Creator here. It's exciting to see this back on the front page of HN! My poor little f1-micro instance is not holding up well against the traffic though I won't be able to migrate it to a bigger server today, but if you bookmark it and check back in a day or two, it'll be back up.
If you think this is cool, I'm working on a huge new thing with some former Firebasers and others. Follow me @_jwngr on Twitter (https://twitter.com/_jwngr) for a big reveal coming very soon!
Super cool, we used to play this game in high school, wikipedia racing!
I have a bit of (unsolicited) advice for you on the graph. It's hard to read the graph because the lines and text are pretty close in color. I would recommend making the lines much lighter in color, or applying a glow effect behind the text so that they stand out more. It's a tough thing to tune, but I think it would make the graph more readable.
What exactly counts as a link? Because I linked Pope Urban II to Corinthian Leather and found no actual link between the penultimate article Leather Crafting and Corinthian Leather.
In school, we used to have "wiki races" when we were bored (I later googled this and we were far from the only ones). Pick a start and end article and race to see who got there first, verification via the back button on your browser. For speed purposes, it was usually easiest to just bubble up to the biggest unit of geography in common and then narrow back down.
In college we made a site that represented each wikipedia page as a graph, with sections and links serving as nodes and leafs. It was a pretty fun visualization but we fell short of our ill-defined goal to page rank Wikipedia.
This is pretty neat! And it reinforces my belief that bubbling up is the way to go. In the example it gave me, only a few of the 35 paths didn't immediately jump to a very general concept. One of those was "leet" though :)
Go to any sizable wiki page and click the first wiki link, then repeat. The theory goes that eventually you will end up at Philosophy. For example Eddie Vedder took seven clicks to reach Philosophy.
It's not a law, however. "Township High School District 211" sent me into an infinite loop:
United States
Contiguous United States
Alaska
U.S. State
United States
Perhaps I should edit one of the pages to prevent that...?
Awesome, it works! I picked a random town and got to Philosophy in fifteen steps. I got from Sushi to Philosophy in 24 steps. All concepts abstract upwards as you go on until you're at pure thought. Deprimo, ergo cogito.
For the record I ignored links in the initial brackets. Beyond Philosophy there's an infinite redirect loop between Metaphysics and Philosophy.
I played this a few times. While it does vaguely work, it seems to follow a pretty consistent route and benefits from the fact that philosophy is preceded by "idea", which seems like the more proper root of the epistemological tree.
We used to play a version of this game in high school. Click for a random article, then see who could get to Hitler the fastest because we were "edgy" teenagers.
We used to play this! I'm not quite sure why it was Hitler of all topics, I guess because he's the most offensive thing that's not blocked by your average secondary school's internet filter.
The "wiki game" where two people click Random Page and try to get to each other's page via blue links only is one of my favorites.
Obviously we never got there optimally but very cool to see this visualized and created.
semi-related, I wonder if there are any new papers on how to optimally generate blue links on Wiki pages and how great linking can happen more auto-magically!
I ran one then opened the wikipedia page to verify it, I couldn't find the links.
List of common misconceptions -> Denzel Washington
Allegedly these pages are only 2 degrees apart by way of Hal B. Wallis, Orson Welles, and Humphrey Bogart. I couldn't find Denzel Washington on any of those pages (but all three of them appear on the list of common misconceptions page).
At the bottom of the page (after References and External Links etc) are multiple collapsible info boxes. For example, Orson Welles has one for an AFI Life Achievement Award, which Washington has also received.
This feels like it would be either an advanced technique in wiki ball, or houseruled out. I personally think it definitely counts as a link in the article, though.
Shameless plug: I’ve made a small and stupid game where you’re presented Wikipedia articles and you have to guess which article is not linked to by any of the other articles.
Readit News
If you think this is cool, I'm working on a huge new thing with some former Firebasers and others. Follow me @_jwngr on Twitter (https://twitter.com/_jwngr) for a big reveal coming very soon!
Here is the original HN post for those who are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468196
I have a bit of (unsolicited) advice for you on the graph. It's hard to read the graph because the lines and text are pretty close in color. I would recommend making the lines much lighter in color, or applying a glow effect behind the text so that they stand out more. It's a tough thing to tune, but I think it would make the graph more readable.
In college we made a site that represented each wikipedia page as a graph, with sections and links serving as nodes and leafs. It was a pretty fun visualization but we fell short of our ill-defined goal to page rank Wikipedia.
This is pretty neat! And it reinforces my belief that bubbling up is the way to go. In the example it gave me, only a few of the 35 paths didn't immediately jump to a very general concept. One of those was "leet" though :)
It's not a law, however. "Township High School District 211" sent me into an infinite loop:
United States
Contiguous United States
Alaska
U.S. State
United States
Perhaps I should edit one of the pages to prevent that...?
For the record I ignored links in the initial brackets. Beyond Philosophy there's an infinite redirect loop between Metaphysics and Philosophy.
Incidentally, both "Lemont Township 210" and "Leyden High School District 212" end up at Philosophy.
Good times!
Obviously we never got there optimally but very cool to see this visualized and created.
semi-related, I wonder if there are any new papers on how to optimally generate blue links on Wiki pages and how great linking can happen more auto-magically!
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Link_recommendation...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.15110
List of common misconceptions -> Denzel Washington
Allegedly these pages are only 2 degrees apart by way of Hal B. Wallis, Orson Welles, and Humphrey Bogart. I couldn't find Denzel Washington on any of those pages (but all three of them appear on the list of common misconceptions page).
This feels like it would be either an advanced technique in wiki ball, or houseruled out. I personally think it definitely counts as a link in the article, though.
https://havarnov.github.io/oddoneout/
Would be cool if clicking/taping the article titles would take you to the actual articles. Some interesting sounding ones popped up!
Mitchell order -> Mun Ikjeom https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Mitchell%20ord...
Cwenthryth (Mercian Princess)
Old English
Weregild
Gold
Neutron Star
Nuclear Pasta
Rostam to Hydro Flask