now-metric-uses-dijkstra-on-wikipedia-dag

IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/wiki-Semantic_similarity-chunk-1.md

Created 2026-08-25T02:58:53+00:00

The noW (n° of Wikipedia) metric constructs a directed acyclic graph from Wikipedia's hierarchy and applies Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm to compute geodesic distance between topic nodes.

Summary

The noW metric turns Wikipedia's category structure into a one-way network and measures how far apart two topics are by finding the shortest chain of steps connecting them. This means topical distance is defined by how Wikipedia's editors organized the site, so the metric captures structural relatedness rather than raw semantic similarity, which matters when the system needs to reason about how closely linked two ideas really are in the knowledge landscape.