OK, so Wikipedia. I have to compartmentalize my feelings for it. As someone who’s curious, really likes trivia and facts, etc., I love it. More comprehensive than pretty much any other encyclopedia, constantly updated because its electronic, and it’s just so darn proletarian, with everyone under the sun chipping in to make it what it is. On the other hand, the educator in me cringes every time I see it listed as a “scholarly source” for college class writing assignments. Because it isn’t. But it’s a great source of information, lots of fun to look through, and pretty useful most of the time. Anyway, I came across this today, and I thought it was great fun. It is The Seven Degrees of Wikipedia. The idea is to go from one entry and link to something entirely unrelated in less than seven steps. For example, let’s say I want to go from “wonder bread” to “koine Greek.” I can pulls this off in only four steps: “wonder bread” to “calories,” “calories” to “European Union,” “European Union” to “languages,” and “languages” to “koine Greek.” This is a lot of fun. There are a few rules, of course.
Disambiguation pages are not to be used. These are the pages that come up if you put something like “rock” and Wikipedia wants to know whether you mean the substance (“Look at that rock.”), the transitive verb (“We will, we will rock you.”), the intransitive verb (“Dude, that rocks.”), or the music (“I like to listen to rock.”).
You may use the back button and try different routes.
You can't edit a page to make your journey shorter.
You can’t write a computer program (or use someone else’s) to do it for you.
If you can stay within the rules, then go nuts. Here are a few to get you started. Leave comments if you have good puzzles or good answers.
Papaya to Penguins.
Unicycle to Aardvark.
Marlon Brando to Micropachycephalosaurus.
Existentialism to Mitochondria.
Sombrero to Cumulus.
Velociraptor to Submarine.
Have fun, and let me know what you find.
Kent
08 August 2006
Seven Degrees of Separation
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