[Wikipedia-l] Re: Showing causation among articles

Wed Jul 14 05:17:04 UTC 2004

Ray Saintonge wrote:

>>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. :-)
>
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I don't think that last statement is 
correct. The number of links required to travel in one direction is not 
necessarily the same as the number required in the opposite direction. 
In this case, the paths from A to B and from A to C do not necessarily 
tell us anything about the path from B to C. Although if A is the Main 
Page, you can always cheat and use any of the navigation links that go 
there.

--Michael Snow
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