Travis at Arcane Gazebo suggests a game: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
- Go to Wikipedia.
- Click the random article link in the sidebar.
- Open a second random article in another tab.
- Try to find a chain of links (as short as possible) starting from the first article that leads to the second.
Lacking other bloggy inspiration, I tried it out. My two pages to connect were Kings Contrivance, Columbia, Maryland and Home Alone (video game), because God hates me. I did find a chain between them, though:
- Kings Contrivance, Columbia, Maryland
- Planned Community
- United States
- Cinema of the United States
- List of Film Studios
- Films by Studio
- 20th Century Fox Films
- Home Alone (movie) (This page mentions the existence of the video game, but doesn't link to it directly.)
- Super Nintendo Entertainment System
- List of SNES Games
- Home Alone (video game)
I said to myself, "Well, that was unlucky... Let's try another two, and see if we get something better."
The next two random pages were Melbourne Club and Behrouz Safarzadeh.
I don't think I like this game.
Comments
# 1 | David Sewell | January 28, 2007 11:40 AM
Wouldn't you know, Wikipedia already had an article on this very thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Six_degrees_of_Wikipedia
# 2 | mollishka | January 28, 2007 11:49 AM
Wikihopping!
And if you're not careful, it could lead to this problem: http://xkcd.com/c214.html . But most of us have already noticed that ...
# 3 | G. Shelley | January 28, 2007 12:10 PM
Would it have been cheating to edit the Home alone page to link directly to the video game?
# 4 | Jason S | January 28, 2007 12:22 PM
There is an actual website which plays this game for you: http://tools.wikimedia.de/sixdeg/index.jsp It automatically finds the shortest path between two articles you enter. This could possibly increase your enjoyment of the game. Try to find a link with more than six degrees!
# 5 | Skwid | January 29, 2007 11:47 AM
G. Shelley, regardless of whether it's cheating or not, it's certainly a good idea. So I just did it.
# 6 | Scott Coulter | January 29, 2007 1:30 PM
Even seemingly easy ones can be a challenge:
I got http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiko_Hasegawa and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_%22E%22_Ticket, and I thought to myself: getting from a cartoonist to a magazine about Disney Land should be a piece of cake, but it still took me 10 steps. Guess I need more practice.
--sdc
# 7 | Scott Coulter | January 29, 2007 1:35 PM
OK, tried again (same start and end pages as above) and got it down to 6 steps. What worked for me was clicking a year on the first page and finding a Disney movie that was released that year -- got me from Hasegawa to Walt's page in fewer steps. Fun game!
--sdc