Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Those existing relationships include causality,
influence, proximity,
temporality, and much more. Why single out "influence" as a
privileged kind of relationship?
See [[Butterfly effect]]
Second, your example in your original post was of
finding out if there
was a causal relationship between the Cold War and 9/11. Wqell, I
think this example actually points out the artificiality and
arbitrariness of how this would end up being used if it existed as a
separate feature.
Correlation does not imply causality.
What *would* be cool, and might just be a different
implementation of
exactly what you have in mind, would be a tool to find all the
(reasonably short) click-paths between any two concepts. I mean, now
that I selected the article titles randomly, I actually wonder how
many clicks it takes to get from Marie Antionette to Michael Jordan.
And what's intervening?
Over a year ago I raised the possibility of tracing every article back
to the Main Page. None in my random sample was more than five links
away. Thus if you trace Marie Antoinette and Michael Jordan back to the
Main Page, the sum of their links will be a maximum distance. :-)
Ec