Wikipedia Pathfinder
Find the shortest hyperlink path between any two Wikipedia articles.
About this project
Wikipedia Pathfinder is inspired by the Wikipedia Game — a challenge where players start on one Wikipedia article and try to reach another by clicking only hyperlinks, in as few clicks as possible.
We thought it would be interesting to automate that process and apply different graph search algorithms to it, so you can compare how they explore the link graph to find the shortest route.
The underlying data is the Stanford SNAP wiki-topcats dataset — a directed snapshot of Wikipedia's hyperlink graph from around 2011, covering ~1.79 million articles and ~28.5 million one-way links. Because it's a static snapshot and not a live mirror of Wikipedia, some links you see on Wikipedia today may not exist in the dataset.
Shortest Path
Article Rank
Article Rank is computed using PageRank — the same algorithm Google originally used to rank web pages. It measures how many other articles link to a given article, weighted by how important those linking articles are themselves.
In the context of this graph, a high-ranking article is a well-connected hub that many paths naturally pass through — like United States or United Kingdom. These hubs are why seemingly unrelated articles can be connected in just a few hops.