Graphing Wikipedia – YouTube Video

I have a slight penchant (if those two words actually fit together, but there we go) for cataloguing and understanding big data. This video is about trying to understand how the articles on Wikipedia are grouped and how they interact with each other.

It’s a bit geeky I accept, but I was suitably fascinated by this (click on the image to make it larger). It’s how many clicks you have to make to get from a pre-defined page on Wikipedia to every other page on the site. The vast majority of articles can be reached within six links, which is the principle of the six degrees of separation. There are a few pages where it takes ten or so clicks to reach, but there are very few of them and they’re mostly clumped into a few smaller categories. The most clicks you’d have to make is 166, but that’s for a specific reason relating to how one set of roads are categorised on Wikipedia.

Once again I’ve intrigued myself with something really not that important, but these things happen quite a lot…..