Most of us have heard about the idea of “six degrees of separation”, the theory that any one person in the world is connected to another random person in six steps or less. In fact, in the 1990s it became a party game started by a couple of college students in Pennsylvania to connect any actor, living or dead, to Kevin Bacon.

But what if you could do it with the largest and most read reference work in history?  Wikipedia launched in 2001 and in the past 21 years has grown exponentially in size and scope.  

In 2018, a developer named Jacob Wenger set out to write the code to accomplish just this task and provide the result as an open-source project, and the website “Six Degrees of Wikipedia” was born.

We take Jacob’s code for a run through the Wikipedia archives of over 59 million articles to see just how quickly you can connect two seemingly unrelated topics.  I'm your host, Lora Waloski and I invite you to join us every Friday as we explore the depths of how interconnected this world of ours can be.