Filed under: World wide web, Social Software
Ever wonder how many clicks it takes to get from the Wikipedia page for Bill Gates to the page for Mark Shuttleworth? The answer is three. How about from “ice cream” to “cone?” Surprisingly, the answer is four. We know this not because we’ve been wasting hours clicking on each possible Wikipedia link and tabulating the results, but because somebody’s done all the hard work for us by creating a Six Degrees of Wikipedia page.
Just type in any two items, and the web service will dig through a database of Wikipedia articles and figure out how long it would take to get from one to the other. The Wikipedia page for “2007″ is apparently the closest to the “center” of Wikipedia, meaning that you can get to any other page from 2007 with an average of 3.45 clicks. When you take out Wikipedia pages for dates or long lists of items, the page for “United Kingdom,” is the closest to the center, since it’s an average of 3.67 clicks away from any other page.
[via Digital Inspiration]
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