I’m feeling a little sheepish. I spent a decade in higher education studying philosophy and have spent plenty of time online, yet I had never heard of the “Wikipedia philosophy game.” It turns out, if you go to almost any Wikipedia article, click the first hyperlink in the main text, and repeat that process, you will eventually find yourself trapped in a loop that lands on the article for “Philosophy.”
It’s not just a one-way street, either. Once you reach the philosophy page, you can keep clicking, but you’ll just end up taking a detour through language, communication, and meaning before circling back to where you started.
The Mechanics of Abstraction
In a recent YouTube video, Matthew Prebeg explains that this phenomenon is rooted in the way we categorize information. It’s all about abstraction. Take a simple chair, for example. You might categorize that object as a “wooden kitchen chair,” which is a “chair,” then “seating,” then “furniture,” then an “object,” and finally, “matter.”
The issue, as Prebeg notes, is that there are multiple ways to climb that ladder. You could just as easily abstract “chair” into “sitting” and then into “bodily movement.” The Wikipedia philosophy game acts as an accidental experiment in how we organize our knowledge. It demonstrates that no matter how we embed our understanding of concepts, there is almost always a fundamental philosophical layer sitting right underneath.
Why Philosophy is the Ultimate Destination
If you ask me, philosophy is essentially that annoying child who keeps asking “why?” to every answer you provide. Eventually, you run out of easy answers—like when you’re forced to explain why you believe the external world exists—and you’ve officially entered the domain of philosophy. Most people are content to treat these questions as too abstract, but the Wikipedia loop shows that our own knowledge structures are constantly pulling us toward these fundamental inquiries.
It’s also a fascinating case of what some call “experimental philosophy.” While traditional philosophy relies on rigorous study, this newer, somewhat controversial methodology attempts to use empirical research and data to reach philosophical conclusions. The Wikipedia game provides a unique, data-driven look at how we categorize our world.
Play it at your own peril. You might find yourself stuck in a perpetual loop of asking “why?”—and honestly, that’s not the worst way to spend an afternoon.