Somewhat related to Getting to Philosophy phenomenon [0].
Interestingly, there are only 3 degrees between Banana slug [1] and Ergodicity [2]. I thought there will be more and Philosophy [3] would be one of them. I was wrong.
Traversing the hyperlinks to find shortest path gives less interesting results. They should have considered some kind of weights to assign some importance to the edges like how many times two entities are mentioned together or if they are mentioned in the first paragraph of each other etc. This is much weaker than 6 degrees of separation.
The UI looks a little ugly, but the UX is really great! I love the fun facts while loading, and how you're able to test the app right on the landing page. The graph is cool too, and I legitimately feel motivated to show this to other people.
I recall a website maybe around a decade ago that "sort of" did this, except it was called Hitler Hops - and it posited that any article on Wikipedia was only (i think) 6 articles away from getting to Adolf Hitler. You'd put in an article and it would find how many "hops"/articles it took to get to the guy.
Was an interesting concept, not sure if it's still around though (probably not).
I find this a helpful antidote to a lot of conspiratorial thinking. Namely the idea that you can draw a connection to one donation from a billionaire, to a foundation, to a person who worked at that foundation but then did another thing, etc.
The error in conspiratorial thinking about these links is the assumption that whoever is at the beginning and end of those chains are in close coordination. When really it's an ordinary phenomenon you see in any information that has any relational properties (people, economic transactions etc.)
Shameless plug, semi-related game I made some years ago based on Wikipedia links, where the goal is to find the page that’s _not_ linked to the others. https://havarnov.github.io/oddoneout/
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
Interestingly, there are only 3 degrees between Banana slug [1] and Ergodicity [2]. I thought there will be more and Philosophy [3] would be one of them. I was wrong.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_slug
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy
The UI looks a little ugly, but the UX is really great! I love the fun facts while loading, and how you're able to test the app right on the landing page. The graph is cool too, and I legitimately feel motivated to show this to other people.
Six Degrees of Wikipedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595821 - Sept 2021 (67 comments)
Six Degrees of Wikipedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27444053 - June 2021 (1 comment)
Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468196 - Feb 2018 (324 comments)
Six Degrees of Wikipedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=201513 - May 2008 (7 comments)
Finally we know!
I feel like the existence of pages like "List of notable people from Buffalo, NY" are sort of cheating this sort of thing.
https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Ecc%C3%A9it%C3...
https://wikispeedrun.org/
Though the path it gives from Manifestiny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny to Homo Sapiens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human seems to go through a hyperlink not found on the page? Might be buried in versioning or other languages though.
Was an interesting concept, not sure if it's still around though (probably not).
Its built from Wikipedia dumps in July. Links in articles shouldn't have changed much by now but updating the data set takes quite a long time!
One of my first project that taught me that gathering and cleaning data in data science is a long task, even if automated.
The error in conspiratorial thinking about these links is the assumption that whoever is at the beginning and end of those chains are in close coordination. When really it's an ordinary phenomenon you see in any information that has any relational properties (people, economic transactions etc.)
https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Korea%20Squash...
Jacob (its creator) is now my cofounder at Shortwave (https://www.shortwave.com). Check it out if you want to see his latest work :)