[Update: automated search: see below] My kids have independently come up with something very similar to the old Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game — they choose two arbitrary Wikipedia topics (say, feces and Paris Hilton) and then figure out the shortest link path between the two articles — they can generally manage in four hops or fewer, by using hub articles for countries, musical genres, etc. I’m sure that there’s a more elaborate version of this somewhere on the web, with formal rules.
Update: Tim has left a comment pointing to Six Degrees of Wikipedia, a simple web app that looks for the shortest path between two articles.
There is a web tool that will find the shortest path between any two Wikipedia pages (limited to about 10 hops): http://kohl.wikimedia.org/~kate/cgi-bin/six_degrees
Thanks for the link, Tim.
Hre’s the elaborate version with rules
http://www.sixclix.blogspot.com/