Slashdot Mirror
Six Degrees of Wikipedia
An anonymous reader notes that someone has applied the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to the articles in Wikipedia. Instead of the relation being "in the same film," he used "is linked to by." From the blog post: "We'll call the 'Kevin Bacon number' from one article to another the 'distance' between them. It's then possible to work out the 'closeness' of an article in Wikipedia as its average distance to any other article. I wanted to find the centre of Wikipedia, that is, the article that is closest to all other articles (has minimum [distance])."
It's pretty obvious, and has a Bacon number of 1.0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
John
Now I will win this game on 4chan every time!
I know that Kurt Vonnegut is apparently the only link between Douglas Adams and Adolph Hitler.
Cool stats though.
.. but I can feel a whole lot of bacon/pork/rashers/pig/swine jokes coming on. Yum yum!
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
I'd be more impressed if we could find the center of Slashdot... except that it's probably somewhere near CowboyNeal's taint. So, on second thought... maybe not.
Ignoring obvious stuff like main page, index etc.. is it not possible that there could be two articles that are not in the same transitive closure at all?
It's sometimes eerie to think of an idea and then see that someone has done it over the weekend and posted it on slashdot.
Last friday at work I was researching different chemicals on wikipedia (a favorite past time of mine) and thought it would be pretty neat if there was a way to find how related two articles were - or to have some way to query the links between two articles to find similarities.
What I really wanted was a very simple query. My SQL is very rusty, so a plain english version might be perhaps, 'show links where link exists in article_a and article_b'
Is there a way to execute SQL queries on wikipedia without having to actually download the entire database? I asked google, but was presented with the SQL page on wikipedia....
Read my Very Short "Stories"
This is News for Nerds. Surely the analogy should be to Erdos numbers, not Kevin Bacon.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Legacy of the colonial era, no doubt.
Is that the one Michael Jackson sings about?
three clicks to to hell:
slashdot
slashdot effect
Larry Niven
Hell
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Slashdot's favorite Star Wars Prequel actress Natalie Portman "... is among a very small number of professional actors with a defined ErdÅ'sâ"Bacon number."
...
Math AND movies. Mmmm
Best one I've found:
Shortest path from kevin Bacon to Wubi:
Kevin Bacon
Christmas
German language
Unicode
Wubi method
Wubi 86
Wubi
6 clicks needed
Good to see it in the middle of the map.
When I'm bored I like to play the Wikipedia Tracing Game. How to play:
1. Open two tabs with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
2. If either page has less than 5 links, you are allowed a new page.
3. Go from one page to the other in under 6 links within the article.
Almost every network exhibits small world phenomena. Neural networks, human networks, www, etc. EVERY actor is connected to every other actor by 6 or fewer degrees, not just Kevin Bacon. And every human is connected to every other human by 6 or fewer degrees. And while understanding how small world phenomena helps us understand human networks, I fail to see how this is even slightly interesting applied to Wikipedia.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The distance going from Article A to Article B is not necessarily the same as from Article B to article A. For example, the Slashdot page links to the HTTP page, but not vice versa. It would be interesting to know if he took that into consideration when counting links, or whether he would have counted it as one in either direction.
01110000 01010111 01101110 00110011 01100100
...the sun never sets, on the British Empire.
I thought of this years ago! I've got blog posts as prior art! SOMEBODY GET ME A MARSHALL TEXAS JUDGE ON THE LINE!
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
This seems to be the obligatory XKCD.com link.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
In case anyone is interested, the original research that created the idea of 'six degrees of separation' is summarized and analyzed by Malcolm Gladwell in his essay Six Degrees Of Lois Weisberg. The original research was done by Stanley Milgram (of greater fame for the (in)famous Milgram Experiment in which people were led to believe that they were shocking other people to death, but continued to do so anyway because they were Just Following Orders.) Milgram's six-degrees research, to sum up, involved handing out a large number of letters to random people, and asking them to give the letters to other people they knew who they thought would be most likely to know a (given, random, unknown-to-everyone-involved) person, and then tracking how those letters actually moved through society to their intended recipients.
The result was a map that showed large groups of closely-connected people, linked by small numbers of people who were linked into many, disparate, closely-linked groups. These people are unusual and their behavior is unusually influential on others, precisely because they serve to transfer information from homogenous groups to other homogenous groups.
It's not that people, or wikipedia articles, are all evenly linked by an average of six links that's important. The idea of 'six degrees of separation' is precisely about the nodes which interlink groups of nodes to each other.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
While the results are interesting (I won't spoil it by posting the answers, although I'm sure someone else has already cut to the chase and done it), the way they arrived at their results is more interesting. I'm sure this could be extended to some pretty maps of what links where, or deep/shallow topics in different fields. I had tried to find the number of links between Kevin Bacon and Nuclear Physics, but it didn't like my input. Instead, I discovered that it takes 3 clicks to go from Bacon to Physics, passing through Columbia University and BDSM on the way.
Off-topic, but this is as good a place as any: There was a project hosted on some academic server a few years ago that linked song lyrics together. Clicking on the lyric 'creep' in the lyrics of the Radiohead song of the same title would bring up links to the TLC and Stone Temple Pilots songs of the same title, as well as any other song that used that word in their lyrics. Two songs that shared certain words would be linked by at most 2 clicks. I'm sure it has been buried in Google-cruft in the years since someone figured out that lyrics pages could be slurped up and turned into banner ad farms, but I had been thinking about how this could be re-implemented using a Wiki that would turn every word into a link and then link to a 'what links here' page. Does anyone know where this original project is or what happened to it? Any hints on re-implementing the behavior with a wiki?
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
the idea is to find redundant connections between sir francis bacon and kevin bacon: socially, in film, genetically, and via wikipedia links
this sort of alternate connection generation is known as a double bacon whopper with cheese
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Our personal favorite for Wikipedia is "Six degrees of anal sex". You'd be amazed how few steps it takes to go from Rush Limbaugh to butt piracy.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Shortest path from Microsoft to Evil
Microsoft
ASCII
2 (number)
Evil
3 clicks needed
Too bored to make a good pun out of this so please someone else do.
This link will take you to the center of Wikipedia (I am making a joke and being serious - sadly - at the same time).
All this time I have been assuming that Gordon Brownshirt and his minions have been involved in some huge 1984-style conspiracy.
Now I can see that all the data collection was just to get The United Kingdom at the centre of Wikipedia.
Well done all involved... now get back to sorting out the economy!
You're not the only one with this problem, I fear.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who wants to know about the most remote articles, or who even wants to see distribution graphs, am I? The article is a teaser, not completely satisfactory. :-(
You just got troll'd!
They once asked him, why would he do that (as that was dangerous and quite pointless from any practical point of view because there's nothing on top of Mt. Everest and the guy wasn't even a scientist). His answer? "Because it's there."
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that it's what defines a true geek - doing things even if they're pointless by themselves, for the sake of doing them and proving that this or that completely crazy idea is actually doable. And, of course, because they're fun!
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
I haven't been able to get two words to be more than 4 links apart so far... can anyone come up with words that can beat 4 degrees?
George Bush to Idiot:
George Bush
George H. W. Bush
Brooks Brothers
The Colbert Report
Idiot
[[There]] are [[some]] [[Cmdr Taco|idiots]] who [[bracket]] [[every]] other [[word]].
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
This looks like a job for Google App Engine!
A variant game to do with the connected nature of Wikipedia involves a group of people choosing a start page and an end page and seeing who can get there in the least amount of hops. Posting the route allows for interesting analysis of the logic players used to try to get places. The "find shortest path" in the article would kill that tho :P
---
When I grow up, I want to be a kid again.
A quick look at her article - along with keeping in mind the previous results of year-and-date type pages being ranked very highly - it seems that her main advantage is that her article is laid out like a (long) biography. Almost every date or year mentioned (and there are a lot of them) is a link to the page for that date or year. If those linked pages have very low Kevin Bacon numbers then she too will have a low number.
Nothing links to Ratware.
I wrote something kind of similar as a proof of concept (in common lisp) a little while back: http://icarus.maneks.net:4242/
There's a few technical details at http://icarus.maneks.net:4242/static/readme.txt
I've been meaning to clean it up and release the source (maybe a screencast intro to Lisp?) for a while now. The main problem with mine is that the DB server and Web server are far apart, so it takes forever to get any data
Slashdot ran an article a while ago about the Wiki Game in which you try to navigate from one predetermined Wiki article to another in the fewest amount of clicks. The Wiki page on the Wiki Game can be found here. Very similar concepts, and very useful to know if you every play the game.
If you want to look something up on IMDB, it can be fun to see if you can use the links on the front page to reach the article you want within seven degrees. I normally count actors but not movies as a degree, but you could try per-click.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
I have a low Elvis Number of about 5 or 6, certainly below 10.
Does anybody know what Elvis Presley's Erdos number is?
The next thing to consider is that Wikipedia is produced by self-selecting contributors who are (necessariy) selective as to what facts (and what references) are to be used, making this a definitely non-random sample using incomplete data out of a population that may have unexpected biases.
What matters, then, is that even under heavily sub-optimal conditions, we are getting the same results as we'd expect from near-perfect data. What also matters is that the incompleteness of the data is not significantly perturbing the distance between any two articles. You would expect it to, but it doesn't.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What an excellent project, and something that I've never considered. Interesting that he made use of distributed computing, and wrote several Perl scripts just to extract the data he needed.
Very cool.
Slashdot is one click away from goatse, even when you aren't being trolled.
Slashdot
Goatse.cx
Looks like TFA is one click away from being Slashdotted too...
Barbara Felden claims prior art on the flip phone, sues Motorola, Nokia.
Want to have some fun on wikipedia?
Click 'random article' and get to Hitler within 5 clicks. Do it.
6 degrees, meh. The ubermensch only need 5!
I prefer the Disneyporn game, where you go to Disney.com and see how many left clicks it takes to reach porn.
Closest I found (a few years ago) was from Disney to ABC, to ABC Sports, to HP (server provider), to Yahoo index, to massage providers, then a few ad links.
Only fair to ensure your PC is free of extra popup software first.
The 6 degrees theory claims that everyone in the world is connected. That means you'd have to include every Wikipedia page in other languages as well, not just English.
/. effect.
I tested some random Japanese Wikipages and the test failed. I then tried some very common English pages and those failed as well "Unknown article...". So I think their server might be having the
In any case it doesn't look like they included other languages in their setup.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Rush Limbaugh's Wikipedia page links to AIDS which links to Anal Sex. Two degrees of separation, or less than half of the average level of separation between pages.
And you're right, I was amazed. I thought the link from Limbaugh to Anal Sex would go through Dominican Republic.
Shortest path from disney to fuck
The Walt Disney Company
Motion Picture Association of America film rating system
Fuck
2 clicks needed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed
Granted it will take a little more effort, and distributed computing will be necessary, but the information would be priceless to those researching demographics and related arts. We could even get a little more creative and build a 3-D online viewer, combined with as much information as is possible to extract from the online profile. (Limited to text to save space) This could easily span across the net, and all social networks, as well as allowing for random people to filter out bots, duplicate profiles, and fake profiles.
Hmmm, I went from Meerkat to Atrac in 3 clicks but I'd question the validity of the second link. In the external links of Altruism, is a link to a BBC podcast and, in parentheses, it is said that it requires RealAudio. The word RealAudio is linked to the Wiki page of RealAudio rather than the company's own home page.
I was disappointed that that link was used. I thought only link within the article per se would be used.
I would contend that nothing in the External Links section of a Wiki page should point back to a Wiki page, even for the case described above. Unfortunately, the application doesn't workaround these "errors".
But apparently my subconscious is used to telling people to Read The Fine Manual, not The Fine Article. I'm going to pretend that the M this time stood for "Metadata". Yes, that sounds plausible.
The paths it generates from Article A to Article B would be more interesting if they excluded list pages... so far, most of the interesting searches I've tried have been short-circuited by some kind of date page.
The standard proposition on /b/ is to get to Hitler in 4 links, 3 for extra win.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Southeast_Asian_Games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
HITLER!
No, I don't know why I'm advocating this.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
There's so much promotional material for bands on Wikipedia that this must lower the the number of steps between pages.
.... ". And then every band page has further spam in the form of "band Y covered the song of Band X on their ABC album".
Basically every other page at least has some sort of "band X wrote a song about
Is this a good time to remind everyone that the Music Industry is the Original Evil raised to the power of evil -- and yet, something that's supposed to be neutral (and I guess I emphasize the "supposed" because we all know it's nothing of the sort) is in fact one of the prime mechanisms where bands, music websites, the music press, and the rest of the music industry promote their wares.
Does no-one not see this is a problem? If it were rolexes, or washing powder would you think it was ok? They are no more, and no less, commercial products than bands. Just because you enjoy the product does not mean that it's promotion is not spam.
Welcome to like the moment Wikipedia was created. The rest of us has been doing this forever. Where have the rest of you been?
First I read "MySQL is very rusty".
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It must've stuck in this guy's craw a little, given that he's at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland to find out that the Center of the Known Wikiverse is the United Kingdom...
Shortest path from Suck to Blow:
Suck
Fellatio
Fetus
Miami, Florida
Blow
In an ironic twist, most articles on Wikipedia are also within 6 clicks of Kevin Bacon's article!
Enjoy a nice game of WikiBacon!
Link is NOT to my blog
That is, the article who has the largest average of shortest paths to every other article.
Shortest path from Zeuxis and Parrhasius to Jeruzal
No path found
I beat the Man
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Excerpt: The premise is quite simple. First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called "Knight." Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we'll go with "Jedi Knight." Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created. Are you looking yet? Get a good, long look. Yeah. Yeeaaah, we know, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. (We're calling it Wikigroaning for a reason.) The next step is to find your own article pair and share it with your friends, who will usually look for their own pairs and you end up spending a good hour or two in a groaning arms race. The game ends after that, usually without any clear winners... but hey, it beats doing work.
Shortest path from Kevin Bacon to drug overdose:
Kevin Bacon
Christmas
The Beatles
Drug overdose
3 clicks needed:
It appears that Kevin OD'ed on Christmas with the Beatles.
http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=Kevin+Bacon&to=drug+overdose
of Wikipedia? We have the map of the Internet which shows major nodes and how they are connected. We need someone to create a map of Wikipedia articles and their links to show where the "hotspots" are. I think that would be interesting. Basically it turns what this person has already done into a graphical representation. Changing the thickness of the links would denote the "distance". Maybe this already exists. I didn't search beforehand.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Screw Kevin Bacon â" every time I'm on Wikipedia, I somehow end up reading about Nazi Germany.
I long ago had the thought (which I should probably ignore) of writing a Firefox plugin which would automatically find how many jumps I need to get to Nazi Germany.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
It would be interesting to find the furthest pair of articles, also known as the diameter of the graph. The funny thing is, I'll bet my hand that shortly after someone finds and publishes it, most likely someone will shortcut the path. It'd be ironic if they did so via an article titled "The diameter of Wikipedia".
To do list for Windows
We applied this to www.uncyclopedia.com? Britney Spears -> William Shakespeare -> William Shatner or... Britney Spears -> William Shakespeare -> Kitten Huffing -> American -> Redneck
In fact, there is a theory (dont ask me who did it first, I cant remember) that says that between you and any other person in the whole world, there are only 4 people. :P
That means that you know someone that knows someone that knows someone that knows someone that knows me
The original number of that theory (not sure who did the original or who did in fact updated it later) was 5 and was created in the 50's or 60's if I aint mistaken.
But now the number reduced to 4, due to globalization and the revolution in communications...
Hehe. I'm quite honoured, I think.
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
Star Alliance Destinations
That was the entry listed that was not as cool as I thought it might be - {grin}
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Wikipedia (like the WWW graph and unlike the "acted together in a film graph)) is naturally a directed graph. In other words, the links have a direction. This has nothing to do with the property of being "simply connected" -- which for graphs like Wikipedia is equivalent to the absence of loops.
I've been doing this for years, came up with the idea in college. It's a great drinking game to bet on the least number of jumps from one obscure article to another.
Shortest path from amoeba to human Amoeba Microorganism Human 2 clicks needed So much for gradual evolution.
So what? Apple Inc, Google, Jack Bauer, Khrushchev and Chuck Norris all take that same three clicks to reach evil.
Do the same for the internet pages.
It should be trivial once one understands the basic algorithm... due, erm, next class on Friday.
Dismiss!
Shortest path from hillary clinton to antichrist
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Jerry Falwell
Antichrist
2 clicks needed
The oracle of Bacon at UVA is what, ten years old? And not a single mention in this discussion?
http://oracleofbacon.org/
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Funny, a bit over a year ago I learned this as a game by way of some teens in Arlington MA.
The game:
1. Pick any subject likely to be a wikipedia entry
2. Each person clicks the "random" button on the left frame
3. Using only the center, article frame, get to the topic.
While some would write code to do this for them, doing it yourself makes for good competitive sport, and it's surprising a) how mentally resourceful you have to be, and b) how few clicks even a human algorithm solves the problem in.
Oh, and it's surprisingly fun. Two friends, two laptops, give it a shot!
The want their link back. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Six_degrees_of_Wikipedia&oldid=841180 is ANYTHING but a new.
Like, Six Degrees of Wikipedia is years old.
Scary:
From Slashdot to Girl, 3 clicks
From Slashdot to Sex, 2 clicks
From Slashdot to Microsoft, 1 click
Interesting, from Slashdot to your basement (4 clicks), you actually go through Apple, Inc.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Who knew it was this easy!
I come here for the love
Sometimes while browsing, I only had the mouse out and I wanted to check a Wikipedia entry on a topic (and where I couldn't simply select some text on the screen and search for it with right-click or the Dictionary ToolTip extension).
:P
So I'd click on the Wikipedia link in my bookmarks and see if I could navigate to it with just my mouse in under six clicks. Depending on the day and the articles on the front page, some topics were easier than others. Sometimes I would simply navigate to the alphabetical listing of articles to get to where I wanted to go.
All this to say, I'm glad that there are people out there more bored than I am who are actually putting energy into studying this.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I'm quite sure the center of Wikipedia, the article linked most by others, is the article on "American Idol." The most pathetic thing is usually the correct one. That would be the most pathetic thing. Thus, it's probably right.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
The "six degrees of separation" idea was originally formulated as a way to ponder the *maximum* distance between any two people.
So I wonder -- what is the maximum distance between any two articles?
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
I've been seeing this at school for over a year. Except it's much more general.
People call it the "Wikipedia game" - basically, two people start off at the same random article and decide on an endpoint.
When time is started (go!), both people take off and try to get from the first article to the next to the next, to get to the other article.
For example:
Johann Christoph Doderlein>Philology>Noam Chomsky>Philadelphia>Benjamin Franklin>Deborah Read>Smallpox>Vaccination
This is just a logical extension of that.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Shortest path from Server to Meltdown:
Server
Web server
1989
Pan Am Flight 103
Meltdown
4 clicks needed
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
This meme went around on LiveJournal some time ago: click 'random article' and see how many clicks it takes you to get to Jesus.
My own more challenging version: do it without going through an article about a geographic location.
Slashdot
Video game
Sex
2 clicks needed
The bottom ten (from the output file linked in TFA):
7.97 Upper Capitol
7.97 Upper Conference
7.97 Upper Pearls
7.97 Mamma Cannes
7.97 Morne Longue
7.97 Clabony
7.97 Chutz
7.97 Deblando
8.39 Relock trigger
8.67 Credit Administration Program
This article talks about a tool that was first available to Wikipedians in 2004. Heck, there's an entire page to try to find long chains at Wikipedia:Six degrees of Wikipedia, and it even mentions a chain of seven articles...
Shortest path from Relock trigger to Credit Administration Program
Relock trigger
Relocker
Relock device
Fusible link
Fuse (electrical)
Fire
Human
Credit (finance)
Credit manager
Credit Administration Program
9 clicks needed
has anyone had better luck?
unfortunate typo there...
my original post was supposed to be largest, not lowest...
I just decided to do a test: April 20 to December 25.
My results from the site are:
April 20
Germany
December 25
Then I checked the pages and found that at the bottom of April 20 there is a link to December 25.
signature is pants
Good to see confirmation of what we Brits already knew.
The UK is the centre of the known universe.
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
Not only from one to the other, but back again as well.
Then it will be a real challange.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
What, not one food-related pun about 'Bacon number'/Hamming distance? I'm ashamed at you, Slashdot!
many paths to anal sex go through some kind of church:
Shortest path from Charles V to Anal sex
Charles V
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor
Christianity
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Anal sex
4 clicks needed
The path from Rob Zombie to Dusty Springfield isn't that long:
- Rob Zombie covered Blitzkrieg Bop by Ramones
- Ramones covered Surf City by Jan & Dean
- Jan & Dean covered Lightnin' Strikes by Lou Christie
- Lou Christie covered If Wishes Could Be Kisses by Dusty Springfield
http://covertrek.com/findLinksBetween.html
Wikipedia seems to have a pretty strong opinion on transhumanism, as evidenced by the shortest path between intelligence and stupidity:
Intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Transhumanism
Stupidity
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Music
Blues
Euphemism
Excretion
I don't really it sounds like that...
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Why not read the article and find out?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Shortest path from Azeroth to Osgood, Missouri:
Azeroth
Warcraft (series)
Board game
World War II
Second Sino-Japanese War
Agnes Smedley
Osgood, Missouri
http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=borgia&to=auris
There is no connection between Chuck Norris and Awesome (there is no whoopass article)
http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=Chuck+Norris&to=Awesome
All the Wikimedia wikis, including Wikipedia, provide a good public web-based API for querying the underlying database. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php.
http://www.cracked.com/article_16270_six-degrees-paris-hilton-global-reach-one-vagina.html
Confession: I saw that from Digg.
Don't quote me on this.
Getting from Slashdot to The Center of the Universe is just that easy! Pretty interesting: we use Apple and Islam to get there.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I've always played this game on my own time. It seems that Wikipedia has some very, very long articles on WW2, so I'd always play a game to see how few clicks I could get to that article. I guess I should have wrote an article on it and see my site traffic go up due to the slashdot effect.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
on a great new internet toy.
Incidentally, the shortest path from Mortification to Gratification is through Sufism.
http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=Mortification&to=Gratification
We are the 198 proof..