[HN Gopher] Six Degrees of Wikipedia
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       Six Degrees of Wikipedia
        
       Author : sharkweek
       Score  : 62 points
       Date   : 2021-09-20 16:46 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com)
        
       | kloch wrote:
       | Has anyone found a 5 or 6 minimum degree search? The longest I
       | have found is 4: Triumph TR-7 to Apple iic
        
         | Aulex wrote:
         | I found one with 5 degrees.
         | 
         | Rostam to Hydro Flask
        
       | jwngr wrote:
       | 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!
       | 
       | Here is the original HN post for those who are interested:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468196
        
       | mikewarot wrote:
       | Slide Rule --> Surface Plate was pretty cool.
        
       | s_dev wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | _z1234 wrote:
       | I tried "Pembroke welsh corgi" to "Moose", it said 2 degrees. But
       | I couldn't find the outward edge links from "Moose" -> "cattle"
       | and vice versa?
        
       | tombert wrote:
       | Huh, fun to learn that there's only three degrees of separation
       | between Norm MacDonald and Miguel De Cervantes.
       | 
       | I love projects like this; they do a good job making the world
       | feel a bit smaller.
        
       | arittr wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | darkwizard42 wrote:
       | 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!
        
       | malkia wrote:
       | Was wondering about
       | https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=bulgaria&targe... -
       | but site maybe getting too much to work right now (would check
       | later!)
        
         | malkia wrote:
         | ah, it worked now - heheh (so I was curious about "Bulgaria"
         | and "ska" music):
         | 
         | 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 Chango 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...
        
       | lapetitejort wrote:
       | 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...?
        
         | davidholdeman wrote:
         | When I play this game, I click the N+1th link if I have already
         | visited the Nth link.
        
         | spywaregorilla wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | bArray wrote:
       | > Sorry internet hipster, this little side project requires
       | JavaScript.
       | 
       | Touche.
        
         | omoikane wrote:
         | This is one of the best error messages of this sort that I have
         | seen as a Lynx user.
        
           | prirai wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | ASalazarMX wrote:
         | < _angrily sips homegrown herb infusion_ >
        
       | drdeca wrote:
       | 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)
        
         | srmarm wrote:
         | 3 degrees of separation seems to be the sweet spot for most of
         | the combos I tested.
         | 
         | Brilliant project and worked pretty fast for me
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
       | > Whoops... Six Degrees of Wikipedia is temporarily unavailable.
       | Please try again in a few seconds.
       | 
       | HN hug of death?
        
         | junon wrote:
         | Seems like it!
        
       | bntyhntr wrote:
       | 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 :)
        
         | marcosdumay wrote:
         | Oh, I play this game when I don't know the name of something.
         | Get in the page of a similar concept, bubble up and then down.
        
         | Ericson2314 wrote:
         | Hyperbolic geometry.
        
         | tbenst wrote:
         | The game is called Wiki Ball! I played it too--fond memories of
         | navigating category pages..
        
       | Timpy wrote:
       | 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).
        
         | crude-technical wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | xeromal wrote:
       | I can't get it to work. :(
        
         | bmn__ wrote:
         | This result link should be cached, does this work for you?
         | 
         | https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Erd%C5%91s&tar...
        
           | xeromal wrote:
           | It does! Thanks! I think my query was just an impossible one.
           | 
           | https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=University%20o.
           | ..
        
       | bob229 wrote:
       | Wikipedia is truly awful
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-20 23:01 UTC)