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.
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Wouldn't you know, Wikipedia already had an article on this very thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Six_degrees_of_Wikipedia
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 ...
Would it have been cheating to edit the Home alone page to link directly to the video game?
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!
G. Shelley, regardless of whether it's cheating or not, it's certainly a good idea. So I just did it.
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
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