Wikipedia talk:Six degrees of Wikipedia

Conflation

The whole article conflates what the 'degree' is; the item/person or the connection, the node or the path. The opening text has person as the degree. The examples of two-degrees etc. have the path as the degree, with three items separated by two links. The semantics need to be cleaned up.

Listing the short chains makes no sense

It really isn't anything special. Take a random long article, and look for the link that seems most out of place, click on it, repeat once more and you got yourself a two-degree chain that seems to have traveled a long way from the original topic (xkcd → Golden Gate Park → Detergent) (or not really: Jesus → Jerusalem → Donald Trump ?!?). Pointless to add that three- or four-degree chains are even less momentous.

This is in contrast to the surprisingly long minimal chains, which, though oft outdated, can tell us something interesting about how Wikipedia works, and, most importantly, can point to where Wikipedia is still poorly linked together and thus where we should work on.

--Eykeklos O.

Eykeklos Omnia (talk) 18:44, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

Shorter chain from Jimmy Wales to god

I'm a bit too unexperienced to have the bravery to edit the article and i'm not sure where to put it but the path is basically this: Jimmy Wales → atheism → god

Sheikchilli (talk) 02:09, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

Removal of "Articles with no connections to each other" section

Currently, the section in question discusses completely unconnected pages such as Basque → Bisque. However, this is unremarkable for two reasons:

• Firstly, in the case above, this works solely because Bisque is an orphaned disambiguation page (i.e. it has no mainspace articles linking to it). As such, there is nothing special about Basque being the starting destination; the lack of connections is also true between Biscotti and Bisque, or Business and Bisque, or Donald Trump and Bisque, or Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon and Bisque, or...
• Secondly, this phenomenon is not unique to Bisque: the same would be true of any orphaned article, of which there are currently around 53,475 (plus or minus a couple thousand)—which is definitely far too many for this scenario to be noteworthy. For example, this same phenomenon would be true (at least, as of June 16th, 2020) for Jackpot → The Jackpots (link), or Egg → Egg puffs and soup pearls (link), or Youth in Africa to Youth in Denmark (link), or Quran to Qar`an (link), or St. John's Church, Leukershausen to St. John's Church, Thiruvaniyoor (or St. John's Fire District or St. John's Protestant Episcopal Church (Charleston, South Carolina), for that matter) (link1, link2, link3), and so on. And I was able to find all seven of these examples after ~10 minutes of searching, thus demonstrating that this type of scenario is quite common and not particularly remarkable.

Hence, I have removed the section in question due to its lack of noteworthiness. Now, if one were able to find two unconnected articles that both aren't orphans and both aren't inside walled gardens, that might be worth mentioning—but we can cross that bridge if we ever come to it.

(As a fun aside, I found that Basque and Bisque can be connected using five steps if one allows pages in Wikipedia space: Basque → List of people from the Basque Country → Alejandro González Iñárritu → Facebook → Six degrees of separation → Wikipedia:Six degrees of Wikipedia → Bisque.) — TheHardestAspect­OfCreatingAnAccount­IsAlwaysTheUsername: posted at 04:38, 17 June 2020 (UTC)