Darn Wikipedia! "Ba Cut" to "Clamato"

[invncble]

 I'm curious about lots of things by nature. And Wikipedia makes it much easier to satiate that curiosity with the click of a mouse. 

So, how does one go from reading about Ba Cut, a military leader for a Vietnamese religious sect in the 1940's-1950's, to Clamato, the tomato juice and clam broth mix?

1. Wikipedia front page - which had a short article on...
2. Ba Cut - who lived in region know as....
3. French Indochina - which was later divided up, including...
4. Vietnam - who has great food described in...
5. Cuisine of Vietnam - which has similarities to...
6. Cuisine of Thailand - which uses lots of...
7. Fish sauce - which is related to...
8. Garum - which is an ancient Roman fish sauce which may be related to...
9. Worchestershire Sauce - which is used in a popular Canadian cocktail called...
10. Blood Caesar - which also contains...
11. Clamato

So there. 10 steps. Kind of like Connections.

Comments

[felixkatz.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia's link graph is a power law graph (see for example "Is Wikipedia Link Structure Different?"), so we expect its diameter to be fairly low.

There's a web page somewhere that will give you the shortest path between two wikipedia articles, but it's for a fairly old data dump (from 2008.)

[invncble.livejournal.com]

I guess they'll start to do more analysis of this relationship database

[felixkatz.livejournal.com]

The whole field of statistical network analysis has been exploding in the last ten-ish years, with the work of Duncan Watts, Joe Kleinberg, MEJ Newman and others. It's a very interesting field to be in right now.

Though for us computer scientists the sad part is that we have all those nice networks, but when it comes to network analysis we're getting our collective asses handed to us on a silver platter by the theoretical physicists -- they know the maths, we don't.

[graywolf769.livejournal.com]

I wonder if you can use Wikipedia to get the six degrees of Kevin Bacon.

[gaz-a.livejournal.com]

http://xkcd.com/214/

[pounce-de-leon.livejournal.com]

THIS

[siegferret.livejournal.com]

That's called "Falling down a wiki-hole", my friend. Take the red pill.

[invncble.livejournal.com]

So easy to get drawn in....