Most Wikipedia articles start with a general description of the topic, for example
A Dog is an Animal
.
Thus, following the first link on each page leads to more general topics, typically reaching philosophy. This is known since at least
May 2008.
There are some single observations about the percentage of pages linking to philosophy, but there is no graph tracking it over time. Wikosophy displays the percentage of pages from the English Wikipedia leading to the Philosophy article at different points in time. You can choose a different Wikipedia language at the top right or click on a data point to get more information about a particular date.
There aren't a lot of data points before November 2011 - the data simply isn't available. It's simple to look up the edit history for each page - but there is no practical possibility to retrieve previous page titles. Thus this website is limited to available Wikipedia dumps, which are very sparse because the dump process was broken for a long time.
These dumps are downloaded and the first non-parenthesized, non-italicized link for each page is extracted. This process is subjective, working with the raw markup is challenging, there are a lot of specialities and ambiguities. For instance two apostrophes start bold text, three start italic text - while parsing the French Wikipedia and encountering three apostrophes it could be either the start or end of an italic section or the start or end of a bold section where an apostrophe occurs naturally.
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