The notion of six degrees of separation has infiltrated popular culture to a very wide extent, particularly for connecting celebrity individuals, i.e. six degrees of Kevin Bacon. It is not suprising that this theory has mainly been applied to high-profile people, as the original Milgram experiment was oriented towards a New England stockbroker. However, as we all know, networks are not confined to the realm of human nodes. Can a small-world phenomena exist in a non-social network? How about a network of words/ideas? The website ’Six Degrees of Wikipedia’ allows users to find the degrees of separation between Wikipedia entries.

Here are some examples:

There is 4 degrees of separation between ’George Bush’ and ’Crack Cocaine’

There is 2 degree of separation between ’Mongolia’ and ’Richard Feynman’

There is 3 degrees of separation between ’skiing’ and ’sex’

There is 4 degrees of separation between ’viagra’ and ’mackerel’

Try it out! http://tools.wikimedia.de/sixdeg/index.jsp