Live data from Hacker News

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

sixdegreesofwikipedia.com

31–40 of 78 posts

Re: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#32
Creator here. Glad that HN rediscovered my old side project. All the code is freely available on GitHub [1]. It's running on a tiny f1-micro GCE instance which is currently down due to the traffic. I don't have time to fix it right now, but it should resolve itself once traffic dies down. The data source is also several years out of date at this point, so the links it returns may not match current reality. Other than that, it should still work!

I'm currently building an AI email app called Shortwave [2]. I promise that has much better uptime and more consistent updates!

[1] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow

[2] https://shortwave.com

Re: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#33
post #30

All post-2021 created pages don't exist. One gets a slightly misleading error messages that a page doesn't exist which is confusing when the page evidently _does_ exist. E.g. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Ever%20Given&t...

My script has been broken since February 2021 :( Documentation on the data source (with links to old data dumps) is on GitHub: https://github.com/jwngr/sdow/blob/master/docs/data-source.m...

Re: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#38

Interesting. I wonder what are the two most separated pages, i.e. pages with the longest path connecting them.

You go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download Then you analyse the data and draw your own conclusions.

If I had to guess there will be a lot of them but there will be roughly six or so (give or take 10) links on average from one article to another. Even the notion of longest path will be debatable - I know this because people are ... people.

I've run a mediawiki based intranet for quite a while - I wrote this: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Intranet

You can link any page from any other and you can categorise ad infinitum. Also you can use subpages. So in the end it does not really make sense to talk about a simple graph, within WP. There are at least three sets of graphs in the last couple of sentences and I haven't really tried to think about it.

Re: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#40
post #39

This is an archetypical graph database query.

It is certainly an achetypical graph problem, shortest path, of which there are many ways to solve. Some algorithms are very highly efficient. I've tried some graph databases and was quite surprised at how hard they were to express using their query languages and how hard it was to solve them efficiently. I've had better luck with library based solutions.
Post reply on HN