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

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

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

no, this is it:

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

Billy Jean King is the center!

Is that the one Michael Jackson sings about?

three clicks to to hell:

slashdot
slashdot effect
Larry Niven
Hell

Re:I know the center

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.

And now

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

Cool stats though.

Erdos number, please!

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

Re:Erdos number, please!

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.

Link distance

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

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.

Yes, I read XKCD

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

"six degrees" connections are not uniform

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.

you can do better than that

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

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.

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.

How many clicks to profit?

e.g.

1. Kevin bacon
2. ?
3. profit!

It All Depends Who Wrote the Article

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

What about language?

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

Shortest path from disney to fuck

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

2 clicks needed

Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?

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?

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?

That page links to them..

Re:This is news?

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!"

Re:Where All...

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:Where All...

My SQL is very rusty

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