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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!"
If there was a way to do that, it would be through a SQL injection hack.
So, hopefully not.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
[[There]] are [[some]] [[Cmdr Taco|idiots]] who [[bracket]] [[every]] other [[word]].
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
That page links to them..
Bitchslapped. Neat.
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."
- Sledge Hammer
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
Makes me think of Russell's paradox...
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
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
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