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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])."
It's pretty obvious, and has a Bacon number of 1.0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
John
I know that Kurt Vonnegut is apparently the only link between Douglas Adams and Adolph Hitler.
Cool stats though.
I'd be more impressed if we could find the center of Slashdot... except that it's probably somewhere near CowboyNeal's taint. So, on second thought... maybe not.
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?
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....
Read my Very Short "Stories"
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
Is that the one Michael Jackson sings about?
three clicks to to hell:
slashdot
slashdot effect
Larry Niven
Hell
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
01110000 01010111 01101110 00110011 01100100
...the sun never sets, on the British Empire.
This seems to be the obligatory XKCD.com link.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
In case anyone is interested, the original research that created the idea of 'six degrees of separation' is summarized and analyzed by Malcolm Gladwell in his essay Six Degrees Of Lois Weisberg. The original research was done by Stanley Milgram (of greater fame for the (in)famous Milgram Experiment in which people were led to believe that they were shocking other people to death, but continued to do so anyway because they were Just Following Orders.) Milgram's six-degrees research, to sum up, involved handing out a large number of letters to random people, and asking them to give the letters to other people they knew who they thought would be most likely to know a (given, random, unknown-to-everyone-involved) person, and then tracking how those letters actually moved through society to their intended recipients.
The result was a map that showed large groups of closely-connected people, linked by small numbers of people who were linked into many, disparate, closely-linked groups. These people are unusual and their behavior is unusually influential on others, precisely because they serve to transfer information from homogenous groups to other homogenous groups.
It's not that people, or wikipedia articles, are all evenly linked by an average of six links that's important. The idea of 'six degrees of separation' is precisely about the nodes which interlink groups of nodes to each other.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
While the results are interesting (I won't spoil it by posting the answers, although I'm sure someone else has already cut to the chase and done it), the way they arrived at their results is more interesting. I'm sure this could be extended to some pretty maps of what links where, or deep/shallow topics in different fields. I had tried to find the number of links between Kevin Bacon and Nuclear Physics, but it didn't like my input. Instead, I discovered that it takes 3 clicks to go from Bacon to Physics, passing through Columbia University and BDSM on the way.
Off-topic, but this is as good a place as any: There was a project hosted on some academic server a few years ago that linked song lyrics together. Clicking on the lyric 'creep' in the lyrics of the Radiohead song of the same title would bring up links to the TLC and Stone Temple Pilots songs of the same title, as well as any other song that used that word in their lyrics. Two songs that shared certain words would be linked by at most 2 clicks. I'm sure it has been buried in Google-cruft in the years since someone figured out that lyrics pages could be slurped up and turned into banner ad farms, but I had been thinking about how this could be re-implemented using a Wiki that would turn every word into a link and then link to a 'what links here' page. Does anyone know where this original project is or what happened to it? Any hints on re-implementing the behavior with a wiki?
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
the idea is to find redundant connections between sir francis bacon and kevin bacon: socially, in film, genetically, and via wikipedia links
this sort of alternate connection generation is known as a double bacon whopper with cheese
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Our personal favorite for Wikipedia is "Six degrees of anal sex". You'd be amazed how few steps it takes to go from Rush Limbaugh to butt piracy.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Shortest path from Microsoft to Evil
Microsoft
ASCII
2 (number)
Evil
3 clicks needed
Too bored to make a good pun out of this so please someone else do.
Small world phenomena in general aren't very interesting, but the specific results are. Your comment is like having an election and saying "big deal, I knew somebody would win!"
You're not the only one with this problem, I fear.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
[[There]] are [[some]] [[Cmdr Taco|idiots]] who [[bracket]] [[every]] other [[word]].
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
The next thing to consider is that Wikipedia is produced by self-selecting contributors who are (necessariy) selective as to what facts (and what references) are to be used, making this a definitely non-random sample using incomplete data out of a population that may have unexpected biases.
What matters, then, is that even under heavily sub-optimal conditions, we are getting the same results as we'd expect from near-perfect data. What also matters is that the incompleteness of the data is not significantly perturbing the distance between any two articles. You would expect it to, but it doesn't.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
/. effect.
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
In any case it doesn't look like they included other languages in their setup.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Shortest path from disney to fuck
The Walt Disney Company
Motion Picture Association of America film rating system
Fuck
2 clicks needed
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.
As someone else pointed out, the largest number is 3.
Edit page -> Insert link to old page and hit Save -> View this page.
No, I don't know why I'm advocating this.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
If 'All roads lead to Rome', then 'All Wikipedia Articles lead to the United Kingdom' should do it. And pretty catchy too...
Unfortunately, yes. The original project was to find the diameter of wikipedia, i.e. the biggest such number of links. That approach was abandoned when I found giant "tails" in wikipedia, almost linear linked lists of articles that stretch out for 70 links. The worst offenders were the subpages of List of named asteroids as each is only linked from the previous one, and it takes about 70 links to get from anywhere to the last one.
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yeah, that kind of thing does bias the results a bit. If you go to the bother of downloading the full results (I think the server may be a bit slashdotted atm, so don't do this immediately), then it turns out that a lot of music group's tours place unusually highly because they have a lot of sentences like "In [[2007]], they toured the [[United Kingdom]]".
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
It must've stuck in this guy's craw a little, given that he's at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland to find out that the Center of the Known Wikiverse is the United Kingdom...
I should have included that in the article. I'll update it sometime, but it's 1.30 now and I'm busy writing load-balancers :P
The most displaced article is "Credit Administration Program", closely followed by "Relock trigger", "Deblando" and "Chutz".
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
Scary:
From Slashdot to Girl, 3 clicks
From Slashdot to Sex, 2 clicks
From Slashdot to Microsoft, 1 click
Interesting, from Slashdot to your basement (4 clicks), you actually go through Apple, Inc.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
This article talks about a tool that was first available to Wikipedians in 2004. Heck, there's an entire page to try to find long chains at Wikipedia:Six degrees of Wikipedia, and it even mentions a chain of seven articles...
Relock trigger
Relocker
Relock device
Fusible link
Fuse (electrical)
Fire
Human
Credit (finance)
Credit manager
Credit Administration Program
9 clicks needed
any other ideas?
Good to see confirmation of what we Brits already knew.
The UK is the centre of the known universe.
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
The path from Rob Zombie to Dusty Springfield isn't that long:
- Rob Zombie covered Blitzkrieg Bop by Ramones
- Ramones covered Surf City by Jan & Dean
- Jan & Dean covered Lightnin' Strikes by Lou Christie
- Lou Christie covered If Wishes Could Be Kisses by Dusty Springfield
http://covertrek.com/findLinksBetween.html