Category — Wandering Wikipedia

Today’s Wandering started when I was reading an interesting article about the rebirth of a stereotypical 90’s Stock Market Player.  Much of the article was about the efficient-market hypothesis, and I got curious…

So, I have to admit I’m a bit of Wikipedia addict.  Some idle curiosity will send me searching the online encyclopedia for an answer, and the next thing I know my browser has sprouted a dozen tabs and I’m reading about subjects only vaguely related to my original query. (NB: Wikipedia is currently having a donation drive.  I donated, and so should you!)

I’ve always been intrigued by graphical representations of large datasets or networks, and my mind reels when I try to picture the vastly interconnected articles of Wikipedia as a giant 3D (or perhaps higher-dimensioned) graph.  In that spirit, I’ll be posting linked graphical representations of some of my Wikipedic wanderings.  I hope everyone finds them educational, if not through reading the articles themselves, perhaps by appreciating some of the unexpected potential paths through the graph and gaining new insights into the interconnectedness of human knolwedge.

There are two kinds of connections in these graphs.  Solid lines represent direct links from one article to another.  Dashed lines represent new searches motivated by further idle curiosities that popped into my head while reading an article, and don’t represent direct links between articles.

Today’s wandering started when I saw a reference to George Will in a blog comment.  The name tickled my memory, so I went to take a look…

Knowing my Wikipedia habit, these types of posts should be fairly common. I’d love to hear any feedback, and I hope people can find something interesting in each post.