Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy

Following the first link in the main text of an English Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually leads to the Philosophy article. In February 2016, this was true for 97% of all articles on Wikipedia^[1] (including this one), an increase from 94.52% in 2011. The remaining articles lead to an article without any outgoing wikilinks, to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops. After an edit to the Awareness article in April of 2024, among others switching the order of Philosophy and Psychology, the number of articles that lead to Philosophy this way has been greatly reduced, as Awareness and Psychology form a loop of their own. Since the edit, there had been numerous attempts to switch the order of the links leading to a discussion on the Awareness talk page.^[2] However, now, the order has been reverted back so philosophy remains first.

There have been some theories on this phenomenon, with the most prevalent being the tendency for Wikipedia pages to move up a "classification chain". According to this theory, the Wikipedia Manual of Style guidelines on how to write the lead section of an article recommend that articles begin by defining the topic of the article. A consequence of this style is that the first sentence of an article is almost always a definitional statement, a direct answer to the question "what is [the subject]?"