Wikipedia: Strongly Connected Component
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia with open articles that were built by a community of users collaborating together. The online platform has excessive internal linking, which is an important element of the platform. Each Wikipedia article contains both internal and external links, as well as linkages to other Wikipedia entries. The Wikipedia Game is a hypertext game that is specifically built to interact within the pages of the online platform. It is a game in which two or more players compete against each other to browse through a randomly assigned Wikipedia page to another page using the least number of links in the shortest time frame.
In class, we discussed accordingly that a strongly connected component (SCC) in a directed graph is a subset of nodes where: 1. Every node in the subset has a path to every other node. 2. the subset is not part of any bigger set where every node can reach every other node. Articles on Wikipedia can be thought of as nodes, and the hyperlinks inside each article serve as routes to all of the other pages. The reason the Wikipedia game works successfully is that 97% of all articles in Wikipedia are connected to the Philosophy article. That said, because all of these articles are connected, that can be considered a strongly connected component. You can reach any of these articles from the Philosophy article or vice versa. Wikipedia can be regarded as a strongly connected component.
Globally, there are more than 55 million articles written on Wikipedia. Given the size and complexity of the network between articles, a ‘map’ plainly cannot resemble a map of all the articles in Wikipedia in any meaningful way. The Bow-Tie Structure can be used to represent Wikipedia and the few large pieces of it. Approximately 3% of the articles in Wikipedia are in the ‘IN’ and ‘OUT’ of these abstract maps. The articles in ‘IN’ are nodes that link with the SCC but cannot be reached from it. The articles in ‘OUT’ can be reached from the SCC but not from it. The bow-tie depiction of the Web, taken as a whole, gives a high-level understanding of the Wikipedia structure, based on its accessibility with pages and how its strongly connected components fit together.
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Six_degrees_of_Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy