jdtw/wikipediaphilosophy

http://xkcd.com/903

WikipediaPhilosophy

The alt text of xkcd 903 states:

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

This is a python script that tests and visualizes that using pygraphviz.

Dependencies

• pygraphviz - http://networkx.lanl.gov/pygraphviz/
• BeautifulSoup - http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

Usage

wiki.py [-i iterations] [-o outfile] [-p] [-l layout] [-s start]
        -i : iterations, default is 10
        -o : outfile, without the file extension. 
             e.g. specifying '-o wiki' (the default)
             will output wiki.log, wiki.dot, and wiki.png
             if -p is specified
        -l : layout to be applied. One of 'twopi', 'neato', 
             'dot', 'fdp'. 'dot' is the default. 
        -p : print graph as png.
        -s : url to start searching from. Must be of the form
             /wiki/foo

Examples

wiki.py -p will generate three files: wiki.log, wiki.dot, and wiki.png

wiki.py -i 1 -s /wiki/xkcd -o xkcd -p will perform 1 iteration starting at the xkcd wikipedia page. The output files will be xkcd.log, xkcd.dot, and xkcd.png

wiki.py -i 100 -l twopi -p will greate a graph in the twopi format using 100 iterations.

Example Output

Generated with wiki.py -p.

License

MIT