Clinamen

Stephen Dolan, a student at Trinity College Dublin, has done some research on the "center" of Wikipedia. That is, he's looked at how articles are linked together in a "six degrees of separation" kind of way. It turns out that the "center" of Wikipedia is the page for 2007. As Dolan explains, it takes "3.45 clicks to get to any of the 2111479 articles reachable from [the 2007 article]." This finding might give some support to those who think Wikipedia tends to focus more on recent events.

When Dolan removed all "lists" from his dataset (such as entries for what happened in certain years or on certain days) he found that the center of Wikipedia was the article for United Kingdom.

The results here aren't too surprising, but the more interesting point to me is that Wikipedia allows for this kind of analysis. I was reminded of Derek's RSA presentation about "distant reading" - reading that allows us to examine the archive from afar using certain kinds of metadata. Derek's talk was more about disciplinary texts in rhetoric and composition and how new ways of sorting can rework how we read disciplinary research and what research is findable.

Tools such as this Dolan's (along with Virgil Griffith's Wikiscanner) give us new ways of reading the hospitable text and new ways of dinging things, and they are the result of a text that leaves a great deal of data in the hands of creative people.