Six, very meta version
https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Six%20Degrees%...
Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
71–80 of 354 posts
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#72What 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?
At the bottom of the page for each of the countries "Articles related to Italy" is a huge expandable section, with even more expandable sections inside. You can actually find both New Zealand and Faroe Islands in there.
If you view-source the Italy page, you can find a link to both of those countries.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#73What 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...
Sexism links to both philosophy and Ethiopia. It is treating links as an undirected graph (despite the visual indication showing a directional vector), which seems entirely fair.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#74I 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).
Indeed, the Wikipedia pages "Geographic coordinate system" and "International Standard Book Number" have the highest PageRank. See: https://www.nayuki.io/page/computing-wikipedias-internal-pag...
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#75Does 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.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#76This 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…
Hilarious, my first search was "OFDM -> Hitler" for some completely unknown reason. (2 steps for the curious)
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#77There's only one path from Mersenne Prime to Bolivia, if anybody was wondering. Mersenne Prime -> French People -> Bolivia.
Only one path of three. There are probably hundreds or thousands in four steps.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#78Not 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 Wiki article for the Crusades. So I went to look and noticed the link it took was the citation for a book published by this company. I wouldn't really count that as a legitimate hop since it's a citation, not a content link.
EDIT - I noticed this also applies to the Notes section.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#79Creator 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…
make it so that if I visit the page and just click the "go" button, it will use the placeholder examples as the start and end points. i did this and got an error message stating "You'll probably want to choose the start and end pages before you hit that." that was annoying. the placeholders that were auto chosen were actually really interesting.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#80It would be a bit more interesting if it could distinguish between the "See Also" and other tables at the bottom of the pages, and the main content. E.g. I connected Donald Knuth to a Geneticist simply because they both won awards (in different categories).