[Wikipedia-l] Showing causation among articles

Wed Jul 14 11:21:57 UTC 2004

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 16:24:19 -0700 "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> 
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?

I'm afraid that the shortest connections are often not the one that are most 
interesting. Going through the links, one short path from Marie Antoinette 
to Michael Jordan is the three-step:

Marie Antoinette -> October 16 -> October 30 -> Michael Jordan

Michael Jordan got back to the NBA in the same month of the year that Marie 
Antoinette was executed. Not really something deep...

Andre Engels