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Wikipedia Mining Algorithm Reveals the Most Influential People In History
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.'
subjectively titled ...
No love for him?
Given those of us the world calls "nerds" seemingly have a weakness for championing the lesser-known, and given that nerd-driven edits are a disproportionately large percentage of Wikipedia edits... it's not surprising someone like Linnaeus has the top spot.
Really, the biggest surprise isn't that Linnaeus outranks Jesus - it's that Jesus managed to outrank Joss Whedon.
#DeleteChrome
Napoleon is the most influential person in history.
An interesting study, but nothing about the rankings has anything to do with measuring being 'influential'.
What do you expect of a man that practically nobody had heard of until centuries after his death?
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so stay frosty and watch some bad ass video when ever the fuck it comes out.
Linné was a nice man.
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 of articles about all kinds of animals and plants. Here's a random example. Notice the "L." at the bottom of the infobox. So, basically, Mr. Linnaeus is being Google.. ahem, Wikipedia-bombed.
I'm a descendant of Carl Linnaeus, don't remember which generation but might be tenth.
The last part of this sentence cracked me up "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."
that he invented the classification system for organisms.
And there are a _LOT_ of stub articles for the Lesser Spotted Garden Slimy Thing, that link to 'biological classification' and hence Carls page. (can you tell I can't spell his second name?
an objective list of the 100 most influential people in history
Objective does not equal definitive. Nor does "mentioned on Wikipedia" equal "influential."
It's an objective list calculated from subjective criteria, subjectively believed by its creator to be an indicator of a subjective quality.
The resulting lists of the most influential men and women might surprise.
Yes, it might, for a few seconds, until you realise that getting your name on a Wikipedia page does not count for influence.
The top PageRanked individual is Carl Linnaeus, the 18th century Swedish botanist who...
...named a lot of species and therefore gets mentioned a lot.
followed by Jesus.
I didn't know they had Twitter back then!
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I am going to give little credence to any objective list that puts Madonna (The Singer) on the top 5 of any such list. I just can't imagine that they aren't counting links to Madonna (The mother of Christ) and associating them to the singer.
History .... Jesus. Uhuh.
It might be objective but the method they use to find the most influential people is flawed. I'd trust the previous subjective list before this.
Thanks for that, but I very nearly sprayed lunch all over my monitor.
The most influential people are, in no particular order: the guy who invented fire, the guy who invented agriculture, the guy who invented the wheel, the guy who invented religion, the guy who invented writing, various other prehistoric inventors and scientists, various leaders of important nations (eg the Romans), various religious figures. Y-chromosome Adam, mitochondrial Eve, etc. The most influential people will be in the deep past, because what they did back then has enough time to affect so many people now. And we might not remember their name, much less have a Wikipedia article on them.
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Correct me if I am wrong, but even from the summary I get a strong suspicion this "research" is heavily flawed. I mean, the only way for "Carl Linnaeus" would be on the top spot would be if you blindly applied a sort of page-rank algorithm forgetting to only include non-standardized parts of pages. A significant percentage of Wikipedia pages on all languages are about the various species of plant or animal life, all of which have a stub which contains the link to "Scientific classification" perhaps also to "Binomial name", both of which feature Linnaeus prominently.
It reminds me a spider my boss had built to get a few thousands of pages to construct a word frequency list, and I had to point out that it needed some work, since words like "print", "home" etc were not in the top-5 most common words of the English language.
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are now 'influential people in history', what the fuck?
Some of those people are still alive! Who influenced them?
No mention of Hitler? After Jesus he is probably the most mentioned historical figure on the Internet. And if influencing to not be like counts, then I would say he might rival even Jesus in influence.
But really, at the very least the politically party that he controlled (the Nazi's) influenced pretty much the entirety of the modern world in their short life. From the Olympic Games, through all of science, to modern animal welfare laws; These were all a hundred years ahead of their time and put in place by Nazi Germany, controlled by Hitler. And pretty much everything not directly copying something Nazi, is something specifically put in place to be unlike Nazi Germany.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
So, you're saying that the guy that invented a naming system, and then named thousands upon thousands of animals, the names and system of which are used by every culture on Earth isn't influential and doesn't deserve a spot on the list?
The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
This is no different from trying to come up with ways of measuring scholars' intellectual impact using citation metrics, like the h-factor or the many recent successors to it, which try to repair the weaknesses in a fatally flawed idea. It makes no distinction between positive and negative citation, and it ignores the raw fact of historical precedence, while preserving every historical bias a culture may have.
The most influential people in world history, at least the very top-tier, isn't particularly debatable, but yet this list failed to capture it. In alphabetical order (and assuming they all existed):
Aristotle
Buddha
Confucius
Homer
Jesus
Lao Tzu
Muhammad
Plato
Ved Vyasa
Then there's the next tier, which include people like Al-Hazan, Alexander, Augustine, Einstein, Genghis, Hammurabi, Imhotep, Newton, Linnaeus, Peter (of Russia), Shakespeare, Suleiman, Zeami Motokiyo etc etc, since I'm sure the further I try to extend the list, the more it would converge with my cultural history.
While unsupervised algorithms can often find interesting things in high-dimensional data, they aren't interpret-able without some expert knowledge.. and if you don't have the 9 entries I mentioned above in your top 20 at least, you can toss the method.
... and thus before any bias on my part: influential is not all that meaningful -- at least, not always in a good direction: Cortez was certainly somewhat influential, and he/Spain just made the Americas miserable.
And Stalin was probably popular.
I always wonder why such an important hypothetical character, who asked people to put god above every powerful entity on the earth, was shunned by powerful entities on the earth, in an age where damnatio memoriae was feasible, or even SOP.
I mean, let's look at Linux and other free operating systems. They have been all over the media as soon as they offered a minimum of usability, right? er, wrong.
You know that last week bought an internet usb modem (olidata 200) that is plug and play on debian stable (switched to modem mode) and working with wvdial? cool huh?
And on the box it came with, linux compatibility button is present and unchecked. Three times because those guys listed debian, redhat, and another distro.
Some guy a couple millennia from now might say: OF COURSE linux did non support standard AT modem commands, see this key we recovered, it uses standard AT commands yet the vendor explicitly marked it as incompatible... Makes perfect sense, still it's wrong because it doesn't take into account some factors, namely that people like forced obsolescence and that's difficult to achieve with linux (until the systemd era, at least).
And it's implicitly admitted by the article itself, where while it lists the top five people, it elaborates briefly on the first place holder of PageRank's algorithm, Carl Linnaeus, to state what the person was actually famous for. Really, if he was the most influential person in human history, one would typically expect that such clarification would not generally be needed. Indeed, there is no such clarification given for 2DRank's #1 place holder, Adolf Hitler, either. Neither is there any explanation needed or offered by others in the top five of either algorithm.
If you want to know how influential somebody was, try and count (or even just make a crude estimate of) how many people, both living and dead, that are or were impacted by that person, or what that person did. Honestly, the modern naming convention for organisms that Linneaus invented isn't liable to impact anyone outside of scientific circles, and probably doesn't even affect a billion people, while the founder of Buddhism, for example, I can't remember his name off the top of my head, almost certainly impacted the lives of at least tens of billions.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If Linnaeus hadn't invented the binomial system (and there's argument about whether he actually did), then someone else would have eventually come up with a comparable system.
If Hitler hadn't come into power and provoked Germany into expanding into Europe and massacring the Jews, it's likely that our world would be substantially different right now. Similarly for Genghis Khan and Hannibal. Marx/Lenin/Stalin/Mao weren't even on the English list. Or Gandhi, who freed what is now the world's largest democracy.
So yeah, the fact that Linnaeus is on the list while none of those people are shows that the methodology is stupid, because it doesn't rank links ~themselves~ importance. Linking to Linnaeus from 'coriander' because he named the plant is not as meaningful a link as linking to Hitler from Auschwitz.
Michael Jackson, and Hitler?
What utter bullshit!
This is like mining Facebook to decide who the best rock band ever was! Think there's any bias?
My vote goes to Gutenberg. You want to talk about inflection points in human knowledge? Gutenberg, and then Tim Berners-Lee.
Jeff
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
if you're not a Christian. If you don't believe he was the son of god then he was just preacher whose particular sect took off. The Roman Emperor that convertered to Christianity after being 'saved' is the real power behind Christianity...
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I wonder how this is evaluated, if at all. As others have been pointed out, the fact that Carl Linnaeus means that they define "influence" in a fairly poor, counter-intuitive way. Many mentions might make someone famous, but not influential in a deep sense. Deep influence, to me, affects the answer to a simple question. If the contributions of person A hadn't been made, would our world be a fundamentally different place? This will work for largely fictional figures (such as Jesus), as for evil people (Hitler). It will, IMHO correctly state that Mary (as in mother of Jesus) or Queen Elizabeth weren't all that influential.
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.
They are going to sell to every damn politician and two bit national leaders "A service in improve your influence on the world. Results guaranteed. Independent tests based on wikipedia will show that your influence has increased. Includes a 110% money back guarantee!"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I know who Michael Jackson is. I can't say he influences my actions very much. I know his name. I don't actually know anything about him. I know who Napoleon is. I can't say that he influences my actions much either. Etc etc etc..... By their methodology, I just name dropped these two guys. Big whoop. Doesn't make them influential.
The MOST important person in the history of humanity is the one who made the species naming system we use, even if few people actually know him? Just because there are more species on Wikipedia than, say, elements whose pages link to Mendeleev (an example of a person I would consider more influential)? It is a good thing then that Jimmy Wales didn't put a link to his page on the "about" link of every Wikipedia, otherwise you know who would be #1 "according to research"!
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If Carl Linnaeus really deserves to be in the top 5 from being link-bombed, consider the following that aren't listed but are far more influential because of their contributions that directly led to Linneaus being listed on every page:
some asshat that put a link to Linnaeus in a Wikipedia template
Jimmy Wales (creator of Wikipedia)
Tim Berners-Lee (HTTP)
Robert E. Kahn (IP and TCP/IP) and Vint Cerf (TCP/IP)
Jack Kilby (Integrated Circuit)
John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley (Transistor)
Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla (AC/DC)
Benjamin Franklin (for flying a kite in a thunderstorm)
and
Ogg (the guy who discovered how to create fire)
I'm sure I left off a ton of people far more deserving than Carl Linnaeus.
Constantine did not convert to Christianity. Despite the Catholic church's attempts at rewriting history this did not happen. What happened was Constantine's mother was dabbling in Christianity and Constantine insisted on Christianity being defined before being allowed to be considered a sanctioned roman religion. This gave us the council of Nicaea which gave us the bible and many other elements that today are considered the fundamental tenants of Christianity. Constantine was effectively editor-in-chief of the Bible and he likely had something to say about the number of 'authors' to be accepted for the new testament. Constantine would have considered himself the head of this religion along with all other things roman. His ego wouldn't have had any problems with him being the head of multiple religions.
No such person has done this. Carl invented a classification system used almost exclusively by scientists. By that measure Napoleon was vastly more influential for his enforcement of the metric system across the French Empire.
Gandhi ? what did he do - the British did it by leaving not like he could drive them out is it? Also wtf has democratic India done (Yet) that hasn't been done before in that part of the world.
Almost no one is influenced by Jesus (Christ, Son of God and Mary, ...). Christians are almost exclusively followers of Paul (Saul of Tarsus), even the Evangelicals who claim otherwise. Jesus had a very straightforward message according to all of the New Testament translations I have read: treat each other with compassion, and claim my death as absolution for your sins. Christians have been failing the the first part of that message for at least 1600 years. Paul, OTOH was a legalistic SOB that wrote a bunch of "rules", most of which had nothing to do with Jesus' message, and it's the rules that Christians follow, not Jesus' message.
You must be the same anonymous person above that claimed Jesus didn't exist, am I right? Are you trying to claim that the British just handed India over and let them run themselves? Read a history book, and see how wrong you are on all accounts. Most of this information does not take in depth study, just a cursory glance at a Wiki page is all you need to know you are wrong.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
All this algorithm reveals is who the algorithm ranks highest. I wouldn't draw any conclusions beyond that.
EVERYONE who invented a naming system deserve to be #1 on this list!
--
Melvil Dewey
I would have to agree. I think that Linnaeus has gamed the system a bit. Every (or at least most) Wikipedia articles about a plant or animal species would have a link to back to Linnaeus or his nomenclature system. While he was certainly a notable scientist, he was in no way as influential as most of the others on the list. Perhaps I should change my name to "Citation Needed" so I would be the most influential person in history (according to this methodology).
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I'm officially changing my name to Citation Needed so I will be next years most influential person in history (assuming they keep the same methodology).
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A list of "Most Influential" people most of the non western world doesn't even care or know about.
Obama was there. If that doesn't completely invalidate it I don't know what does.
Oh, on second hand, Hitler was there too. I guess Obama isn't so out of place then.
When did some middle management talking head (Obama and the like) become more important than one of the greatest inventors and minds of modern history?
This list shows how fucked society really is.
William Tynedale - King James Bible. Priests and common people could now read the bible, including the jewish part (priests were notorious for not knowing what latin words meant). Created 500 odd years of a desire for literacy, war, and progress.
Dennis Ricthie - The start of programming for common people. Even if you are not using something with a c compiled program, that compiler was made using c. Should also get a boost for the fastest influence on everyones life.
I'm a fan of pre-Beatles oldies rock music. Every so often, somebody comes up with a "Greatest Hits Of All Time" list, and it usually seems to go back no further than 10 or 15 years before the list was published. Similar for history. Many such lists are better described as "the most influential people of recent times".The most influential people are founders of major movements religions (Jesus, Mohammed, etc) and political ideologies such (Karl Marx, etc)
And then there are leaders of states/empires, who led their empires to triumph/defeat. Too numerous to mention, going back to Biblical times through today
I'm not repeating myself
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It was more or less all paul and a few others. In fact here is a work for you : try to gather all what Jesus is reported to have said, (not even going into the no direct witness), and try to see what image that make of Jesus. Firstly you will quickly find out that there is not much, and what's left are banalities even at that time (there isn't any moral code Jesus stated which was not present in older works).
No what helped the spread of christianity are 1) Paul and a few others proselytism 2) the rage and fanatism of christian and the subsequent destruction of older religion 3) the warfare expansion they did and imposing their religion including execution of ehretic.
All combined historically jesus word are far less the reason of the spread , than the forceful imposition by authorities after the 5th-6th century.
Let alone this fictitious character's possibly even more fictitious mother.
(Just for the record: One of the regional lists even names the "step-father of god", Joseph.)
The resulting lists of the most influential men and women might surprise.
So basically, it's bullshit. With Jesus and Mary on the list, it's clear it is basically a popularity contest, and they have just re-defined influence to mean something totally different from what it usually means. Just because 50,000 people mention a probably fictional virgin in their memoires doesn't mean she has had any influence whatsoever on anyone. It just means people like to mention her (in this case, for obvious religious reasons).
Going by the names of people instead of their ideas is just incredibly stupid. Aristotle et al basically defined western thinking, even if many people they strongly influenced don't even know it. Meanwhile, entertainers are popular, but their influence rarely lasts for more than a few decades and even more rarely extends outside of the sphere of entertainment.
Finally, this approach completely ignores the problem of figureheads. I'll take Jesus again as an example. Absolutely none of the ideas or miracles or actions attributed to him in the bible are original, they've all been written about in older texts or can otherwise be traced to older sources. The same is true of some scientists, many philosophers, etc. -- the problem is that the popularity approach confuses the person who made something popular with the person who created it. It is a philosophical discussion who is more influential or more important, and if an idea without popularity is as worthless as popularity without content - but it's an important point and simply mixing the two up as if they were the same is a fundamental flaw.
At least they did consider timeframes and cultures.
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Having Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, Roosevelt, Reagan, etc. in the list is just bloody nonsense.
I don't know if PageRank is screwed or their interpretation of it, or both.
A better description would be the aggregate of our group tribe. We only have space for so many people in our heads so we simplify with fame. Perhaps the average store is 120 people to match the tribe size we are evolved for?
So influential is pretty close a term in that these are the names in our mind so just because of that they are also a good bet as to influence... Just its only a bet.
Comparing cultures is interesting. Quite a gap for English and Chinese but less so for Russian. If you were a strategist you can then surprise that China/USA are more different than Russia/USA. Apply this again to different countries and we can start to map out political likely strongest and weakest links between countries. A map from this contrasted to an economic might be able to highlight any differences and the result would be areas either of future change or recent moves.
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If Linnaeus hadn't invented the binomial system (and there's argument about whether he actually did), then someone else would have eventually come up with a comparable system.
If Hitler hadn't come into power and provoked Germany into expanding into Europe and massacring the Jews, it's likely that our world would be substantially different right now.
If Linnaeus hadn't invented racial biology then it is unlikely that the extinction would have happened and Hitler would just have been yet another one in the long list of people trying to build an empire.
Also, Darwin wouldn't have been on that list if it weren't for the work of Linnaeus.
Not centuries. Romans were being widely persecuted in Rome as early as 63 CE, so only a few decades after the death of Christ. The faith had reached Rome long before persecution began.
No they didn't just hand it over and yes he gave them a major nudge but do you think they would have let go what they considered the jewel of the empire 'quite' as easily (quite as a relative term.) If they had not just just fought a global war and were bankrupt and the US had not been pushing its weight around so much at that period?
They just didn't have the will nor the means to put the boots on the ground and 'police' the insurgency as its termed these days. What else could they do but withdraw and save as much face as possible?
Gandhi benefited from the tides of history India would have left the empire even without him , he shortened the timescale is all.
No I wasn't the personal who complained about the fictional Jesus because Jesus the man himself wasn't important, Jesus the myth as peddled by various powers with various agendas was. Otherwise he would have been lost to a history footnote a long time ago.
The list seems to me to be mostly politicians, with some entertainers. I think that there are some scientists and engineers that have been far more influential. Even when a name is not listed and linked to in languages various languages that wikipedia has page listings doesn't mean that the individual was not influential. Every current civilization benefits from the work of Edward Jenner. Just because people no longer think about smallpox any more doesn't mean that the influence is no longer present.
Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, Louis Pasteur (scientists), and Walter Reed (an engineer and scientist) also come to mind.
Gandhi benefited from the tides of history India would have left the empire even without him , he shortened the timescale is all.
I think he deserves much of the credit for it not being a blood bath.
Also, Darwin wouldn't have been on that list if it weren't for the work of Linnaeus.
Even without Carl Linnaeus animals & plants still had names. I think Darwin would probably have coped.
The aftermath was anyway - the death toll in the various migrations to form Pakistan and Bangladesh was horrific
What they didn't tell you is that Mary & Jesus were primarily looked up as a means to find ridiculous statements which can be used to argue why Religion is bullshit.
Jesus was certainly the most influencial in history. And there is lot's of evidence that He was real. Lot's of silly people pretending there's not very much evidence. But people looking for the truth will come to know Jesus(Yahshua). Jesus said that people who are of the truth hear Him. Read the Bible for yourself don't listen to the churches. Big difference between the two.
You do not need to remember his name to heard about his taxonomy which starts with Animal, Mineral, Vegetable.
Kingdom, Phylum (Vertebrate/invertebrates), Class (Mammals, Birds, Amphibians, Fish, Reptiles), Order, Family, Genus, Species. etc, etc.
Jesus made the list but Santa Claus didn't?!?
This. The fact that the paper doesn't even mention the "Scientific Classification" path to Linnaeus is kind of ridiculous. I mean, sure, you can argue whether or not it's valid to include that or not, but the fact that it's systematic means it's at least important to point out.
Not centuries. Romans were being widely persecuted in Rome as early as 63 CE
I can only assume you meant to write "Christians" were being persecuted?
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Indian?! Is that a language? Spoken where?
The list just shows how poorly the algorithm has been constructed. Politicians and entertainers are walking and talking advertisements of themselves. Unfortunately scientists and engineers are not, It's their works that are influential. The ranking algorithm will reveal them if the pages of their works are ranked instead. There are numerous other biases in this kind of an algorithm.