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Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

sixdegreesofwikipedia.com

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Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#41

Post by bringtheaction »

colemannugent wrote: post #16

This makes the "How many clicks to Hitler" game much faster. For those uninitiated, the game was to click the "Random Article" link in the sidebar and count how many links it took to get to Hitler. It is really interesting to see just how big of an event WWII was. Every country article has a section on their involvement or why they were not involved. After playing with it more, this is pretty fun. I vote that a "degr…

Indeed. First thing I tried as well.

Found 1 path with 2 degrees of separation from Bitcoin to Adolf Hitler in 1.33 seconds!

Bitcoin -> Austria -> Adolf Hitler

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#45

Post by jwngr »

tucif wrote: post #36

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 exercis…

I considered this and may eventually add an option to ignore those kinds of pages, but I ultimately felt like the current mode remains more true to my goal for the project which is to traverse the links as any human would be able to. By the way, the two pages with the most incoming links are "Geographic coordinate system" (1,047,096 incoming links) and "International Standard Book Number" (955,957 incoming links).

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#48

Post by jffry »

scrooched_moose wrote: post #31
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.

Which is a shame, because that specific example ends up having some interestingly diverse paths between the two: https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=M.%20C.%20Esch...

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#49

Post by jwngr »

lultimouomo wrote: post #34

The same thing from 2008, with some fun graph facts included: http://mu.netsoc.ie/wiki/

Yes, Sthephen Dolan's project (along with others) was definitely an inspiration for me! Although, I like to think I made a lot of performance and design improvements over his work. I used to have an acknowledgements section in my README with his name in it, but I seemed to have destroyed that. I'll make sure to give credit where credit is due and list all my inspirations.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#50

Post by AstralStorm »

bringtheaction wrote: post #41
colemannugent wrote: post #16

This makes the "How many clicks to Hitler" game much faster. For those uninitiated, the game was to click the "Random Article" link in the sidebar and count how many links it took to get to Hitler. It is really interesting to see just how big of an event WWII was. Every country article has a section on their involvement or why they were not involved. After playing with it more, this is pretty fun. I vote that a "degr…

Indeed. First thing I tried as well. Found 1 path with 2 degrees of separation from Bitcoin to Adolf Hitler in 1.33 seconds! Bitcoin -> Austria -> Adolf Hitler

Game is much more challenging if you ban pages that also have big categories.

(Look of Category: X exists and add some cutoff based on number of links there.)

Obviously also lists.

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