I warn you: the following may sound trivial, but it will suck you in and then you'll finally understand that the Internet is a meaningful and omnipotent entity:
Ever heard of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? If you haven't, it works like this: Every actor gets a Kevin Bacon number. Kevin Bacon has a Kevin Bacon number of 0, actors who were in a movie with Kevin Bacon get a Kevin Bacon number of 1, actors who were in a movie with someone who has a Kevin Bacon number 1 get a 2, and so on (Everybody always gets the smallest number possible, so if you were in a film with two people, one with a 4 and one with a 6, your Kevin Bacon number would be 5).
The same idea could apply to the articles Wikipedia. Instead of taking "in the same film" as the relation, you can take "is linked to by". We'll call the "Kevin Bacon number" from one article to another the "distance" between them. It's then possible to work out the "closeness" of an article in Wikipedia as its average distance to any other article. I wanted to find the centre of wikipedia, that is, the article that is closest to all other articles (has minimum closeness).
The site is more than just informative. You can actually enter two search terms and find out how many wikipedia clicks separate the two. For instance I found out there were four clicks separating syntax and things.
I think I've spent too much time playing around at this site this already, time I should have spent coming up with something halfway interesting to more people than just me to post here this morning. Back later.
Ah, Kalevipoeg. The Estonian hero. Anyone who follows the advice of a hedgehog and uses planks as weapons is a good connection to have.
Posted by: zan | May 29, 2008 at 09:28 AM
Shortest path from shit to shinola
Shit
Hashish
California
Lincoln Highway
Shinola
4 clicks needed
Oddly, this makes sense.
Posted by: tito | May 30, 2008 at 02:58 AM