Wikipedia Network Maps

2008

A final project for a math class on Networks. Ian Pearce, Devin Gaffney and I, decided to map and analyze the relational internal link structure of smaller Wikipedias. Some of the Wikipedias we mapped were Scottish, Anglo-Saxon, Quechua and Kongo.

To do this we wrote a Ruby program that picked a random Wikipedia page, went through the article parsing all links that went to other wiki pages, and would continue this process on all those linked pages. We then took this data and converted it into python in order for the mapping program Sage in order to visualize and analyze the network. Using Sage we could determine data such as largest connected node, average clustering coefficient, the average degree, number of unconnected nodes.