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Ever heard of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? If you haven’t, it
works like this: 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).
www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/wiki
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