Six Degrees of Wikipedia
Learning and science
wikipedia link explorer
SHOW HN2018
How HN took it
54 positive, 104 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 29 critical, out of 189 comments about the project. Thread score +0.17.
Idea: 21 for, 3 againstExecution: 1 for, 15 againstDesign: 6 for, 6 againstPerformance: 5 for, 2 againstPrivacy: 0 for, 3 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Fast results and fun to play with
From 3 comments
After spending way too much time I got 9 degrees of separation. I did piggyback off of someone else's work with "Phinney".…
purell_hack on HNVery cool. And a lot less degrees of freedom between my tests than I expected - so far everything has a legitimate 3 degrees when I expected much more. Higgs Boson to Taylor…
turc1656 on HNVery cool! Your UI is great. I like all the animations and the graph is super smooth. All my code is open source[1] and it is decently documented. I'm happy to answer any…
jwngr on HN
Objections
Bibliography and citation links counted as hops
From 2 comments
Not sure if you deliberately designed it this way, but I noticed when spot checking some results that it includes the bibliography section links as connections. This seems like…
turc1656 on HNYeah unfortunately I don't know of any way to differentiate the different types of links. Wikipedia's pagelinks database doesn't different them. I agree it's undesireable but I…
jwngr on HN
Graph visualization slow with many nodes
From 2 comments
Glad you found one of the Easter eggs :D The graph visualization / performance is definitely not ideal. I spent a ton of time trying to make d3 more performant and layout the…
jwngr on HNThank you! The graph is built using vanilla d3, no library on top of it. The code for it lives all in one file, ResultsGraph.js [1]. I pieced together the code from a handful of…
jwngr on HN
Requests
Ignore category and citation links
From 1 comment
I considered this and may eventually add an option to ignore those kinds of pages, but I ultimately felt like the current mode remains more true to my goal for the project which…
jwngr on HN
Show a test-with-suggestions option
From 1 comment
Could you make it possible to just test with the fun suggestions that scroll through?
maaaats on HN
Add a degrees-from-Hitler score
From 1 comment
This makes the "How many clicks to Hitler" game much faster. For those uninitiated, the game was to click the "Random Article" link in the sidebar and count how many links it…
colemannugent on HN
Questions
Why paths are not the same in both directions
From 1 comment
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it! > I was expecting the site to tell me how to start at page X and get to page Y with the min number of clicks. Yup, this is exactly what the site…
jwngr on HN
What the graph diameter is
From 1 comment
Does anyone know what the "diameter" of the wikipedia graph is? In other words, what is the longest shortest path between two wikipedia articles?
tw1010 on HN
Alternatives named
Six Degrees of Wikipedia by Stephen Dolan
From 1 comment
Yes, Sthephen Dolan's project (along with others) was definitely an inspiration for me! Although, I like to think I made a lot of performance and design improvements over his…
jwngr on HN