Bacon Numbers, Hubs, and Wikiracing
http://mu.netsoc.ie/wiki/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/want-to-waste-an-hour-or_n_654619
In the beginning of this course we learned about six degrees of separation, which explains for any two nodes, there is a path of at most six connections between them. One popular example of this is the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where actors are given a Bacon number based on how closely they have worked with Kevin Bacon. A Bacon number of 1 means you’ve worked on a movie with Kevin Bacon, 2 means you’ve worked with someone who’s worked with Bacon, and so on. Of the 1.5 million actors in the world, the average Bacon number is 2.9. This phenomenon shows just how connected humans are, and one researcher decided to apply this to Wikipedia pages.
The goal of Stephen Dolan’s research project was to find the distance between the two Wikipedia articles that are the farthest apart by internal links. In Networks terms, the goal was to find the diameter of Wikipedia, or the longest shortest path between any two nodes. He found that Wikipedia has large tails with pages that only link to the previous page, and the diameter result was not particularly interesting. What was noteworthy, however, was his result on hub pages, or what he called the “departure center.” According to the data, the center of Wikipedia is “United Kingdom,” which takes an average of 3.67 clicks to get to any other page on Wikipedia. This idea of efficiently surfing from one Wikipedia web page to another is actually an internationally competitive game.
Wikiracing comes in two forms: fastest time from one Wikipedia web page to another and having the fewest clicks from one web page to another. This is a perfect example of networks and how certain types of pages act as “hubs” for many other pages. For example, Wikipedia pages for years, notable deaths, and long lists of a particular topic all have very small average numbers of clicks to access the millions of other pages on the web site.