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Show HN: WikiBinge – discover how all things are vaguely connected (wikibinge.com)

246 points by jamez ↗ HN
Connect two articles on Wikipedia, but do it the long way. I've always been a fan of the theory of six degree of separation, but it's an overused concept when exploring the Wiki-graph.

Instead of showing the shortest path, which in my opinion is "boring" and ends up connecting super-important central articles, I came up with my own method: WikiBinge selects the smaller, less represented articles on Wikipedia. In a WikiBinge path, the underdogs are the kings!

How does it work? It's pretty straightforward! Compute PageRank on the Wiki-graph and assign as weight of each edge the PageRank value of the destination node. A WikiBinge path is then simply a shortest path using these weights: the algorithm will then favor paths passing through articles with lower PageRank values.

More on the motives to build this here: https://www.jamez.it/project/wikibinge/

This is an older project of mine, but it never got much exposure, so I'm humbly submitting it now.

65 comments

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Kerrick
This is pretty neat! I tried https://www.wikibinge.com/#Moray_eel/Sony_Alpha and I was pleased with the path it took me for first big chunk of the path. The last bit was a tour of a significant number of camera models (none of them Sony), which felt... strange? It certainly felt less-varied than the combination of animalia, history, geography, and pop culture that the first part took me through.

Fun project, thanks for sharing!

If I had a bit of feedback to share, it's that the shortest path (which shows while loading the binge) continues to be visible after it finishes loading -- maybe at the bottom of the page?

jchw
Interesting. Seems like it'd be ideal if there were some way to penalize pages that are too similar to each-other (similar categories/taxonomy, maybe similar text/structure, etc.) because when it does chain a bunch of weird stuff it is very interesting.
jamez
Cool path! The last bit of the tour you described is fairly common - the algorithm is just doing its job, getting closer to the target, avoiding articles with larger PageRank. It's very uncommon to pass through "important" pages. Glad you enjoyed it!
passwordoops
Nice! My wife and I used to play a game sort of like this - find the shortest path between two pages on Wikipedia. It actually made for a fun party game too.

I really love the circuitous path though. Fantastic route to discovery and I can see those even being a neat thing for schools

kirubakaran
Anyone got anything longer than this? (68)

https://www.wikibinge.com/#Madurai/Semiahmoo_Bay

r3trohack3r
This is absolutely amazing.

I built wikiscroll.blankenship.io for myself to scratch my neophile itch. You might be displacing it in my daily routine, a nice pre-built rabbit hole between two topics of interest has proven to be a lot of fun over the past 30 minutes.

Amazing work.

As a short aside, at first I didn't get it. I was surprised the paths between articles were so long. It wasn't until I tried "Adolf Hitler" -> Something (Hitler has notoriously short paths to everything) that I realized these weren't the shortest paths. Your loading text does a really great job of explaining that, but the "random" button appears to be pulling from a cache (clever!) so I didn't get to see that loading message about the "boring shortest path" until I went off the beaten path.

Since it seems like you are computing both the shortest and the "most interesting" path between the two articles, it would be cool to give me a way to see both on the final loaded page. The shortest path is interesting too, even if it is less interesting than the one you ultimately generate.

It'd also be cool to be able to "pin" one of the boxes so the random button only impacts the other. For example, if I started at the Great Molasses Flood, what path could I take to random other articles? Though I guess this can be accomplished by spinning and then retyping the "Great Molasses Flood"

Edit: I deeply appreciate your narrative at https://www.jamez.it/project/wikibinge/ - this is one of my favorite projects I've come across on HN in a long while.

saltminer
> Since it seems like you are computing both the shortest and the "most interesting" path between the two articles, it would be cool to give me a way to see both on the final loaded page. The shortest path is interesting too, even if it is less interesting than the one you ultimately generate.

I agree. Sometimes it loads fairly quickly and you only get a second to look at the shortest path.

jamez
Thank you both, this is a good suggestion. I'll leave the short connection on screen, comparing it with the long and windy path is fun.
armandososa
This is funny, pressed the dice icon and I got "Milk" and "Cookie" and I thought it was going to be a short connection. It isn't. https://www.wikibinge.com/#Milk/Cookie
delecti
That is a shockingly long chain. Amusingly if you flip them, Cookie links directly to Milk.
MattGaiser
Just using my Wikigame skills, I went from Milk -> Hot Chocolate -> Chocolate -> Chocolate chip cookie -> Cookie. This path likely got downranked because all would be popular articles.
chillage
The generated paths are not shortest. Click the "About" section for details. It intentionally generates longer paths through smaller articles.
culi
I'd love to be able to customize the algorithm. I'm curious what would happen if you placed various weights to optimize for shortest path AND most niche path (or however you'd describe this)
asdfman123
It’s only about 70 jumps from Allosauruses to bodybuilder and trainer Mark Rippetoe
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foota
It might be interesting to see this but with paths where they're instead weighted based on the strength of the relation (e.g., something like TF-idf on the articles each link to).

I think this would avoid the super common article problem, but also lead to more relation between each link.

jamez
TF-idf would definitely be something very interesting to try, though I also treasure the serendipity brought by the "blindness" to the content.
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dzink
Horse and Astronaut are more closely connected (through the shows, road, actors) than Cancer and Healthcare which are not connected at all, apparently. This was the problem with public datasets and counting on HTML links to build the graph of human knowledge years ago. I tried to build better search at the time and hit this wall. Large language models will be a bonanza for new products now that the wall is broken.
jamez
To be clear - the point is not to display what can or cannot be connected. The emphasis on this project is about the long and tortuous path chosen.

I take your point about the limits of knowledge graphs written manually vs LLMs. IMHO it's not either/or. We need both curation and statistical approaches, and when they are merged they give the best results. Just ask Wolfram: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/chatgpt-gets-its... Edit: fixed link to Stephen Wolfram's blog.

cocodill
hmm, that six degrees of wikipedia bridge is little weird. i thought you can land from everywhere in few clicks by hitler. but it takes over 70 steps to get dill from hitler.
adrianh
This is excellent. The path from "George Barnes (Musician)" to "Django Reinhardt" somehow managed to pass through Hysterectomy, 5-Bromouracil, Glucuronidation and Port Bannatyne (Scotland). Kudos for some creative coding!
mcint
My first attempt I can't search donut (Doughnut is the canonical), can't type the "()" parenthesis that appear in page names, and can't use any of France, La France, or French Republic to indicate the wiki page on France. Lots of francesca's though.

Fun fun, thank you for sharing! In the interactive web interface*, I hope non-canonical names can be used, that shortest names can be completed and exact matches can be use, and at least accept what it's in page names.

*It looks like writing the URL fragment yourself allows more leniency.

munro
The chains are so long, it's really not that impressive :/
r3trohack3r
The point is that the chains are long and winding instead of the shortest path between two articles.

It seems that, if you pick an uncached path, the loading screen shows you the shortest path while it computes the longer one. More info in their linked article.

dopidopHN
Asked to connect two small town on different continent.

One of those town manufacture car parts. Then I got 10ish car model from various brand.

An actor that did a commercial for one of those brand 20 years ago.

He grew up in the second town.

Cool. But loose

tobyjsullivan
This might be the first time I wish I’d read the comments before visiting the link. Assuming it would find the shortest path, I gave it two very unrelated concepts. I spent way too long exploring a very long chain thinking “How can this be the shortest path?”

So now I want to know, is there a similar tool that does shortest path? Because that would be fun too.

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pelagicAustral
I used to play a drinking game with the lads. You had to name one thing/person/event and had to click on "Random Article" on Wikipedia and land on that particular concept in 5 clicks or less. Good times...
m0llusk
Not sure I get it, but on my first use it pointed out connections between Dehumanization and Memes that I had not previously considered. Curious.