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Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

sixdegreesofwikipedia.com

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Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#101

Post by VikingIV »

orf wrote: post #86
jwngr wrote: post #13

Creator here. Six Degrees of Wikipedia is a side project I've been sporadically hacking on over the past few years. It was an interesting technical challenge and it's fun to play with the end result. Here's the tech stack: * Frontend: React (Create React App) * Backend: Python Flask * Database: SQLite * Web (frontend) hosting: Firebase Hosting * Server (backend) hosting: Google Compute Engine (it runs fine on a tiny…

Damn, you beat me to it! I've been hacking on something similar for the longest time. Thanks for sharing your code!

Were either of your creations around since ~2012? I recall someone sharing this very concept in a room on turntable.fm, except it would list it's discovery in real-time as an ordered list. I've been racking my memory for 2 years trying to find a link again, but here we are!

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#104

Post by jwngr »

maaaats wrote: post #11

Could you make it possible to just test with the fun suggestions that scroll through?

I clearly should've done some more user testing ;) I think that's a great suggestion and would be much better than showing an error message. I'll update that once I have some time when the server isn't crashing!

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#106

Post by pradn »

jwngr wrote: post #93
turc1656 wrote: post #78

Not sure if you deliberately designed it this way, but I noticed when spot checking some results that it includes the bibliography section links as connections. This seems like it may not be desirable. Example, I did a search that went from the Crusades to Buzz Aldrin and I noticed that Routledge was the first hop from the Crusades. It strikes me as odd that Routledge (a publishing company) would be mentioned on the…

Yeah unfortunately I don't know of any way to differentiate the different types of links. Wikipedia's pagelinks database doesn't different them. I agree it's undesireable but I just cannot figure out how to cull them.

I think you'd have to parse the raw wikitext dump, keeping track of which section each link belongs in. Since the raw dumps is something like 50 GB of text, this sort of thing takes a while.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#107

Post by jwngr »

dbranes wrote: post #75
tw1010 wrote: post #46

Does anyone know what the "diameter" of the wikipedia graph is? In other words, what is the longest shortest path between two wikipedia articles?

Well that question only makes sense for connected graphs, we don't really know whether this is connected. So in general a version of this question that makes sense is, among all the connected components of the wikipedia graph, what is the largest diameter.

This is an interesting question that I'd like to answer now that I have all the data. I am curious to see how long it will take to find a solution as I believe even the most efficient algorithms for this have a high runtime complexity.

And yes, the graph is not connected (there are both nodes with no outgoing links and with no incoming links), but over 99% of the pages are connected, so the answer would still be interesting and worthwhile.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#108

Post by sinaa »

jwngr wrote: post #13

Creator here. Six Degrees of Wikipedia is a side project I've been sporadically hacking on over the past few years. It was an interesting technical challenge and it's fun to play with the end result. Here's the tech stack: * Frontend: React (Create React App) * Backend: Python Flask * Database: SQLite * Web (frontend) hosting: Firebase Hosting * Server (backend) hosting: Google Compute Engine (it runs fine on a tiny…

Great work!

Do you simply do a BFS to find the shortest paths? If so, are you doing any tricks to avoid the path explosion problem?

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#109

Post by jxramos »

This thing is pretty dang good, "Golden Ratio" to "Pope Pius X", what could possibly go wrong? Nailed it with "1 path with 2 degrees of separation". "Infinite Series" to "Declaration of Independence", nailed it in "4 paths with 3 degrees of separation". This is a lot of fun

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#110

Post by jwngr »

aecs99 wrote: post #40

This looks great! Nice work. I have a suggestion: Could you highlight a path when an edge is clicked on? I guess the clicking on the nodes can link to their wiki pages.

Yes, definitely a feature I'd like to add. I can change the opening the page on Wikipedia to happen on double click instead of single click. I am still a d3 noob and need to figure out how to implement the highlight path thing.
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