articles could find Baymax.
Add Spider-Man → Baymax and 274 other articles gain a path to him. Baymax still has no way out.
A PLAYABLE DATA STORY · ISSUE 01
ONE HERO. NO CONNECTIONS. YOUR MOVE.
GIVE BAYMAX
A VOICE.
Baymax is in the Marvel roster. But in this snapshot, not a single article links to him.
You can add a link. The direction is up to you.
~60 seconds · 2 small missions · a real networkREAL SNAPSHOT · NO EDITS
- 01 Be found
- 02 Answer back
ARTICLES THAT CAN REACH BAYMAX0
ARTICLES BAYMAX CAN REACH0
Following one or more arrows. Other articles only. A path is a possible sequence of clicks, not measured readership.
MISSION 01 / BE FOUND
PUT HIM
ON THE MAP.
Help a reader elsewhere in the network find Baymax. You have one imagined link. Which page should it go on?
THE CATCH
See what you changed A link is a one-way door. Writing about someone doesn’t make them link back.
REPLAY THE DIFFERENCE
Loading the frozen network…
A what-if experiment on the 26 August 2026 snapshot. These edits are imagined; the original 303 articles and 1,784 links stay intact.
THE FINDINGS / NO WORKING REQUIRED
A LINK IS SMALL.
ITS DIRECTION ISN’T.
articles Baymax could reach.
Point it from Baymax → Spider-Man instead. He gains 231 destinations, but nobody gains a path to him.
articles with a route both ways.
Two imagined links create a round trip between Baymax and 229 other articles. Being reachable and reaching out are different.
Being listed isn’t the same as being connected.
Baymax is one of 17 isolates in the real snapshot. The experiment shows how direction changes inclusion—and why a single “number of connections” misses part of the story.
FOR THE CURIOUS
What is real, and what did we change?
The source is the course’s frozen 26 August 2026 Wikipedia snapshot: 303 character articles and 1,784 directed links. Baymax has zero incoming and outgoing links within that roster. The experiment adds only Baymax → Spider-Man, Spider-Man → Baymax, or both, to an in-memory copy of that graph.
Each count includes distinct other articles reachable by following arrows for any number of steps. An article with many possible paths is counted once. The round-trip count includes only articles reachable in both directions. These are counterfactual graph results, not predictions of readership, friendship, or future Wikipedia edits.
The map keeps the same positions between states. Existing connections are muted; the bright, dashed arrows are the imagined additions. Moving a dot does not change the data.
How were the results checked?
The browser follows the directed links and counts the reachable articles. A separate NetworkX calculation in the presentation exporter checks every state: no edit, outgoing only, incoming only, and both. Baymax is excluded from all reachability counts.
Download the frozen graph and scenario checks ↓ · Source files, notebooks and snapshot checks ↗