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Six Degrees of Wikipedia

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175 pointssharkweek67 comments

Creator here. It's exciting to see this back on the front page of HN! My poor little f1-micro instance is not holding up well against the traffic though I won't be able to migrate it to a bigger server today, but if you bookmark it and check back in a day or two, it'll be back up.

If you think this is cool, I'm working on a huge new thing with some former Firebasers and others. Follow me @_jwngr on Twitter (https://twitter.com/_jwngr) for a big reveal coming very soon!

Here is the original HN post for those who are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468196

What exactly counts as a link? Because I linked Pope Urban II to Corinthian Leather and found no actual link between the penultimate article Leather Crafting and Corinthian Leather.

Go to the bottom of the Leather Crafting page and expand the "Leather" navigation box and the link to Corinthian Leather is in there.

I note they don't have that on mobile. Not trying to be pedantic but I think potentially more interesting though lengthier connections would be made if links had to be within the text content of the article itself.

I think the result should also show where the links are in the pages. It's only two steps from where I live to where I was born even though the two towns are in different countries. But it goes via the page for Demonym and the page for where I live doesn't seem to have a link to Demonym even when I examine the HTML.

I second this and want to add that I think in addition to saying where on the page it was found it should also link to the revision of each of the articles it was found, in case any of the articles have been edited since.

Super cool, we used to play this game in high school, wikipedia racing!

I have a bit of (unsolicited) advice for you on the graph. It's hard to read the graph because the lines and text are pretty close in color. I would recommend making the lines much lighter in color, or applying a glow effect behind the text so that they stand out more. It's a tough thing to tune, but I think it would make the graph more readable.

In school, we used to have "wiki races" when we were bored (I later googled this and we were far from the only ones). Pick a start and end article and race to see who got there first, verification via the back button on your browser. For speed purposes, it was usually easiest to just bubble up to the biggest unit of geography in common and then narrow back down.

In college we made a site that represented each wikipedia page as a graph, with sections and links serving as nodes and leafs. It was a pretty fun visualization but we fell short of our ill-defined goal to page rank Wikipedia.

This is pretty neat! And it reinforces my belief that bubbling up is the way to go. In the example it gave me, only a few of the 35 paths didn't immediately jump to a very general concept. One of those was "leet" though :)

Hyperbolic geometry.

The game is called Wiki Ball! I played it too—fond memories of navigating category pages..

Oh, I play this game when I don't know the name of something. Get in the page of a similar concept, bubble up and then down.

https://www.thewikigame.com/app

Go to any sizable wiki page and click the first wiki link, then repeat. The theory goes that eventually you will end up at Philosophy. For example Eddie Vedder took seven clicks to reach Philosophy.

It's not a law, however. "Township High School District 211" sent me into an infinite loop:

United States

Contiguous United States

Alaska

U.S. State

United States

Perhaps I should edit one of the pages to prevent that...?

When I play this game, I click the N+1th link if I have already visited the Nth link.

I played this a few times. While it does vaguely work, it seems to follow a pretty consistent route and benefits from the fact that philosophy is preceded by "idea", which seems like the more proper root of the epistemological tree.

Awesome, it works! I picked a random town and got to Philosophy in fifteen steps. I got from Sushi to Philosophy in 24 steps. All concepts abstract upwards as you go on until you're at pure thought. Deprimo, ergo cogito.

For the record I ignored links in the initial brackets. Beyond Philosophy there's an infinite redirect loop between Metaphysics and Philosophy.

>It's not a law, however. "Township High School District 211" sent me into an infinite loop

Incidentally, both "Lemont Township 210" and "Leyden High School District 212" end up at Philosophy.

We used to play a version of this game in high school. Click for a random article, then see who could get to Hitler the fastest because we were "edgy" teenagers.

Good times!

We used to play this! I'm not quite sure why it was Hitler of all topics, I guess because he's the most offensive thing that's not blocked by your average secondary school's internet filter.

There is a popular saying that everything is connected to Hitler in 7 steps or so

The "wiki game" where two people click Random Page and try to get to each other's page via blue links only is one of my favorites.

Obviously we never got there optimally but very cool to see this visualized and created.

semi-related, I wonder if there are any new papers on how to optimally generate blue links on Wiki pages and how great linking can happen more auto-magically!

Not sure if this is what you mean, but I found an ongoing Wikimedia research project & preprint:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Link_recommendation...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.15110

I ran one then opened the wikipedia page to verify it, I couldn't find the links.

List of common misconceptions -> Denzel Washington

Allegedly these pages are only 2 degrees apart by way of Hal B. Wallis, Orson Welles, and Humphrey Bogart. I couldn't find Denzel Washington on any of those pages (but all three of them appear on the list of common misconceptions page).

At the bottom of the page (after References and External Links etc) are multiple collapsible info boxes. For example, Orson Welles has one for an AFI Life Achievement Award, which Washington has also received.

This feels like it would be either an advanced technique in wiki ball, or houseruled out. I personally think it definitely counts as a link in the article, though.

Shameless plug: I’ve made a small and stupid game where you’re presented Wikipedia articles and you have to guess which article is not linked to by any of the other articles.

https://havarnov.github.io/oddoneout/

Fun!

Would be cool if clicking/taping the article titles would take you to the actual articles. Some interesting sounding ones popped up!

Has anyone found a 5 or 6 minimum degree search? The longest I have found is 4: Triumph TR-7 to Apple iic

I found one with 5 degrees.

Rostam to Hydro Flask

No path https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Anavryto&targe...

Seems like no article links to Boundary Vector Field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Boundary...

Found a 6 degree path https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Victoria%20(3D...

Cwenthryth to Nuclear Pasta, 442 paths with 5 degrees of separation. My favorite path is probably:

Cwenthryth (Mercian Princess)

Old English

Weregild

Gold

Neutron Star

Nuclear Pasta

Haha found a 7 degree pair!

Mitchell order -> Mun Ikjeom https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Mitchell%20ord...

Huh, fun to learn that there's only three degrees of separation between Norm MacDonald and Miguel De Cervantes.

I love projects like this; they do a good job making the world feel a bit smaller.

This made me remember a webpage that using IMDB would calculate the degrees of separation between Nicolas Cage and the input person (actress, director...) of your choice.

I did a quick search and couldn't find it. Does anybody remember it? I'm wondering if my memory or my search skills are failing or if it has simply disappeared.

sure it wasn't 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon

And at one point even, google allowed you to directly search for someone's bacon number: https://www.wired.com/2012/09/easter-egg-google-connects-the...

In the course Introduction to Computer Science: AI (CS50AI) by Harvard, one of the first homeworks is implementing a search exactly like this with Python.

It was extremely fun!

I've only ever heard of something similar, the Bacon Number, which is the degrees of separation between a given person and Kevin Bacon [1].

My Bacon Number is 2, having been an extra in Alexander, which featured Connor Paolo, who was in Mystic River with Kevin Bacon.

[1] https://www.oracleofbacon.org/help.php

Was wondering about https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=bulgaria&targe... - but site maybe getting too much to work right now (would check later!)

ah, it worked now - heheh (so I was curious about "Bulgaria" and "ska" music):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrestling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Santo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ska

The El_Santo is the real connection here (" The Latin ska band King Changó released an album titled The Return of El Santo.") from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_El_Santo

fun times :)

I should search on "death metal" next, etc. (should be more connections) - it's the two styles of music I like most...

Recall this being a school project from a classmate. Was disappointed to learn the article centre of Wikipedia beyond the list articles e.g. 2019 was 'the United Kingdom' this was back in 2007 or 2008 or something.

I did something similar back in the uni days. However, one node was fixed to 'Chuck Norris' in order to do the search quickly. The first version with both random articles sometimes timeout the apache.

Appears to be suffering from a partial hug of death atm, but is pretty cool. Was surprised how few jumps needed for many things. (E.g. 3 jumps from “metric tensor” to “Ronald Reagan” along many possible paths)

3 degrees of separation seems to be the sweet spot for most of the combos I tested.

Brilliant project and worked pretty fast for me

I tried "Pembroke welsh corgi" to "Moose", it said 2 degrees. But I couldn't find the outward edge links from "Moose" -> "cattle" and vice versa?

It's probably in one of the expandable boxes. Check the page source code to find the link a bit easier.

Tried "Mongolia" to "United States". My mind is blown; 222 paths with 2 degrees and the nodes look like an atom with a dark hole next to the nucleus.

The 6 degrees experimental result was based on snailmail. In social media its 4 degrees, probably due occasional supernodes- people with over a thousand connections.

Slide Rule --> Surface Plate was pretty cool.

I wish it could optionally ignore the info boxes and navbars. They kinda feel like cheating.

i love it. i used to play this late night in college with whoever was around... part of me feels like seeing the graph takes a little of the joy out of it, but that's the same part of me that wishes i made this myself.

I tested it starting with the name of a rarely-mentioned (US) indian reservation. The name was first always 'linked' with a completely unrelated state in the US. Pretty damn weak link.

I suppose you could just go through 'universe' to reduce the degrees to two. What's the point?

It follows Wikipedia links of the given pages. The connections aren't arbitrary.

fails for me for: Linz (capital of Upper Austria) -> Brouwer‘s fixed point theorem

Error: Whoops.

I can't get it to work. :(

This result link should be cached, does this work for you?

https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Erd%C5%91s&tar...

It does! Thanks! I think my query was just an impossible one.

https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=University%20o...

So I just learned that there’s a direct link from Adolf Hitler to Jeff Bezos… 1 degree.

Vandalism?

They've both been Time's Person of the Year

> Sorry internet hipster, this little side project requires JavaScript.

Touché.

<angrily sips homegrown herb infusion>

This is one of the best error messages of this sort that I have seen as a Lynx user.

Yep, makes me sad. It's the reason I made my site fully optimized for text based browsers too. Have a look : prirai.github.io/nav.html Also, I parsed some books from various paces to make a neat archive. The themes will be visible only on a GUI browser tho. You won't need javascript.

> Whoops... Six Degrees of Wikipedia is temporarily unavailable. Please try again in a few seconds.

HN hug of death?

Seems like it!

I've tried "Bill Gates" to "Wuhan Institute of Virology" and I'm pleased with the results.

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