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Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

sixdegreesofwikipedia.com

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Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#341

Post by CRConrad »

prophesi wrote: post #130
mung wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a suggestion, not a request and a good one at that. So who should be saying 'thank you' here (if anyone)?

Tact.

Or "Tack". ;-)

No, of course the word you're after is "tact". (And even as a foreigner, it annoys the heck out of me when people mix them up [which you didn't!], ususally as in "take another tact" when they mean "take another tack" [where 'tack' is a originally a sailing term for flipping the sail to the other side of the boat when going against the wind, IIUC; so the expression means "go in a slightly different direction"].)

I'm just riffing on Heikki's remark about foreign languages: In my primary language, Swedish, "tack" means "thank you" but is also often used for Eng. "please" -- so "Kan du ... , tack?" means "Could you ... , please?".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacking_(sailing)

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#343

Post by jwngr »

PinkMilkshake wrote: post #340

I like the little trivia that show up, although sometimes they disappear too quickly. My favorite mentioned which Wikipedia article had the longest article name: Suzukake no Ki no Michi de "Kimi no Hohoemi o Yume ni Miru" to Itte Shimattara Bokutachi no Kankei wa Dō Kawatte Shimau no ka, Bokunari ni Nannichi ka Kangaeta Ue de no Yaya Kihazukashii Ketsuron no Yō na Mono ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzukake_no_Ki_n…

The full fact list is on GitHub[1]. The fact list was a lot more interesting and important when searches took longer to run. One of the bad things about improving the performance so much was the fact that the facts don't have as long to display :P

[1] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow/blob/master/website/src/resour...

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#344

Post by thomasahle »

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?

Yes, check this out http://mu.netsoc.ie/wiki/

> Several people were asking about what's known as the "diameter" of Wikipedia, that is, the distance between the two articles furthest apart (the longest shortest path if that makes any sense to you). This was in fact the original goal of the project but it turned out not to be very interesting. Wikipedia has giant "tails", almost linear linked lists of articles that stretch out for 70 links. The worst offenders were the subpages of List of named asteroids as each is only linked from the previous one, and it takes about 70 links to get from anywhere to the last one. So, you find that the two articles furthest from each other are List of asteroids/145701-145800, linked to by List of asteroids/145601-145700, linked to by List of asteroids/145501-145600, and so on for 70 links until you get back to some vageuly normal article. This is far less interesting that I was hoping. Even when I special-cased out that string of 70 boring articles, a new one appeared (I think it was linked pages about administrations of Myanmar or something). Rather than special-casing out reams of articles, I decided to pick a different metric, one that better reflects the structure of wikipedia without arbitrarily removing parts of it.

It appears that the particular tail has been "cut" however.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#345

Post by sente »

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…

Thus is awesome.

Just a heads up - some of the node colors can be difficult to differentiate for people who are red/green colorblind. Very minor, just wanted to mention it though.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#346

Post by bluetwo »

jwngr wrote: post #128
bluetwo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to hear a little more on how you organized the search and what you are pre-processing and what you calculate on-the-fly. Thanks.

The database creation script[1] has a lot of Unix junk in it, but reading through the comments and echo statements should give you an idea of what it does. The end result is a SQLite database with a size of about 9 GB which has four tables, the schema of which are described in the README[2]. The big things that are precomputed are redirects are "auto-followed" to reduce the total graph size and all incoming and outgo…

Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#347

Post by Heikki0 »

IntronExon wrote: post #322
Heikki0 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit off topic, but just to blow ones mind: Finnish, which I am natively speaking, is lacking direct "please" word completely and I have to admit that especially orally I forget it often. (We make things sound nice by conditional, "could you", "would you be so kind" etc..) I have no immediate reaction what so ever how it would feel if someone left out "please". I understand the concept, but it feels horrible…

That’s not off-topic at all! Honestly, I’m ashamed that I hadn’t considered the possibility of a non-native speaker’s linguistic quirks, and what this tells me is that I need to continue to work on my snap-judgements. Thank you for reminding me that languages don’t handle courtesy the same way.

This was really nice to hear! Don't worry, one can only think through ones own mind =) I think this already helps, if everybody are just a bit more aware about that others might think differently, and not be deliberately mean. I have learned several languages, since Finnish is very useless in a large scale, and it always amazes me how in different languages it is also thought differently. I can only recommend!

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#348

Post by calt »

My friends and I used to play this a race. We weren't concerned so much with the number of hops as how quickly we could get here.

It was always fun reviewing each round and seeing how everyone got to the destination.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#349

Post by SkylerASmith »

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…

This is an awesome tool!

I'm interested in building a fact checker from a wikipedia graph, and your SDOW seems like a great place to start (I'm intending to use an algorithm inspired from researchers at Indiana University http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....). I was wondering if your database has a non-GUI API. Is there a URL or something I can hit to get back JSON or XML as a response?

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#350

Post by jwngr »

SkylerASmith wrote: post #349
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…

This is an awesome tool! I'm interested in building a fact checker from a wikipedia graph, and your SDOW seems like a great place to start (I'm intending to use an algorithm inspired from researchers at Indiana University http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... ). I was wondering if your database has a non-GUI API. Is there a URL or something I can hit to get back JSON or XML as a response?

I'd prefer you not send any additional load to my server (this is just a side project I'm paying out of pocket for), but you are welcome to download the data yourself. There are instructions in the project README[1] to download the SQLite files I use in the project and I should have documented enough about the schema for you to know what queries to make. I am happy to answer questions via GitHub issues if you have them.

[1] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow#get-the-data-yourself

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