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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])."

3 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. 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.