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Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

sixdegreesofwikipedia.com

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Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#31

Post by scrooched_moose »

maaaats wrote: post #11

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

Yeah, that really confused me. Distance from "M.C. Escher" to "Lucky Charms" sounds interesting only to get:

    You'll probably want to choose the start and end pages before you hit that.
Took me a while to realize it didn't "lock in" the suggestions and I had to manually enter it.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#32

Post by colemannugent »

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…

Your notification for having JS disabled made me chuckle.

One suggestion I have is that the graph view seems to clutter up pretty fast. Maybe have a slider that increases the length of the lines between the vertices. Also, a SVG export would be cool for visualizing related concepts.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#33

Post by jwngr »

diegorbaquero wrote: post #28

How are the paths created? I found intermediate nodes that didn't link to the actual articles. I searched Colombia > Silicon Valley

The Wikipedia database doesn't differentiate links which appear in the main article versus in the sources or categories sections. It's possible one of the intermediate links is in there. You sometimes need to do a CTRL+f in "View Source" to find the link. Also, the latest Wikipedia dump is from February 2nd, so it's possible the link has been deleted since that date. I'll regenerated my database when the new dump lands in early March.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#35

Post by torgard »

kyleschiller wrote: post #30

What determines a "path"? "Philosophy" is connected to "Ethiopia" through "Sexism", but I couldn't find that phrase on either page. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Philosophy&tar...

Same, New Zealand to Faroe Islands through Italy.

Maybe both New Zealand and the Faroes reference Italy?

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#36

Post by tucif »

I was getting interesting results until I noticed a pattern involving the presence of "Wayback machine" as the only connecting dot between really different things.

That adds noise, since articles now automatically use the wayback machine for "archived" links, thus generating many paths that do not really connect topics, just because the text "wayback machine" is part of the link text.

It may be an interesting exercise to find outliers like that and compute paths without those nodes.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#37

Post by empath75 »

turc1656 wrote: post #9

Very cool. And a lot less degrees of freedom between my tests than I expected - so far everything has a legitimate 3 degrees when I expected much more. Higgs Boson to Taylor Swift in 3 steps, amazing. Not only that, but 91 ways to get there in just 3 steps. This basically quantifies what my wife and I jokingly refer to "rabbit-holing" online. She'll ask me what I'm reading and it will be something totally unrelated t…

You need to go more obscure -- Fiber Bundle to Lars Ulrich was 4 steps. Calabi-Yau Manifold to Donnie Wahlberg is also 4.

I haven't gotten 5 yet.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#38

Post by jwngr »

colemannugent wrote: post #32
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…

Your notification for having JS disabled made me chuckle. One suggestion I have is that the graph view seems to clutter up pretty fast. Maybe have a slider that increases the length of the lines between the vertices. Also, a SVG export would be cool for visualizing related concepts.

Glad you found one of the Easter eggs :D

The graph visualization / performance is definitely not ideal. I spent a ton of time trying to make d3 more performant and layout the graph more nicely, but ultimately I just had to cut my losses and go with what I had. I do think there is room for improvement and I'll look into your suggestion, which is something I didn't consider. SVG export is also a great idea!

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#39

Post by scrooched_moose »

kyleschiller wrote: post #30

What determines a "path"? "Philosophy" is connected to "Ethiopia" through "Sexism", but I couldn't find that phrase on either page. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Philosophy&tar...

From the project description [1]:

Wikipedia dumps raw database tables in a gzipped SQL format for the English language Wikipedia (enwiki) approximately once a month (e.g. dump from February 1, 2018)...By default, the script grabs the latest dump (available at https://dumps.wikimedia.your.org/enwiki/latest/), but you can also call the database creation script with a download date in the format YYYYMMDD as the first argument.

I'd guess the tool is working off an out of date article.

1) https://github.com/jwngr/sdow

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