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Six Degrees of Wikipedia

Posted by kdawson on from the finding-the-center dept.

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])."

7 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I know the center by nebaz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think the spirit of the discussion, since Wikipedia is actually a directed graph, is more from the sender's perspective. Every page has a link to the main page, but not the other way around. The main page does not directly link to all other pages (though with search, you can find them).

    (me, -1 Obvious)

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  2. Erdos number, please! by Charles+Dodgeson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  3. Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions? by Gat0r30y · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you follow the best route in all cases, it takes an average of 4.573 clicks to get from any Wikipedia article to any other. It would appear there aren't any. Why? I haven't the slightest, however, since editors can add to many seemingly disjoint articles, it would seem that could help - though I'm not sure if the method used here would take that into account.
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  4. Excluding "list" pages by $random_var · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Baconator by goombah99 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Or be even more of a smartass, and write a bot that links all Wikipedia articles to Kevin Bacon's! The way to do this is to have every page list it's bacon number at the bottom, and then have the "bacon" be linked to kevin. Of course this would be construction mean every article had a bacon number of one.

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    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  6. Re:What about language? by stedo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No, it's just the English Wikipedia. There aren't that many links between the English and Japanese Wikipedias anyway, so it wouldn't make much difference. I might do it again later with other Wikipedias.

    Stephen Dolan (aka mu)

  7. Re:Billy Jean King is the center! by Rei · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, it's pretty amazing how quickly seemingly unrelated things interconnect. Example:

    Shortest path from Aptera Motors to Pop Tart

    Aptera Motors
    California
    January 13
    American Idol
    Pop-Tart

    4 clicks needed

    Or:


    Shortest path from Parking pawl to Fermionic condensate

    Parking pawl
    1965
    Brazil
    Chemistry
    Fermionic condensate

    4 clicks needed


    The dates and lists help it out an awful lot; it'd be interesting to see the results if you could exclude them.

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