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Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

sixdegreesofwikipedia.com

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Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#81

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...

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.

It seems somewhat unfair. If it's not a directed graph, it means you can't actually navigate from the source to the target page by following these links...

edit: in fact, the author describes the goal of his project in another comment here: "my goal for the project which is to traverse the links as any human would be able to".

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#82
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> Glad you found one of the Easter eggs :D

Easter egg? I never have JS enabled on random websites.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#83
"You'll probably want to choose the start and end pages before you hit that."

Why? There were two random examples filled in the boxes. I have to retype them manually?

Really interesting and fun other than that! I'm trying something with 7 degrees, but so far most I could get are 4

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#84

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…

This reminds me of the wikipedia rule I learned a while back: If you click the first link in an article (besides the pronunciation guide), you will always end up on philosophy.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#85
post #80

It 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).

Unfortunately I'm not aware of a way to distinguish between the two. Wikipedia stores both types of links in the same database. I would love to cull out all the links in category boxes and sources. If anyone has any ideas, let me know!

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#86
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!

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#90
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…

I had a conversation with a friend a few weeks ago that surely this already exists, and if not that someone should make this.

Any plans to filter by mutual paths?

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