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])."

"six degrees" connections are not uniform

[smellsofbikes]

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.

Re:Where All...

[corsec67]

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.

Re:Erdos number, please!

[grizdog]

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.

Re:Link distance

[stedo]

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:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?

[psychodelicacy]

Makes me think of Russell's paradox...

Re:How many degrees can you find?

[stedo]

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

Re:Billy Jean King

[stedo]

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

Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?

[ChrisMP1]

Try Girisopam to Slashdot effect. It took me 15, though maybe you can top that. I probably could have done better.

1. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry nomenclature
2. Analytical chemistry
3. Forensic science
4. Computer forensics
5. Technology
6. List of emerging technologies
7. Semantic Web
8. World Wide Web
9. Newsgroup
10. Troll (Internet)
11. Sockpuppet (Internet)
12. Usenet
13. Godwin's law
14. Slashdot
15. Slashdot effect

I probably could have gotten to Usenet right from Newsgroup, but if I could have, I missed the link.

Re:What about the most displaced article?

[stedo]

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

Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?

[stedo]

Those both link to the article "Ossa (motorcycle)", which isn't what the original poster had. In that case, the shortest path is Nikon D300->August 23->Rik Smits->Motocross Ossa (motorcycle). There is no path to the article "Ossa" (a disambiguation page), staying within the main namespace (no Wikipedia: or User: links).

Stephen Dolan, aka mu

This should be from the "Old News" department...

[Titoxd]

This article talks about a tool that was first available to Wikipedians in 2004 [wikipedia.org]. Heck, there's an entire page to try to find long chains at Wikipedia:Six degrees of Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], and it even mentions a chain of seven articles...

Re:Longest path?

[baboso]

Shortest path from Relock trigger to Credit Administration Program

Relock trigger
Relocker
Relock device
Fusible link
Fuse (electrical)
Fire
Human
Credit (finance)
Credit manager
Credit Administration Program

9 clicks needed

any other ideas?