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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])."

4 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions? by Intron · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    Orca
    Argentina
    Saxophone
    Oboe
    3 clicks needed

    --
    Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
  2. Link distance by ninjapiratemonkey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    01110000 01010111 01101110 00110011 01100100
  3. Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions? by mfarah · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

    --
    "Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
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  4. What about language? by kylehase · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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