The Six Degress of Wikipedia project, run by Trinity College Dublin student Stephen Dolan, is designed to find the “centre” of Wikipedia using the Six degrees of Kevin Bacon theory. Here’s how it works in the author’s own words:

Every actor gets a Kevin Bacon number. Kevin Bacon has a Kevin Bacon number of 0, actors who were in a movie with Kevin Bacon get a Kevin Bacon number of 1, actors who were in a movie with someone who has a Kevin Bacon number 1 get a 2, and so on (Everybody always gets the smallest number possible, so if you were in a film with two people, one with a 4 and one with a 6, your Kevin Bacon number would be 5).

The same idea could apply to the articles Wikipedia. Instead of taking “in the same film” as the relation, you can take “is linked to by”. We’ll call the “Kevin Bacon number” from one article to another the “distance” between them. It’s then possible to work out the “closeness” of an article in Wikipedia as its average distance to any other article. I wanted to find the centre of wikipedia, that is, the article that is closest to all other articles (has minimum closeness).

His findings? Well, the actual article that is closest to all other articles is 2007. But as this is just a list of links, that’s pretty understandable. After filtering through many other link pages, the first true encyclopedia article he comes across is United Kingdom, from which any other article on Wikipedia can be reached in an average of 3.67 clicks.

So now you know. There’s also a handy “shortest path” calculator, which can, for example, show us that Steve Jobs is only 3 clicks away from marmalade, Stopping by Anime and Yakikate!! Japan on the way.

Incidentally, Kevin Bacon is an average of 3.98 clicks away from anywhere else.

Check out Six Degrees of Wikipedia here.

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