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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])."

5 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)

    --
    Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
  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.
    --
    Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
  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. 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)