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Six Degrees of Wikipedia
Ever wonder how many clicks it takes to get from the Wikipedia page for Bill Gates to the page for Mark Shuttleworth? The answer is three. How about from "ice cream" to "cone?" Surprisingly, the answer is four. We know this not because we've been wasting hours clicking on every possible Wikipedia link and tabulating the results, but because somebody's done all the hard work for us by creating a Six Degrees of Wikipedia page.
Just type in any two items, and the web service will dig through a database of Wikipedia articles and figure out how long it would take to get from one to the other. The Wikipedia page for "2007" is apparently the closest to the "center" of Wikipedia, meaning that you can get to any other page from 2007 with an average of 3.45 clicks. When you take out Wikipedia pages for dates or long lists of items, the page for "United Kingdom," is the closest to the center, since it's an average of 3.67 clicks away from any other page.
[via Digital Inspiration]
Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsToddJun 4th 2008 5:24PM
Oh hush Download Squad, voices carry.
RileyJun 4th 2008 11:39PM
I don't think this thing is right...trying to get the most number of clicks, I tried this:
http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=penis&to=microsoft
There's no "arithmetic mean" in that article...
Rico SanJun 5th 2008 9:26AM
It's like Six Clicks to Jesus. My friend told me about that game. Click on Random Article on the Wikipedia front page, and get to the article about Jesus in less than 6 clicks.
This is what we do at a Catholic school :-P
bobJun 5th 2008 11:35AM
we play a similar game in my public school
except we try to get to the article about sex
arvashJun 5th 2008 12:09PM
http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/cgi-bin/shortpath.cgi?from=vger&to=gentoo
I broke it. . .
archpopeJun 6th 2008 7:35AM
xeriscape to Cydonia: no path found.