Count me as one of those people more interested in cool graph theory stuff than Wikipedia. What else have you got up your sleeves?
Also, while we're talking about Wikipedia-- any plans to play around with "shortest path" algorithms? For example, how few pages to I have to navigate to get from, say, "Turing machines" to "Miles Davis"?
Wikipedia's just a big data set to practice on. I've been musing on information graphs (and doing talks about such) since 2004 or so.
It also happens that I've done a bit of work in writing fast, embedded databases, so when I realized that none of the off-the-shelf graph databases that I found were fast enough for our needs, and that mapping graphs to an SQL database was abysmally slow, I wrote a small one. Honestly, I was surprised when I discovered some graph databases that advertise being an order of magnitude slower.
I'd love for our product to be a graph database, but I'm convinced that product takes too long to get to the market. I'd need probably a year of just concentrating on that, without, say, also having to do business stuff just to get that ready for general purpose use. It'd also be cooler for geeking out to, but I don't know if people would actually pay for it.
So right now we've got a database that's really fast at: traversing lots of edges and filtering on tags. That's what we need for finding related stuff.
As for shortest path stuff ... well, it's never had much more than novelty value for me. I don't see much of a business case for implementing it, and well, we're a business.
I agree about the shortest path stuff being purely novelty stuff-- but I must admit it was the first thing that came to my mind when I tried to connect Wikipedia with graph theory.
Personally, I like playing around with graph theory, but I have yet to come up with a compelling business case-- I wish you luck, and hope you find something cool (and lucrative.) I'd probably be a customer of a fast graph database, but I doubt there are a lot of other graph theory hobbyists out there.
Also, while we're talking about Wikipedia-- any plans to play around with "shortest path" algorithms? For example, how few pages to I have to navigate to get from, say, "Turing machines" to "Miles Davis"?