Six Degrees of Wikipedia 296
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I know the center (Score:5, Insightful)
(me, -1 Obvious)
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-5 Obvious
Re:I know the center (Score:5, Funny)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Bacon [wikipedia.org]
Billy Jean King is the center! (Score:5, Funny)
three clicks to to hell:
slashdot
slashdot effect
Larry Niven
Hell
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Shortest path from Aptera Motors to Pop Tart
Aptera Motors
California
January 13
American Idol
Pop-Tart
4 clicks needed
Or:
Shortest path from Parking pawl to Fermionic condensate
Parking pawl
1965
Brazil
Chemistry
Fermionic condensate
4 clicks needed
The dates and lists help it out an awful lot; it'd be interesting to see the results if you could exclude them.
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Re:I know the center (Score:5, Funny)
(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 (Score:5, Funny)
Baconator (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I know the center (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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Shortest path from start to end
Start
Start signal
Code
Computer printer
Black
End
5 clicks needed
And now (Score:5, Funny)
Cool stats though.
No... I'd rather not (Score:4, Funny)
Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions? (Score:5, Interesting)
Orca
Argentina
Saxophone
Oboe
3 clicks needed
Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Funny)
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No path found
What do I win?
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Ossa
Motorcycle
Toyota
Honda
Nikon
Nikon D300
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Stephen Dolan, aka mu
Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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 ~
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hence there must be >> 2(14.5) links per node.
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Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions? (Score:5, Informative)
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Shortest path from Agassaim to bananas No path found
However that is not always the case for "orphan
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Where All... (Score:4, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Informative)
If there was a way to do that, it would be through a SQL injection hack.
So, hopefully not.
"What is the use... (Score:3, Interesting)
You're not the only one with this problem, I fear.
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Re:Where All... (Score:5, Funny)
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Please, tell me this is a troll.
GET OFF MY LAWN YOU SON OF A BITCH!
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Your lawn is full of grub worms!
Layne
Erdos number, please! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Erdos number, please! (Score:5, Funny)
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United Kingdom? (Score:2)
This is news? (Score:2)
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, that depends. (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Link distance (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Link distance (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Link distance (Score:4, Interesting)
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What it does mean, however, is that "Wikipedia distance" is not a metric.
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If the distance from article A to B is n, then the distance from B to A is at most 2n.
Proof:
Because every page has a "What links here" page we can walk backwards in twice as many steps. There could be a shorter path which is why the bound is not strict.
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Shortest path from george bush to satan
George Bush
George H. W. Bush
Andover, Massachusetts
Satan
3 clicks needed
Further Proof that... (Score:3, Funny)
Call my lawyer! (Score:2)
Yes, I read XKCD (Score:5, Funny)
"six degrees" connections are not uniform (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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I remember when searching for certain terms on the Internet could bring you from one article to another and suddenly you'd gone from Seaquest DSV to magnetic monopoles to a South African shaman who talks with UFO aliens and suggests curing diseases with sonic frequencies. Now you can do all that solely through Wikipedia.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/214/ [xkcd.com]
you can do better than that (Score:5, Funny)
this sort of alternate connection generation is known as a double bacon whopper with cheese
Fun games to play with your friends (Score:5, Funny)
Here's proof that number 2 is almost evil. (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft
ASCII
2 (number)
Evil
3 clicks needed
Too bored to make a good pun out of this so please someone else do.
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Sex -> Rape -> Violence
Violence -> Video game -> Sex
Draw your own conclusions...
Re:Here's proof that number 2 is almost evil. (Score:5, Funny)
e.g.
1. Kevin bacon
2. ?
3. profit!
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Shortest path from Kevin Bacon to Profit [netsoc.tcd.ie]
Re:Here's proof that number 2 is almost evil. (Score:5, Funny)
Shortest path from You to Natalie Portman [netsoc.tcd.ie]
Shortest path from Natalie Portman to Hot Grits [netsoc.tcd.ie]
and finally
Shortest path from Natalie Portman to Bed [netsoc.tcd.ie]
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Shortest path from Apple to Evil
Apple
Evil
1 clicks needed
But what we all want to know is (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who wants to know about the most remote articles, or who even wants to see distribution graphs, am I? The article is a teaser, not completely satisfactory. :-(
OP is similar to the guy who climbed Mt. Everest (Score:2)
The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that it's what defines a true geek - doing things even if they're pointless by themselves, for the sake of doing them and proving that this or that completely crazy idea is actually doable. And, of course, because th
How many degrees can you find? (Score:2)
Re:How many degrees can you find? (Score:5, Informative)
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
It All Depends Who Wrote the Article (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone fluent in python (Score:2)
Wiki Races (Score:2)
Billy Jean King (Score:2)
A quick look at her article [wikipedia.org] - along with keeping in mind the previous results of year-and-date type pages being ranked very highly - it seems that her main advantage is that her article
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Stephen Dolan, aka mu
A similiar site (in Common Lisp) (Score:2)
There's a few technical details at http://icarus.maneks.net:4242/static/readme.txt [maneks.net]
I've been meaning to clean it up and release the source (maybe a screencast intro to Lisp?) for a while now. The main problem with mine is that the DB server and Web server are far apart, so it takes forever to get any data
More Fun with IMDB (Score:2)
The Disneyporn game. (Score:2)
Closest I found (a few years ago) was from Disney to ABC, to ABC Sports, to HP (server provider), to Yahoo index, to massage providers, then a few ad links.
Only fair to ensure your PC is free of extra popup software first.
What about language? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Stephen Dolan (aka mu)
shortest path (Score:5, Funny)
The Walt Disney Company
Motion Picture Association of America film rating system
Fuck
2 clicks needed
Excluding "list" pages (Score:5, Insightful)
time-like Bacon distance (Score:5, Funny)
No, I don't know why I'm advocating this.
Music Industry Spam (Score:2)
Basically every other page at least has some sort of "band X wrote a song about
Is this a good time to remind everyone that the Music Industry is the Original Evil raised to the power of evil -- and yet, something that's supposed to be neutral (and I guess I emphasi
And you can believe it, too! (Score:3)
But what about WikiBacon? (Score:2)
Enjoy a nice game of WikiBacon [blogspot.com]!
Link is NOT to my blog
Yay (Score:2)
No path found
I beat the Man
Sex and the Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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.
This should be from the "Old News" department... (Score:3, Informative)
No surprise here (Score:3)
The UK is the centre of the known universe.
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2) Click it again (open it in a new tab)
3) Try to get from page A to page B in as clicks as possible.
Other person repeats, whoever has the smaller number wins!
I never said it was a good game.
Re:Excellent... (Score:5, Funny)
Edit page -> Insert link to old page and hit Save -> View this page.
That's a feeble challenge (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Southeast_Asian_Games [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II [wikipedia.org]
HITLER [wikipedia.org]!
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If 'All roads lead to Rome', then 'All Wikipedia Articles lead to the United Kingdom' should do it. And pretty catchy too...
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