[Wikipedia-l] Showing causation among articles

Wed Jul 14 03:37:01 UTC 2004

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

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

>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.  
>
Correlation does not imply causality.

>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?
>
Over a year ago I raised the possibility of tracing every article back 
to the Main Page.  None in my random sample was more than five links 
away.  Thus if you trace Marie Antoinette and Michael Jordan back to the 
Main Page, the sum of their links will be a maximum distance. :-)

Ec