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Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

ryanelmquist.com

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Re: Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

#131
the routes should be affected not by selecting the first link on the page but a weighted probability based on the number of clicks each link on the page gets to the other in-subject links in the body.

also sometimes it counts links in sidebars as first, i think that's unintentional.

Re: Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

#133
post #79

Excellent. Saved me some clicking resulting in more efficient use of procrastination time! I hit loops a few times - you could drop to the second link in those cases instead of stopping completely.

If you drop out of loops, you will reach every article eventually. (Unless you are ending in a cul de sac.)

If the draw to "philosophy" is as string at it seems you should end up there without scanning too many articles. You'd need some sort of fixed cap to avoid the few cases where you'd end up scanning thousands of articles, of course.

Re: Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

#134
Found a loop: Start at Reiki

reiki spiritual_practice spirituality reality being eastern_philosophy islamic_philosophy islamic_studies islamic_history history george_santayana madrid spain balearic_islands catalan_language uh oh... found a loop

spain -> balearic_islands -> catalan_language -> spain .

So this game is traversing a cyclic graph. It should be possible to get around this by keeping track of visited links, and not repeating our clicks.

Now is Wikipedia a connected graph?

Re: Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

#135
post #123
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just hijack Philosophy.

Too easy. The idea was to create an entirely plausible pathway of links that nobody could complain about individually (so they wouldn't get reverted) which nonetheless eventually led to http:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/goatse

I mean, create that plausible pathway with philosophy as its root. Since so many articles already lead to philosophy, it's a good starting point.

Re: Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

#136

As of 2008, the center of English Wikipedia is the article 2007. From that article, it takes on average 3.45 clicks to get to any of the 2,111,479 articles reachable from it. Disregarding all of the articles that are just lists, years or days of the year, the "real article" closest to the center is United Kingdom, at an average of 3.45 clicks to anywhere else. from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separati…

>the "real article" closest to the center is United Kingdom I find this absolutely fascinating. Consider that the reason we're at the centre of the world map is because we had the power to choose to put ourselves there, at the point in history when the maps were being drawn. Is that imperial influence, long since waned, still echoing across the years, visible in the wikipedia graph?

OR, it's just because they used the English wikipedia for it

Re: Inspired by XKCD:903, Wikipedia steps to philosophy

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the "real article" closest to the center is United Kingdom I find this absolutely fascinating. Consider that the reason we're at the centre of the world map is because we had the power to choose to put ourselves there, at the point in history when the maps were being drawn. Is that imperial influence, long since waned, still echoing across the years, visible in the wikipedia graph?

OR, it's just because they used the English wikipedia for it

Hah, good point. I wasn't trying to be triumphalist, though I admit it certainly reads that way.
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