[HN Gopher] Show HN: WikiBinge - discover how all things are vag...
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Show HN: WikiBinge - discover how all things are vaguely connected
Connect two articles on Wikipedia, but do it the long way. I've
always been a fan of the theory of six degree of separation, but
it's an overused concept when exploring the Wiki-graph. Instead of
showing the shortest path, which in my opinion is "boring" and ends
up connecting super-important central articles, I came up with my
own method: WikiBinge selects the smaller, less represented
articles on Wikipedia. In a WikiBinge path, the underdogs are the
kings! How does it work? It's pretty straightforward! Compute
PageRank on the Wiki-graph and assign as weight of each edge the
PageRank value of the destination node. A WikiBinge path is then
simply a shortest path using these weights: the algorithm will then
favor paths passing through articles with lower PageRank values.
More on the motives to build this here:
https://www.jamez.it/project/wikibinge/ This is an older project
of mine, but it never got much exposure, so I'm humbly submitting
it now.
Author : jamez
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-04-14 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wikibinge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wikibinge.com)
| adrianh wrote:
| This is excellent. The path from "George Barnes (Musician)" to
| "Django Reinhardt" somehow managed to pass through Hysterectomy,
| 5-Bromouracil, Glucuronidation and Port Bannatyne (Scotland).
| Kudos for some creative coding!
| munro wrote:
| The chains are so long, it's really not that impressive :/
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| The point is that the chains are long and winding instead of
| the shortest path between two articles.
|
| It seems that, if you pick an uncached path, the loading screen
| shows you the shortest path while it computes the longer one.
| More info in their linked article.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Excellent. 32 degrees away, and brings in Air Bud.
|
| https://www.wikibinge.com/#John_Wilkes_Booth/Hentai
| throwaway9131 wrote:
| Strange, my first guess had no connections either way
|
| chicken nugget <-> constitution of canada
|
| Now I'm wondering if its a bug or if there is actually no
| connection
| ape4 wrote:
| But this works...
| https://www.wikibinge.com/#Chicken_nugget/Canada_Day
| foota wrote:
| It might be interesting to see this but with paths where they're
| instead weighted based on the strength of the relation (e.g.,
| something like TF-idf on the articles each link to).
|
| I think this would avoid the super common article problem, but
| also lead to more relation between each link.
| jamez wrote:
| TF-idf would definitely be something very interesting to try,
| though I also treasure the serendipity brought by the
| "blindness" to the content.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| TF-idf would be a really cool tool for doing research.
|
| Seems like there are some cool modes you could explore here:
|
| * TF-idf Path
|
| * The Meandering Path (current)
|
| * The Shortest Path
|
| * The Human Path (prefer connections that are humans vs.
| topics/places/concepts/etc.)
|
| * The Rabbit Hole Path (prefer connections that are
| concepts/academic/etc.)
| ArekDymalski wrote:
| it's nice that it highlights less popular and obvious - i've
| discovered a lot linking potato to the Millenium Falcon :)
| https://www.wikibinge.com/#Potato/Millennium_Falcon
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Anyone got anything longer than this? (68)
|
| https://www.wikibinge.com/#Madurai/Semiahmoo_Bay
| vallanceroad wrote:
| My first search counted 118:
|
| https://www.wikibinge.com/#George_Bush_Intercontinental_Airp...
|
| I imagine you could double this.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I count 91 articles from FreeBSD to Weedonville, Virginia
|
| https://www.wikibinge.com/#FreeBSD/Weedonville,_Virginia
| layman51 wrote:
| I count 100+ articles between these two. It is a pretty long
| path and that is the point I guess.
| https://www.wikibinge.com/#Amy_Goodman/Anatoly_Karpov
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| This is absolutely amazing.
|
| I built wikiscroll.blankenship.io for myself to scratch my
| neophile itch. You might be displacing it in my daily routine, a
| nice pre-built rabbit hole between two topics of interest has
| proven to be a lot of fun over the past 30 minutes.
|
| Amazing work.
|
| As a short aside, at first I didn't get it. I was surprised the
| paths between articles were so long. It wasn't until I tried
| "Adolf Hitler" -> Something (Hitler has notoriously short paths
| to everything) that I realized these weren't the shortest paths.
| Your loading text does a really great job of explaining that, but
| the "random" button appears to be pulling from a cache (clever!)
| so I didn't get to see that loading message about the "boring
| shortest path" until I went off the beaten path.
|
| Since it seems like you are computing both the shortest and the
| "most interesting" path between the two articles, it would be
| cool to give me a way to see both on the final loaded page. The
| shortest path is interesting too, even if it is less interesting
| than the one you ultimately generate.
|
| It'd also be cool to be able to "pin" one of the boxes so the
| random button only impacts the other. For example, if I started
| at the Great Molasses Flood, what path could I take to random
| other articles? Though I guess this can be accomplished by
| spinning and then retyping the "Great Molasses Flood"
|
| Edit: I deeply appreciate your narrative at
| https://www.jamez.it/project/wikibinge/ - this is one of my
| favorite projects I've come across on HN in a long while.
| Kerrick wrote:
| This is pretty neat! I tried
| https://www.wikibinge.com/#Moray_eel/Sony_Alpha and I was pleased
| with the path it took me for first big chunk of the path. The
| last bit was a tour of a significant number of camera models
| (none of them Sony), which felt... strange? It certainly felt
| less-varied than the combination of animalia, history, geography,
| and pop culture that the first part took me through.
|
| Fun project, thanks for sharing!
|
| If I had a bit of feedback to share, it's that the shortest path
| (which shows while loading the binge) continues to be visible
| after it finishes loading -- maybe at the bottom of the page?
| jchw wrote:
| Interesting. Seems like it'd be ideal if there were some way to
| penalize pages that are too similar to each-other (similar
| categories/taxonomy, maybe similar text/structure, etc.)
| because when it does chain a bunch of weird stuff it is very
| interesting.
| jamez wrote:
| Cool path! The last bit of the tour you described is fairly
| common - the algorithm is just doing its job, getting closer to
| the target, avoiding articles with larger PageRank. It's very
| uncommon to pass through "important" pages. Glad you enjoyed
| it!
| stevenking86l wrote:
| This is great fun. Though my first guess had no connection:
| Cleopatra and The Great Pacific Garbage patch
| jamez wrote:
| When you can't find a connection, always try the reverse!
| https://www.wikibinge.com/#Great_Pacific_garbage_patch/Cleop...
| CyborgCabbage wrote:
| https://www.wikibinge.com/#Electoral_college/The_Long_Earth
|
| Apparently Humptulips, Washington was Terry Pratchett's favourite
| place on earth. :)
| Anduia wrote:
| I tried to go from "Bronze Age" to "Mail" and it took me in a
| long ride including the dog from Oz. Quite fun.
| https://www.wikibinge.com/#Bronze_Age/Mail
| passwordoops wrote:
| Nice! My wife and I used to play a game sort of like this - find
| the shortest path between two pages on Wikipedia. It actually
| made for a fun party game too.
|
| I really love the circuitous path though. Fantastic route to
| discovery and I can see those even being a neat thing for schools
| birdyrooster wrote:
| You two sound awesome together.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| https://www.thewikigame.com/
| ramesh1994 wrote:
| It is a pretty fun game https://wiki-race.com/
| armandososa wrote:
| This is funny, pressed the dice icon and I got "Milk" and
| "Cookie" and I thought it was going to be a short connection. It
| isn't. https://www.wikibinge.com/#Milk/Cookie
| delecti wrote:
| That is a shockingly long chain. Amusingly if you flip them,
| Cookie links directly to Milk.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Just using my Wikigame skills, I went from Milk -> Hot
| Chocolate -> Chocolate -> Chocolate chip cookie -> Cookie. This
| path likely got downranked because all would be popular
| articles.
| [deleted]
| mcint wrote:
| My first attempt I can't search donut (Doughnut is the
| canonical), can't type the "()" parenthesis that appear in page
| names, and can't use any of France, La France, or French Republic
| to indicate the wiki page on France. Lots of francesca's though.
|
| Fun fun, thank you for sharing! In the interactive web
| interface*, I hope non-canonical names can be used, that shortest
| names can be completed and exact matches can be use, and at least
| accept what it's in page names.
|
| *It looks like writing the URL fragment yourself allows more
| leniency.
| raybb wrote:
| Pretty cool project! FYI for some reason search doesn't seem to
| work that well.
|
| hackNY won't come up and if you try try to add a place with a
| comma (Lowell, Massachusetts) you can't type it you have to
| scroll it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackNY
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell,_Massachusetts
| dzink wrote:
| Horse and Astronaut are more closely connected (through the
| shows, road, actors) than Cancer and Healthcare which are not
| connected at all, apparently. This was the problem with public
| datasets and counting on HTML links to build the graph of human
| knowledge years ago. I tried to build better search at the time
| and hit this wall. Large language models will be a bonanza for
| new products now that the wall is broken.
| jamez wrote:
| To be clear - the point is not to display what can or cannot be
| connected. The emphasis on this project is about the long and
| tortuous path chosen.
|
| I take your point about the limits of knowledge graphs written
| manually vs LLMs. IMHO it's not either/or. We need both
| curation and statistical approaches, and when they are merged
| they give the best results. Just ask Wolfram:
| https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/chatgpt-gets-its...
| Edit: fixed link to Stephen Wolfram's blog.
| cocodill wrote:
| hmm, that six degrees of wikipedia bridge is little weird. i
| thought you can land from everywhere in few clicks by hitler. but
| it takes over 70 steps to get dill from hitler.
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(page generated 2023-04-14 23:00 UTC)