All Wikis Lead to Mathematics?

Last weekend, my favorite webcomic XKCD was about Wikipedia and how it made us all look smarter. As you rolled over the cartoon, a box popped up that said,
"Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at ‘Philosophy’."
Since then, I've seen a couple of my science blogs repeat this "fact" with "Mathematics" replacing "Philosophy". So I thought I would try it using CARROT. The list of wikipedia articles looks like this:

1.  carrot
2.  root vegetable
  (remember to skip over all the stuff in parentheses
   and italics, like the Latin derivation, etc.)
3.  vegetables
4.  edible
5.  ingestion
6.  organism
7.  biology
8.  natural science
9.  science
10. knowledge
11. facts
12. information
13. sequence
14. mathematics

If you keep going, four steps later you do get to philosophy, so both hypotheses are possibly correct.Let's try it again.

1.  Derrick Rose
2.  basketball
3.  team sport
4.  sport
5.  organized
6.  social group
7.  social cohesion
8.  social policy
9.  human welfare (quality of life)
10. international development
11. foreign aid
12. international relations
13. states (sovereign state)
14. state
15. social sciences
16. fields
17. academia
18. community
19. interaction
20. causal
21. effect (result)
22. sequence
23. mathematics

Now there have been many reasons given in the various blogs about why this happens. One interesting insight was that it doesn't happen if you use the French language version of Wikipedia. In the English language version, almost all articles start with identifying the topic with a broader topic. You can see that in the second example where basketball leads to team sport leads to sport. The model article in Wikipedia in English is usually written in the form "A is a kind of B" (Basketball is a kind of team sport.  A team sport is a kind of sport. And so on.) OK, that does make a lot of sense. And a number of blogs point to exceptions that tend to loop between two topics. For example, one blog listed "The Gong Show" as a counterexample that formed a loop when it hit "Knowledge". So I tried that one, and guess what? It led to mathematics. Which brings us to a similarly likely reason why this works, given in a computer science blog that had some serious data given on archived versions of Wikipedia: since the XKCD webcomic appeared last week, hundreds, if not thousands, of Wikipedia articles have been edited to make them work out. Just a minor change in the order of the first sentence, or taking away a link that used to be to another topic that dead-ended. In other words, all the math - science - humanities geeks that regularly edit Wikipedia (and regularly read XKCD) are making it all work out. One of the advantages of having a huge, free, easy to edit encyclopedia on the Internet. Well, an advantage unless you were hoping that the huge, free encyclopedia was being edited solely to make the articles better. Luckily the changes are fairly minor. I haven't seen any blogs reporting that articles have become less factual as a result. In fact, Wikipedia has a page devoted to the game, where people are encouraged to find the longest sequence that eventually leads to "Philosophy". The winner right now is "Abbadon", which takes 42 links before it gets to "Philosophy". Finally, I found something that I don't think I have enough time for.