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])."

Comments

Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?

[Palmyst]

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?

Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?

[Intron]

In theory. I haven't found two articles with a separation greater than 4, tho.

Orca
Argentina
Saxophone
Oboe
3 clicks needed

Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?

[mfarah]

So far, my "personal best" has been 5 clicks:

Shortest path from Pelagius of Asturias to Pham Nuwen

Pelagius of Asturias
Iberian Peninsula
Africa
Zheng He
A Deepness in the Sky
Pham Nuwen

5 clicks needed

I've found several others that require 5 links.

I wish Stephen Dolan would have posted which article(s) has(have) the BIGGEST number as well...

Where All...

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

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....

Link distance

[ninjapiratemonkey]

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.

Re:Link distance

[jd]

In mathematical terms, this makes Wikipedia a non-simply-connected space. This has two consequences. Firstly, it makes the topology much harder to describe. Secondly, it means that topologists should have enough research material to write books and papers on the dynamics of Wikispace for years to come.

What about language?

[kylehase]

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.

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 /. effect.

In any case it doesn't look like they included other languages in their setup.

Re:I know the center

[Fumus]

Funny that. Start to end has five clicks needed.

Shortest path from start to end
Start
Start signal
Code
Computer printer
Black
End
5 clicks needed