Via Slashdot.
Stephen Dolan, a student from Trinity College has calculated the “Six Degrees of Wikipedia”. Based on the popular US college game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” - from Wikipedia:
The trivia game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is based on a variation of the concept of the small world phenomenon and states that any actor can be linked through his or her film roles to actor Kevin Bacon. The game requires a group of players to try to connect any film actor in history to Kevin Bacon as quickly as possible and in as few links as possible. The game was played across various college campuses in the early 1990s. Its name is a pun on the concept of six degrees of separation.
Stephen had the idea to apply this principle in order to discover the “centre of Wikipedia”, i.e. the article that is closest to all other articles. He has an interesting article that explains his methodology.
His initial discovery was that the article 2007 produced a average click rate of 3.45 clicks in order to access any other article on Wikipedia - I would guess this is only to be expected as the Wikipedia user base grows and adds articles about recent events.
Stephen then decided to remove any articles that are just lists, years or days of the year and discovered that the “real article” closest to the centre is:
Well they’ve always had the opinion that they are the centre of the universe - I guess this proves it!
Bonus link: You can test find the Kevin Bacon number of any actor here. Since there is a famous actress that shares my name - it turns out that I have a Kevin Bacon number of 2!
