The Center of Wikipedia
Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has changed the way people access information. Although the accuracy of some of its sources is frequently contested, the benefits of having an open-source database of information available to anyone with an internet connection are immense and unquestionable. Over the past fourteen years Wikipedia has expanded to include over 2,301,486 articles and 55,550,003 links between articles. The setup of this website lends itself perfectly to a network analysis, and many independent researches have devoted time to analyzing certain characteristics of this network.
Interestingly, of the 2,301,486 articles, 2,111,480 of them exist in a single strongly-connected-component. This means that any node within this cluster can reach any other node in the cluster by simply clicking links within the article. Additionally, there exists no other strongly connected cluster that contains more than three nodes (articles).
Other research has been aimed at identifying the ‘center’ of Wikipedia (only including the strongly-connected-component mentioned above), defined to be the node that has the lowest average edge length to any other article. Of all possible nodes, the center of Wikipedia is the article 2007 which is simply a list of notable events happening in that year. From that node, the average path length to any other node is a staggeringly low 3.45, meaning that from this article every other article can be reached in an average of 3.45 clicks. Excluding the list articles, United Kingdom has the next lowest average edge length of 3.67. On average, it was found to take 4.573 clicks to get from one article to any other article.
A visual representation of this graph can be seen below:
Source:
http://mu.netsoc.ie/wiki/
http://abeautifulwww.com/2007/10/02/visualizing-science-tech-activity-in-wikipedia/