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There is a popular hypothesis, known as six degrees of separation, holding that any two people are separated by a chain of no more than six acquaintances. Studying the characters of Wikipedia to see whether something similar obtains among its articles, Six Degrees of Wikipedia aims to be a compendium of the following things:
- The items separated by the longest minimal chains in the encyclopedia (especially where these are more than four links long). The shortest known chain between the two items should be specified. Generalisation over time, where possible, seems to produce the shortest chains. Failing this, try generalisation over space to reduce chain length.[clarification needed]
- The most intuitively remote items separated by short chains—chains of fewer than six articles, anyway. That is, these should be items that have no obvious connection but which, nonetheless, can be linked between very quickly in Wikipedia. This is a much more subjective category, but should still be interesting; it may be enough to describe these as "interestingly" or "oddly" short chains.
- Chains between two articles selected at random (using Special:Randompage). Since these can often be uninteresting, think twice about actually adding these to this page.
- Articles that can be proven to have no chain between one another. This is the search for the potential outlier that could prove the hypothesis at least capable of being in a state of "incorrect". Intuition suggests that there shouldn't be any, but that is in fact why we need to search for it/them.