Six Degrees of Wikipedia

Six degrees of Wikipedia applies the hypothesis of six degrees of separation to Wikipedia to see whether something similar obtains among its articles. It is interesting to see how some intuitively remote items are actually separated by short chains.

The theory behind the six degrees of separation is that people are connected by no more than a path of six. Why is six this number? In the future, is it likely that this average degree of separation decreases or increases? Online social networks are increasing in popularity and some people are "friends" with people they have never met on social networking sites, so would this decrease this value? Or does the slowly increasing world population increase this value?
Also, I was thinking about it is mainly the weak ties that determine this degree of separation. Weak ties link people to other states and countries, so how much do strong ties determine the degree of separation/do the even help determine the degree of separation? If weak ties are the main contributing factor, does this mean that weak ties are more important that strong ties?

I think that the degrees of separation between people in the world will decrease in the future because, while the population is growing, technology is advancing also and allowing people from very different places to connect. Technology is making it easier for people to work directly with others how live in a completely different part of the country or the world because they can more easily send information, they can call distant people for less money, and they can hold conferences on a video over the web. Also, the world is becoming more integrated and there is more interaction between different countries, which creates more weak links between people from very different lifestyles and that will end up decreasing the degrees of separation.

You have a point about technology allowing people to connect easier in the future, but I think that would be cancelled out by the population increasing by a comparable factor. Like how when we discussed scales of resolution, and doubling the distance out from the center was cancelled out by the increased amount of people in the area, and lead to the same amount of links in each scale. Based on that, I think that the degree of separation will stay at or very close to six.

I agree with Andrew. Though the rapid improvement of technology makes it feel like we can more easily reach people, I still don't think it will change the dynamic of randomness. You still have to physically meet a person for them to be consider a link (like you can't call up/IM/text/skype/insert technology here a random person in China and then consider them to be a link). With the world becoming increasingly populated our diameter might even increase, because finding a particular person might be like finding a needle in a haystack. I'm not sure about the veracity of that statement because an increased amount of people means an increased amount of opportunities for interactions...or not necessarily? Blah. Good question. I've stumped myself.

When discussing “six degrees of freedom” it is important to realize where this line first became famous—a play. See the famous line bellow.

“I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it A) extremely comforting that we're so close, and B) like Chinese water torture that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection... I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.

John Guare, the plays author, credits Guglielmo Marconi and Stanly Milgram, a psychologist that preformed research on the small world problem with introducing him to the research behind six degrees of separation. However, “New evidence discovered in the Milgram papers in the Yale archives, together with a review of the literature on the "small world problem," reveals that this widely-accepted idea rests on scanty evidence.”

http://www.uaf.edu/northern/big_world.html

As such I feel that 6 degrees of separation really is an arbitrary number, however the small world theory is sound. With new technologies connecting far off parts of the globe I think that whatever the x degree of separation we have today, will continue to decrease in the future.