Wikipedia:Six degrees of Wikipedia

There is a widespread hypothesis -- Six degrees of separation -- holding that any two people in the world are separated by a chain of no more than six acquaintances. It is perhaps a worthwhile task in studying the character of Wikipedia to see whether something similar obtains among its articles. Six Degrees of Wikipedia (this article) aims to be a compendium of the following things:

• The items separated by the longest chains in the encyclopedia (especially where these are more than four links long). The shortest known chain between the two items should be specified.

• The most intuitively remote items separated by short chains--chains of fewer than six articles, anyway. That is, these should be items that have no obvious connection but which, nonetheless, can be linked between very quickly. This is a much more subjective category, but should still be interesting; it may be enough to describe these as "interestingly" or "peculiarly" short chains.

• Chains between two articles selected at random (using Special:Randompage). (Note: Is Special:Randompage actually random, or does it chose from recently accessed articles? I often get articles I've seen or edited before.)

Tampering with articles for the express reason of changing their degrees of separation is discouraged for the purposes of this project: we aim to clarify how Wikipedia is as it evolves, not to set forth that it should be more or less so. All the same, if this page brings to your attention a place where there just ought to be a link but isn't feel free to correct it (and to correct this page correspongingly).

We will accept only links between actual articles, not "Talk" pages. (If this approach fails to produce interesting connections, it might be worth restricting it in still further ways, like disallowing articles on years or decades, or anything else that might be "too" broad. For now we will not worry about these.) Make sure to specifiy the direction the chain runs in.

Table of contents 1 Six Degree Chains 2 Long shortest chains 3 Shortest "unnatural" chains 4 Chains between two random pages

Six Degree Chains

• Six Degrees of Separation to Sidney Poitier to To Sir, With Love to East End of London to Jack the Ripper to Prostitution to the Bible

Long shortest chains

Shortest "unnatural" chains

LSD to Shakespeare

• LSD to Latin to split infinitive to Shakespeare

Oboe to veto

• Oboe to Baroque to Papacy to temporal power to veto

Immanuel Kant to Ken Kesey

• Immanuel Kant to reality to schizophrenia to electroconvulsive therapy to Ken Kesey

Chains between two random pages

Velociraptor to Jewish services

• Velociraptor to Tooth to Human to Bible to Judaism to Jewish services