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])."

I know the center

[plover (150551)]

It's pretty obvious, and has a Bacon number of 1.0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page [wikipedia.org]

Re:I know the center

[nebaz (453974)]

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)

Re:I know the center

[smitty97 (995791)]

no, this is it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Bacon [wikipedia.org]

Billy Jean King is the center!

[goombah99 (560566)]

Is that the one Michael Jackson sings about?

three clicks to to hell:

slashdot
slashdot effect
Larry Niven
Hell

Re:I know the center

[Eudial (590661)]

The point with wikipedia is being omitted altogether. In wikipedia, there is just one degree of separation.

(1) See an article.
(2) See another unrelated article.
(3) Edit articles 1 and 2 to link to each other.

Complexity O(1). You could write a (very unpopular) bot that links all wikipedia articles.

Re:I know the center

[saskboy (600063)]

Or be even more of a smartass, and write a bot that links all Wikipedia articles to Kevin Bacon's!

Re:I know the center

[JordanL (886154)]

I find it incredibly ammusing that Bukkake is only three clicks away from The Roman Catholic Church...

By way of the Japanese Language evidentally.

http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=bukkake&to=catholic+church [netsoc.tcd.ie]

Re:I know the center

[by Anonymous Coward]

I find it incredibly amusing that that was one of the first connections you looked for...

And now

[by Anonymous Coward]

I know that Kurt Vonnegut is apparently the only link between Douglas Adams and Adolph Hitler.

Cool stats though.

No... I'd rather not

[OMNIpotusCOM (1230884)]

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.

Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?

[Palmyst (1065142)]

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 (870560)]

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 (231411)]

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...

Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?

[imsabbel (611519)]

I totally approve of your choice of search words.

Re:

[MrAnnoyanceToYou (654053)]

Meh. There's a path I found manually in about a minute. There's probably a shorter one, though;
Ossa
Motorcycle
Toyota
Honda
Nikon
Nikon D300

Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?

[Gat0r30y (957941)]

If you follow the best route in all cases, it takes an average of 4.573 clicks to get from any Wikipedia article to any other.

It would appear there aren't any. Why? I haven't the slightest, however, since editors can add to many seemingly disjoint articles, it would seem that could help - though I'm not sure if the method used here would take that into account.

Re:

[Anonymous Cowpat (788193)]

well, according to "Complexity vs. stability in small-world networks." (Sitabhra Sinha. Journal of Physics. 2004):

The number of links per node (bi-directional), k (must be) >> ln(N), where N is the number of nodes, to avoid a fragmented network (assuming undirected link distribution).
So - figure out the number of pages (nodes) in wikipedia, slap a natural log around it and you know how many links you would need to double and then have much more than to avoid fragmentation.

So, you need much more than ~

Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?

[Migrant Programmer (19727)]

That page links to them..

Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?

[psychodelicacy (1170611)]

Makes me think of Russell's paradox...

Re:

[Gat0r30y (957941)]

Those aren't linked from any other articles - but they link to other wikipedia articles. Since its a directional graph he's using (from what I gathered) it would appear to me that these would only be disjoint in a one way sort of style. I.E. You can get from A to B in a finite number of steps but you cannot get from B to A - he appears to measure the minimum distance. - However I was able to get thies -
Shortest path from Agassaim to bananas No path found
However that is not always the case for "orphan

Where All...

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor (1089561)]

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....

Re:Where All...

[corsec67 (627446)]

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....

If there was a way to do that, it would be through a SQL injection hack.

So, hopefully not.

"What is the use...

[jd (1658)]

...in staying up all night arguing over whether there is or isn't a God, if the machine only gives you his bleedin' phone number in the morning!"

You're not the only one with this problem, I fear.

Re:Where All...

[borizz (1023175)]

My SQL is very rusty

Yes, and removing the space between My and SQL doesn't really help much either...

Erdos number, please!

[Charles Dodgeson (248492)]

This is News for Nerds. Surely the analogy should be to Erdos numbers [oakland.edu], not Kevin Bacon.

Re:Erdos number, please!

[mrbluze (1034940)]

Surely the analogy should be to Erdos numbers [oakland.edu], not Kevin Bacon. --

Erdos numbers just don't have the same crackling sound to them.

Re:

[grizdog (1224414)]

Also, I'm sure Erdos has priority. I remember people talking about Erdos numbers in the early 80s. I don't think Bacon number goes back before 1990.

Link distance

[ninjapiratemonkey (968710)]

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 [wikipedia.org] page links to the HTTP [wikipedia.org] 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

[stedo (855834)]

I just took it as distance outwards. The "center" I came up with is the article from which it is easiest to get to all others.

Re:Link distance

[jd (1658)]

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.

Re:

[ArsonSmith (13997)]

I found this one interesting:

Shortest path from george bush to satan

George Bush
George H. W. Bush
Andover, Massachusetts
Satan

3 clicks needed

Further Proof that...

[LionKimbro (200000)]

...the sun never sets, on the British Empire.

Yes, I read XKCD

[orkysoft (93727)]

This seems to be the obligatory XKCD.com link. [xkcd.com]

"six degrees" connections are not uniform

[smellsofbikes (890263)]

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 [gladwell.com]. The original research was done by Stanley Milgram (of greater fame for the (in)famous Milgram Experiment [wikipedia.org] 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.

From Bacon to Physics, 3 clicks.

[certron (57841)]

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?

you can do better than that

[circletimessquare (444983)]

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

Fun games to play with your friends

[snuf23 (182335)]

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.

Here's proof that number 2 is almost evil.

[Escogido (884359)]

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.

Re:Here's proof that number 2 is almost evil.

[Jorgandar (450573)]

How many clicks to profit?

e.g.

1. Kevin bacon
2. ?
3. profit!

Re:Here's proof that number 2 is almost evil.

[Spikeles (972972)]

Normally i don't post to myself, but these are just too funny:

Shortest path from You to Natalie Portman [netsoc.tcd.ie]

1. You
2. Darth Vader
3. Natalie Portman

2 clicks needed

Shortest path from Natalie Portman to Hot Grits [netsoc.tcd.ie]

1. Natalie Portman
2. Connecticut
3. African American
4. Grits
5. You

2 clicks needed
and finally

Shortest path from Natalie Portman to Bed [netsoc.tcd.ie]

1. Natalie Portman
2. Arabic language
3. Bilabial consonant
4. Bed

It All Depends Who Wrote the Article

[STrinity (723872)]

[[There]] are [[some]] [[Cmdr Taco|idiots]] who [[bracket]] [[every]] other [[word]].

What about language?

[kylehase (982334)]

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.

shortest path

[joelpt (21056)]

Shortest path from disney to fuck

The Walt Disney Company
Motion Picture Association of America film rating system
Fuck

2 clicks needed

Excluding "list" pages

[$random_var (919061)]

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.

time-like Bacon distance

[xPsi (851544)]

Wikipedia articles actually linking to Kevin Bacon should be made "time-like" and given a negative sign in the metric tensor when calculating article "distances" in this exercise.

No, I don't know why I'm advocating this.

Sex and the Slashdot

[guruevi (827432)]

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.

Re:This is news?

[timeOday (582209)]

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!"

Well, that depends.

[jd (1658)]

The six degrees of seperation is an easily-misunderstood concept, making it important that what it is people are looking for is also what people think they are looking for.

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 heavil

Re:Excellent...

[Sancho (17056)]

As someone else pointed out, the largest number is 3.

Edit page -> Insert link to old page and hit Save -> View this page.

Re:How many degrees can you find?

[stedo (855834)]

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