Cool, someone already applied graph theory to find the “center” of Wikipedia (the article with the shortest average distance to any other article), and the shortest path between two articles. As of March, 2008:

The centre of Wikipedia is: 2007

From this article, it takes on average 3.45 clicks to get to any of the 2,111,479 articles reachable from it. The top 10 articles are 2007, Deaths in 2004, 2006, 2004, List of accidents and incidents on commercial aircraft, Star Alliance destinations, 1990s, List of town tramway systems in North America, 2005 and 1967.

If you skip past all of the articles that are just lists, years or days of the year, the “real article” closest to the centre is United Kingdom at an average of 3.67 clicks to anywhere else.

I guess the only thing left to do is add this information to the six degrees of separation article on Wikipedia. (Via inky.)

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