[Quora] 你知道的最没用的事情是什么？

果然我大哲学才是永恒的

What is the most useless fact you know?

你知道的最没用的事情是什么？

原文地址：https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-useless-fact-you-know

---

Annanya Johari:

**Clicking on the first link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually eventually gets you to the Philosophy article. **

点击维基百科的文章正文的第一个链接，然后再接下来跳转的文章中重复这一过程，最后通常都会转到关于哲学的条目中。

As of May 26, 2011, 94.52% of all articles in Wikipedia lead eventually to the article Philosophy.The remaining 100,000 (approx.) links to an article with no wiki links or with links to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops (all three are equally probable). The median link chain length to reach philosophy is 23.

截止 2011 年 5 月 26 日，维基百科中 94.52% 的条目最终都会跳转到关于哲学的文章。剩下的 100000 （大约）个链接会跳转到没有相关条目或者还没有创建的页面中，也可能进入一个死循环（所有三种可能性都是产不多的）。在这个链条中到达哲学类条目的的平均值是 23 个。

Following the chain consists of:

1. Clicking on the first non-parenthesized, non-italicized link
2. Ignoring external links, links to the current page, or red links
3. Stopping when reaching "Philosophy", a page with no links or a page that does not exist, or when a loop occurs

依照以下的规则试验：

1. 点击第一个未添加括号，不是斜体的链接
2. 无视外部的，页内跳转，以及红色的链接
3. 在跳转到“哲学类”的，没有链接的或者不存在的页面时停止

Nice way indeed to kill time.

真是个消磨时间的好办法。

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 the article should start by defining the topic of the article, so that the first link of each page will naturally take the reader into a broader subject, eventually ending in wide-reaching pages such as Mathematics, Science, Language, and of course, Philosophy, nicknamed the "mother of all sciences".

对这种现象有几种理论解释，最流行的一种是维基百科的条目倾向于提高“分类链”。基于这种理论，维基百科在关于页面布局的样式编写指南中，推荐在文章的开头首先应定义此篇文章的中心，因此文章的第一个链接便会将读者引入到一个更加宽泛的主题中，最终归于数学、科学、语言当然还有哲学这些被称之为“科学之母”的大条目中。