[Wikipedia-l] Showing causation among articles

Tue Jul 13 23:24:19 UTC 2004

It's a neat idea, but...

First, it is already possible to explore relationships among concepts
in interesting ways by just browsing the site.  I'm sure that the vast
majority of contributors are like me -- I start reading about one
thing for fun, and end up an hour later reading about stuff that is
completely unrelated, just by following links which implicitly
describe relationships.

Those existing relationships include causality, influence, proximity,
temporality, and much more.  Why single out "influence" as a
privileged kind of relationship?

Second, your example in your original post was of finding out if there
was a causal relationship between the Cold War and 9/11. Wqell, I
think this example actually points out the artificiality and
arbitrariness of how this would end up being used if it existed as a
separate feature.  

Nearly everything influences everything else, if you want to be
philosophical about it.  Introducing a feature which tempts people to
link "Marie Antoinette" with "Michael Jordan", well, I don't think it
makes sense.

---

What *would* be cool, and might just be a different implementation of
exactly what you have in mind, would be a tool to find all the
(reasonably short) click-paths between any two concepts.  I mean, now
that I selected the article titles randomly, I actually wonder how
many clicks it takes to get from Marie Antionette to Michael Jordan.
And what's intervening?

Basically, this doesn't need a special type of "influence map", but
rather just an analysis of existing links.

--Jimbo