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Wikipedia has thousands of list articles. Some of those lists catalog other lists. And one article, "List of lists of lists," catalogs the lists of lists. It’s exactly as recursive as it sounds: the page includes itself in its own index.
The article serves as a navigation hub for Wikipedia’s many list-of-list pages, organized by topic. You can find your way to lists of metalloids, lists of Atlantic hurricanes, lists of Category 5 hurricanes, lists of tornadoes and tornado outbreaks, lists of physics equations, lists of celebrities, lists of centenarians, …
Houston49/shutterstock.com
Wikipedia has thousands of list articles. Some of those lists catalog other lists. And one article, "List of lists of lists," catalogs the lists of lists. It’s exactly as recursive as it sounds: the page includes itself in its own index.
The article serves as a navigation hub for Wikipedia’s many list-of-list pages, organized by topic. You can find your way to lists of metalloids, lists of Atlantic hurricanes, lists of Category 5 hurricanes, lists of tornadoes and tornado outbreaks, lists of physics equations, lists of celebrities, lists of centenarians, lists of deaths, lists of ethnic groups, lists of heroes, and lists of LGBTQ people — all in one place.
It’s useful infrastructure, but the self-referential quality is what draws people in. Wikipedia’s own guidelines describe list-of-lists articles as indexes that "help readers navigate to the article they want" and "may also provide information about the lists or the topic as a whole." The "List of lists of lists" does both, while also raising questions about where the recursion stops. (There is, for the record, no "List of lists of lists of lists.")
The page belongs to a category of Wikipedia oddities that are technically practical but also function as conceptual jokes — like the article on "lamest edit wars" or the page documenting fictional expletives. Wikipedia at its best: obsessively organized, slightly absurd, and self-aware enough to know it.
Previously: • Click the first link on a Wikipedia page. Repeat. Eventually, you’ll end up on "Philosophy" • A recursive tweet that links to itself
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