Wikipedia Mining Algorithm Reveals the Most Influential People In History 231
KentuckyFC writes: 'In 1978, the American researcher Michael Hart published The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, a book that became an international best seller. Since then, various others have published similar lists. But all suffer the same drawback: they are subjective list ultimately influenced by numerous cultural factors. Now data scientists have come up with a way to extract an objective list of the 100 most influential people in history using the network of links between biographical articles on Wikipedia and how they vary between 24 different language editions, including English, Chinese, Russian Arabic and so on. The researchers assume that people who are highly ranked in different language editions are influential across both language cultures and that the more appearances they make in different language editions, the more influential they are. But the actual ranking is done by PageRank-like algorithms that consider a biographical article important if it is pointed to by other important articles.
The resulting lists of the most influential men and women might surprise. The top PageRanked individual is Carl Linnaeus, the 18th century Swedish botanist who developed the modern naming scheme for plants and animals, followed by Jesus. The top PageRanked women are: Elizabeth II followed by Mary (mother of Jesus). For comparison, just under half of the top 100 most influential also appear in Hart's 1978 book. But this is just the beginning. By counting the individuals from one culture that influence other cultures, the team is able to work out which cultures have dominated others. And by looking only at people born before certain dates, they can see how the influence of different cultures has waxed and waned throughout 35 centuries of recorded history.'
The resulting lists of the most influential men and women might surprise. The top PageRanked individual is Carl Linnaeus, the 18th century Swedish botanist who developed the modern naming scheme for plants and animals, followed by Jesus. The top PageRanked women are: Elizabeth II followed by Mary (mother of Jesus). For comparison, just under half of the top 100 most influential also appear in Hart's 1978 book. But this is just the beginning. By counting the individuals from one culture that influence other cultures, the team is able to work out which cultures have dominated others. And by looking only at people born before certain dates, they can see how the influence of different cultures has waxed and waned throughout 35 centuries of recorded history.'
Re:Yeah, right (Score:5, Informative)
I think he got the top spot due to the fact that just about every single critter on this planet has a link back to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org] on their page.
Carl Linnaeus? Here's why: (Score:5, Informative)
You want to know why Carl Linnaeus is on top of that list? Every Wikipedia article about an Animal or a Plant has an infobox, containing their binomial name. And the person who got to name the animal or plant is linked in said infobox. Since Mr. Linnaeus basically created the binomial nomenclature, he named thousands upon thousands of species. Thus, he is linked from thousands upon thousands [wikipedia.org] of articles about all kinds of animals and plants. Here's a random example. [wikipedia.org] Notice the "L." at the bottom of the infobox. So, basically, Mr. Linnaeus is being Google.. ahem, Wikipedia-bombed.
Yeshua didn't exist (Score:0, Informative)
There are no contemporary accounts that Yeshua ben Youssif even existed. Some monk was so upset that Josephus didn't write about Yeshua in his history of the jews in that part of the world, that said nameless monk inserted a fake paragraph to correct that mistake. If you read it, it's pretty obvious bullshit. Centuries of similarly deluded Xtian scholars have convinced themselves that there is some original mention that was elaborated upon. There is no reason to believe this unless you have a vested interest in doing so. Further "evidence" relies on the "principle of embarrassment", e.g. John the Baptist was a real historical figure, and it was somewhat weird or otherwise embarrassing to the Church to have the Son of God baptized by this random dude in the desert, so therefore it is considered more likely to have actually happened. Friends, if that is your standard of proof, you can prove anything. We have no original copies of any documents related to the NT, and the earliest copies were written centuries after the events.
So, odds are actually pretty good that Peter and Paul just made it up.
Re:objective list (Score:5, Informative)
Annoying isn't it? Why do people link to (or write in the first place) an article about a list, and then not include the list? Where's the logic in that? Anyway, I dug through the supporting data fo the paper and found it, then ran it through a simple bash script to strip extraneous information. I'm only including the PageRank version because the methodology is more logical and the results more reasonable (the 2D rank version is mostly pop-culture).
1. Carl Linnaeus
2. Jesus
3. Aristotle
4. Napoleon
5. Adolf Hitler
6. Julius Caesar
7. Plato
8. William Shakespeare
9. Albert Einstein
10. Elizabeth II
11. Alexander the Great
12. Isaac Newton
13. Muhammad
14. Karl Marx
15. Joseph Stalin
16. Augustus
17. Christopher Columbus
18. Charlemagne
19. Louis XIV of France
20. George W. Bush
21. Immanuel Kant
22. Barack Obama
23. Mary (mother of Jesus)
24. Vladimir Lenin
25. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
26. Paul the Apostle
27. Charles Darwin
28. Martin Luther
29. Herodotus
30. Franklin D. Roosevelt
31. Galileo Galilei
32. Pope John Paul II
33. Constantine the Great
34. Benito Mussolini
35. Cicero
36. Ren Descartes
37. Saint Peter
38. Ludwig van Beethoven
39. George Washington
40. Moses
41. Johann Sebastian Bach
42. Bill Clinton
43. Leonardo da Vinci
44. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
45. Gautama Buddha
46. Winston Churchill
47. John F. Kennedy
48. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor
49. Pope Benedict XVI
50. Richard Nixon
51. Sigmund Freud
52. Ronald Reagan
53. Abraham Lincoln
54. Saddam Hussein
55. Ptolemy
56. Richard Wagner
57. Diocletian
58. Queen Victoria
59. Napoleon III
60. Charles de Gaulle
61. Mao Zedong
62. William Herschel
63. Michael Jackson
64. Justinian I
65. Augustine of Hippo
66. Ali
67. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
68. Ernst Haeckel
69. Pliny the Elder
70. Pope Gregory XIII
71. Confucius
72. Henry VIII of England
73. Thomas Jefferson 74. Francisco Franco 75. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 76. Pierre Andr Latreille 77. Pope Paul VI 78. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 79. Chiang Kai-shek 80. John Herschel 81. Elizabeth I of England 82. J. R. R. Tolkien 83. Socrates 84. Genghis Khan 85. Qin Shi Huang 86. Umar 87. Philip II of Spain 88. Frederick the Great 89. Johannes Kepler 90. Emperor Wu of Han 91. Friedrich Nietzsche 92. Plutarch 93. Thomas Edison 94. Max Weber 95. Dante Alighieri 96. Ashoka 97. Tacitus 98. Ernst Mayr 99. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck 100. Elvis Presley
Not a bad list, honestly. Still not sure why Linnaeus is *that* high, but most of the rest is quite reasonable, methinks.
Oh, and because Slashdot is complaining, "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 19.0)": Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat c
Re:objective list (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia is very slanted towards recent [wikipedia.org] and Eurocentric events [wikipedia.org].
Yes, this is somewhat explainable in terms of how much literature has been produced over time, and how much literature is accessible online. Wikipedia isn't the problem here, the problem is that the authors didn't acknowledge this issue, let alone attempt to account for it in their computation. (though it's a long paper, so I might have missed where it was discussed)