Shortest path from spinach to cataphora
Stephen Dolan had a simple question: what is the center of Wikipedia? That is, if you look at a graph of all the articles in Wikipedia with all the links between them, and see which is (on average) closest to all the other articles. In doing this he came up with a great tool that finds the shortest distance between any two Wikipedia articles (that existed at the time he downloaded them). Lets see what the results are for Spinach to Cataphora: Spinach — Asia — Arabic language — Pronoun — Cataphora
Because links in Wikipedia are one-way, it’ll be different going the other way: Cataphora — Linguistics — Brain — French cuisine — Spinach
And interestingly, the results are rather different for anaphora. It’s sort of interesting if you’ve picked two lower level articles to see what sort of strange connection happens as you go “up” the hierarchy (which in my experience is usually what happens; I haven’t seen a lot of traversal among more leafy levels to get from one specialty article to another) — like the connection from brain to French cuisine: go figure! Now I don’t know what happens when there are multiple, equally short paths - my hunch is that alphabetical order is involved, but I haven’t looked into it.
My personal best is eight links: from kinship to Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination.