The "wiki game" where two people click Random Page and try to get to each other's page via blue links only is one of my favorites.
Obviously we never got there optimally but very cool to see this visualized and created.
semi-related, I wonder if there are any new papers on how to optimally generate blue links on Wiki pages and how great linking can happen more auto-magically!
Appears to be suffering from a partial hug of death atm, but is pretty cool. Was surprised how few jumps needed for many things. (E.g. 3 jumps from “metric tensor” to “Ronald Reagan” along many possible paths)
In school, we used to have "wiki races" when we were bored (I later googled this and we were far from the only ones). Pick a start and end article and race to see who got there first, verification via the back button on your browser. For speed purposes, it was usually easiest to just bubble up to the biggest unit of geography in common and then narrow back down.
In college we made a site that represented each wikipedia page as a graph, with sections and links serving as nodes and leafs. It was a pretty fun visualization but we fell short of our ill-defined goal to page rank Wikipedia.
This is pretty neat! And it reinforces my belief that bubbling up is the way to go. In the example it gave me, only a few of the 35 paths didn't immediately jump to a very general concept. One of those was "leet" though :)
Yep, makes me sad. It's the reason I made my site fully optimized for text based browsers too. Have a look : prirai.github.io/nav.html
Also, I parsed some books from various paces to make a neat archive. The themes will be visible only on a GUI browser tho. You won't need javascript.
Go to any sizable wiki page and click the first wiki link, then repeat. The theory goes that eventually you will end up at Philosophy. For example Eddie Vedder took seven clicks to reach Philosophy.
It's not a law, however. "Township High School District 211" sent me into an infinite loop:
United States
Contiguous United States
Alaska
U.S. State
United States
Perhaps I should edit one of the pages to prevent that...?
I played this a few times. While it does vaguely work, it seems to follow a pretty consistent route and benefits from the fact that philosophy is preceded by "idea", which seems like the more proper root of the epistemological tree.
Awesome, it works! I picked a random town and got to Philosophy in fifteen steps. I got from Sushi to Philosophy in 24 steps. All concepts abstract upwards as you go on until you're at pure thought. Deprimo, ergo cogito.
For the record I ignored links in the initial brackets. Beyond Philosophy there's an infinite redirect loop between Metaphysics and Philosophy.
I ran one then opened the wikipedia page to verify it, I couldn't find the links.
List of common misconceptions -> Denzel Washington
Allegedly these pages are only 2 degrees apart by way of Hal B. Wallis, Orson Welles, and Humphrey Bogart. I couldn't find Denzel Washington on any of those pages (but all three of them appear on the list of common misconceptions page).
At the bottom of the page (after References and External Links etc) are multiple collapsible info boxes. For example, Orson Welles has one for an AFI Life Achievement Award, which Washington has also received.
This feels like it would be either an advanced technique in wiki ball, or houseruled out. I personally think it definitely counts as a link in the article, though.
Recall this being a school project from a classmate. Was disappointed to learn the article centre of Wikipedia beyond the list articles e.g. 2019 was 'the United Kingdom' this was back in 2007 or 2008 or something.
Creator here. It's exciting to see this back on the front page of HN! My poor little f1-micro instance is not holding up well against the traffic though I won't be able to migrate it to a bigger server today, but if you bookmark it and check back in a day or two, it'll be back up.
If you think this is cool, I'm working on a huge new thing with some former Firebasers and others. Follow me @_jwngr on Twitter (https://twitter.com/_jwngr) for a big reveal coming very soon!
What exactly counts as a link? Because I linked Pope Urban II to Corinthian Leather and found no actual link between the penultimate article Leather Crafting and Corinthian Leather.
I note they don't have that on mobile. Not trying to be pedantic but I think potentially more interesting though lengthier connections would be made if links had to be within the text content of the article itself.
I think the result should also show where the links are in the pages. It's only two steps from where I live to where I was born even though the two towns are in different countries. But it goes via the page for Demonym and the page for where I live doesn't seem to have a link to Demonym even when I examine the HTML.
I second this and want to add that I think in addition to saying where on the page it was found it should also link to the revision of each of the articles it was found, in case any of the articles have been edited since.
Super cool, we used to play this game in high school, wikipedia racing!
I have a bit of (unsolicited) advice for you on the graph. It's hard to read the graph because the lines and text are pretty close in color. I would recommend making the lines much lighter in color, or applying a glow effect behind the text so that they stand out more. It's a tough thing to tune, but I think it would make the graph more readable.
i love it. i used to play this late night in college with whoever was around... part of me feels like seeing the graph takes a little of the joy out of it, but that's the same part of me that wishes i made this myself.
The 6 degrees experimental result was based on snailmail. In social media its 4 degrees, probably due occasional supernodes- people with over a thousand connections.
I tested it starting with the name of a rarely-mentioned (US) indian reservation. The name was first always 'linked' with a completely unrelated state in the US. Pretty damn weak link.
I suppose you could just go through 'universe' to reduce the degrees to two. What's the point?
We used to play a version of this game in high school. Click for a random article, then see who could get to Hitler the fastest because we were "edgy" teenagers.
We used to play this! I'm not quite sure why it was Hitler of all topics, I guess because he's the most offensive thing that's not blocked by your average secondary school's internet filter.
This made me remember a webpage that using IMDB would calculate the degrees of separation between Nicolas Cage and the input person (actress, director...) of your choice.
I did a quick search and couldn't find it. Does anybody remember it? I'm wondering if my memory or my search skills are failing or if it has simply disappeared.
In the course Introduction to Computer Science: AI (CS50AI) by Harvard, one of the first homeworks is implementing a search exactly like this with Python.
I did something similar back in the uni days. However, one node was fixed to 'Chuck Norris' in order to do the search quickly. The first version with both random articles sometimes timeout the apache.
69 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadObviously we never got there optimally but very cool to see this visualized and created.
semi-related, I wonder if there are any new papers on how to optimally generate blue links on Wiki pages and how great linking can happen more auto-magically!
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Link_recommendation...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.15110
Brilliant project and worked pretty fast for me
HN hug of death?
In college we made a site that represented each wikipedia page as a graph, with sections and links serving as nodes and leafs. It was a pretty fun visualization but we fell short of our ill-defined goal to page rank Wikipedia.
This is pretty neat! And it reinforces my belief that bubbling up is the way to go. In the example it gave me, only a few of the 35 paths didn't immediately jump to a very general concept. One of those was "leet" though :)
Touché.
It's not a law, however. "Township High School District 211" sent me into an infinite loop:
United States
Contiguous United States
Alaska
U.S. State
United States
Perhaps I should edit one of the pages to prevent that...?
For the record I ignored links in the initial brackets. Beyond Philosophy there's an infinite redirect loop between Metaphysics and Philosophy.
Incidentally, both "Lemont Township 210" and "Leyden High School District 212" end up at Philosophy.
List of common misconceptions -> Denzel Washington
Allegedly these pages are only 2 degrees apart by way of Hal B. Wallis, Orson Welles, and Humphrey Bogart. I couldn't find Denzel Washington on any of those pages (but all three of them appear on the list of common misconceptions page).
This feels like it would be either an advanced technique in wiki ball, or houseruled out. I personally think it definitely counts as a link in the article, though.
https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Erd%C5%91s&tar...
https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=University%20o...
If you think this is cool, I'm working on a huge new thing with some former Firebasers and others. Follow me @_jwngr on Twitter (https://twitter.com/_jwngr) for a big reveal coming very soon!
Here is the original HN post for those who are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468196
I have a bit of (unsolicited) advice for you on the graph. It's hard to read the graph because the lines and text are pretty close in color. I would recommend making the lines much lighter in color, or applying a glow effect behind the text so that they stand out more. It's a tough thing to tune, but I think it would make the graph more readable.
I love projects like this; they do a good job making the world feel a bit smaller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrestling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Santo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ska
The El_Santo is the real connection here (" The Latin ska band King Changó released an album titled The Return of El Santo.") from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_El_Santo
fun times :)
I should search on "death metal" next, etc. (should be more connections) - it's the two styles of music I like most...
Rostam to Hydro Flask
Cwenthryth (Mercian Princess)
Old English
Weregild
Gold
Neutron Star
Nuclear Pasta
Mitchell order -> Mun Ikjeom https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Mitchell%20ord...
Vandalism?
I suppose you could just go through 'universe' to reduce the degrees to two. What's the point?
Good times!
I did a quick search and couldn't find it. Does anybody remember it? I'm wondering if my memory or my search skills are failing or if it has simply disappeared.
It was extremely fun!
My Bacon Number is 2, having been an extra in Alexander, which featured Connor Paolo, who was in Mystic River with Kevin Bacon.
[1] https://www.oracleofbacon.org/help.php