I Made a Graph of Wikipedia... This Is What I Found

A deep dive into the network of Wikipedia and some of the the most interesting, bizarre, and unique articles on the website.

Music:
Beyond the Wall - Sugoi
How About Now? - Andreas Dahlbäck
First Horizon - ELFL
Neroli - Ennio Máno
Tree Tops - Autohacker

Technical details for nerds:
- Data is collected from Wikipedia dumps
- Graph is made with python-igraph
- Distributed Recursive Layout algorithm is used for the graph layout
- Leiden algorithm is used for community detection
- A valid article is any page in Wikipedia's article namespace excluding redirect pages, disambiguation pages, and soft redirects
- A valid link is a link in an articles body. Links that appear in or after the "See Also" section and links that appear as footnotes are not included since these are not really a part of the article's body. Links in and after the "See Also" section of pages are typically not used in Wikipedia races.

0:00 Intro
1:00 Communities
4:07 Popular Articles
7:38 Orphans & Dead Ends
10:23 6 Degrees of Wikipedia
14:56 Longest Path on Wikipedia
17:06 FANTA CAKE
19:20 Outro

[madelinew]

Making a Wikipedia article about an orphan article creates a paradox where any orphan example given in the article automatically stops being an orphan

[JeadyVT]

I like how someone fixed the Fanta Cake article but didn't bother to replace the sad sopping excuse of a fanta cake picture lmao

[andrewduncan]

Once when playing the wikipedia game in history class, the target article was "the French Revolution." We all had to start on a random page in order to demonstrate that essentially everything in the world is influenced heavily by the French Revolution. Some lucky duck's random article was "France"💀💀💀💀

[charlottemacmillan]

This is so wild to me because I'm one of the people who's edited that article but before this video came out. Wikipedia shows you the views on articles you've edited, so I was incredibly confused as to why the Fanta Cake article was abruptly getting oodles more than Lancelot's. Turns out it was this video! Another fun thing is that back when you started this in October, those two references on the Fanta Cake page are my contribution to the article. Small world!

[Gareth]

I love how almost all dead-end articles you mentioned have no longer been dead-end just within a day of this video being uploaded.

[jacoL]

Another thing I’d like to point out is how 97% of all Wikipedia articles will end up in philosophy if you kept clicking on the first hyperlink

[WootZoot]

Explaining overly complex charts over smooth jazz is my favorite YouTube genre.

[Gtoonm]

The colors, the tone of narration, the jazz. It makes it feel like an instructional/educational video from the late 90s to early 2000s. Something I would see in a slow school day. I love it.

[GreeeenCat]

Petition to run the code to make this graph yearly to see how it changes.

[ayushpandey]

I work in graph and graph database research and i have not seen such a beautiful, succinct and well presented graph ever. I think an average person would never fathom the amount of computer science that backs this video up. Huge congratulations to the creator.

[teagannam]

Dude you should seriously submit this graph as a series to a modern art museum!! I know it sounds strange, but it’s so unique, so visually interesting, and there are so many parts of it that reveal truths about society, politics, human behavior, etc. I know so many galleries that would just love to have this as a series!

[aGameScout]

Putting the graphs shown in the video aside, just wanted to say this is a masterpiece of youtube storytelling. You had endless information to talk about and put together an incredible concise and compelling presentation. Kudos!

[ICountFrom]

I want a CURSED wikipedia race as a prank. You host, you select at "random" but all of them are 10th degree separation OR HIGHER.

[mat_name_whatever]

The fact that the "Fanta Cake" was noticeably edited during the making of the video is hilarious

[kevinslater]

Dude came up with one of the most significant and important studies of Wikipedia ever conceived for a game. Amazing.

[johnhendy]

Just wow. Bravo. As a hobby programmer and data scientist I have a glimpse of what it took to do this, but know the real effort and magnitude far exceeds that idea. You hide the complexity (and I'd suspect quite a few brutal bugs to solve) incredible well in your simple yet entertaining walkthrough. Incredible!

[skizzers_]

The algorithm is sleeping on this one
update: The algorithm was sleeping on this one

[gemhunter]

I really hope the Wikipedia groups start talking about this, this is really cool to see

[jakobmax]

Community 27 (Figure skating) is truly special. Almost all major Figure skaters have similarly formatted wikipedia pages with quite detaile info about their skating carreers.
This hints towards that they have been majorly edited or set up by a very small group of dedicated fans.

[Liggliluff]

On the topic of degrees of separation and the longest paths. All we really need to do here is to add more links between articles and these numbers should decrease. People are already editing articles with the help of this video, and people are definitely interested in shortening these paths.