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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
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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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.
Well done bot, well done.
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?
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.
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.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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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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.
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
Actually the only piece of actual evidence of the existence of Christ as a real person is an entry in the histories written by the Jewish historian Josephus. Those histories are not originals of course, in fact they are all copies made by the Catholics. There are no shortage of changes made by those copiers including additions and changes from the original text that have been detected by comparing various copies that were altered in different ways. The only thing that makes people who know what they are talking about say Jesus probably lived vs probably did not live is the subjective opinion of a few scholars (mostly theist scholars) who studied the passages in question and subjectively think they seem like the style of Josephus.
Given the thinking of the day it would be the most natural thing in the world for a Monk to "correct" a "mistake" in a history that failed to record the trial and death of Jesus and to patch it up with the details from their bible.
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.
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.
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.
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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Actually the only piece of actual evidence of the existence of Christ as a real person is an entry in the histories written by the Jewish historian Josephus.
It depends on what you allow as evidence. Even the few historians who seriously question the authenticity of Josephus's account also have to deal with one of the most influential and well-known Roman historians, Tacitus, who mentions the trial of "Christus" under Pontius Pilate. And, they have to deal with the account by Roman historian Suetonius, who mentions a Christian leader called "Chrestus" who created disturbances against the Romans.
Neither Tacitus nor Suetonius were at all sympathetic to the Christian cause -- the former was a patriotic Roman senator who referred to "Christian abominations" in his writings, and the latter portrayed "Chrestus" as some sort of rabble-rouser (as well as other details which conflict with the Gospel accounts and seem unlikely to be the result of some later interpolation).
Those histories are not originals of course, in fact they are all copies made by the Catholics. There are no shortage of changes made by those copiers including additions and changes from the original text that have been detected by comparing various copies that were altered in different ways.
Yes, and if we were dealing with one or two sources that seem to conflict with the rest of the historical record, that could be a reasonable conclusion.
But instead we have a number of sources from very different contexts, at least two of whom get similar details like Pilate being involved in the punlishment. And we get these hints showing up in multiple historical documents where the details don't even quite agree ("Chrestus"? -- and most importantly, the details even say things that contradict the Gospels in the Bible).
Given the thinking of the day it would be the most natural thing in the world for a Monk to "correct" a "mistake" in a history that failed to record the trial and death of Jesus and to patch it up with the details from their bible.
Yeah, except -- as I said, they didn't do that in all the sources, which disagree. Why would medieval monks randomly insert erroneous information into a smattering of random sources that in places contradict the biblical accounts?
To accept the theory that "Christus/Jesus" was merely a myth, we'd have to assume these theoretical monks were trying to "plant" erroneous information because someday people might question whether Jesus was a real person, so they wanted to make it look like it wasn't fake by including some details that looked like they were written by non-Christians.
That's pretty near crazy.
Mainly because there is no historical evidence that there was any great controversies in the early Church or from the opponenets of Christianity about whether Jesus had been a real person. This sort of debate just never came up. And if you read accounts of enemies of Christians and even those early Christians who had a great variety of ideas about Jesus that would now be considered heretical, NONE of them bothers to say, "Oh, yeah, and Christ/Jesus never really existed anyway."
It really wasn't a question that came up in scholarship until the 1800s. So, it seems pretty crazy that there was this medieval conspiracy theory to plant random references in multiple ancient sources, some of which were even contradictory, just in case many centuries later somebody would question whether Jesus was a real person.
The only thing that makes people who know what they are talking about say Jesus probably lived vs probably did not live is the subjective opinion of a few scholars (mostly theist scholars) who studied the passages in question and subjectively think they seem like the style of Josephus.
Not true.
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).
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
No, there really is not a lot of evidence that Yeshua ben Youssif existed. There's a single paragraph in Josephus that everyone agrees was faked, and that's it for contemporary mentions. Peter and Paul existed, but we just have their say-so for it, and not even original texts for that; the earliest surviving documents were recorded centuries after the events.
Joe Sixpack saying he's an atheist doesn't mean Jesus didn't exist. The lack of evidence means he didn't exist.
[citation needed]
It seems that the majority of historians disagree with you: Historicity of Jesus
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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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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.)
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.
A blog I run for the wealth
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.
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.
"To accept the theory that "Christus/Jesus" was merely a myth, we'd have to assume these theoretical monks were trying to "plant" erroneous information because someday people might question whether Jesus was a real person, so they wanted to make it look like it wasn't fake by including some details that looked like they were written by non-Christians."
Hardly because the Monks/Priests of the church did not believe it was a myth. They believed it was fact. And in their eyes the gospels represent absolute truth and Josephus' account was not contradictory evidence but merely an erroneous history that they corrected with information from a more authoritative source. Integrating it into the text in a way that seamlessly fit with the original, including tone, was simply "best practice" in the day.
None of this requires a conspiracy or ill will just some Monks/Priests trying to correct a history book they believe made a serious factual omission.
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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Um, did you actually read the article or the talk page (where it says the dispute has been resolved). I was actually surprised at the consensus, but the article provides good evidence for it. It also primarily focuses on evidence that isn't from scripture (hence why I assumed you hadn't read the article),
Here's another wikipedia article. Although the other one seems less biased. (I don't have time to wade to check for other article using google, and given wikipedia's primary demographic it is more likely to be accurate then me checking other sources)
Perhaps you should check your facts instead of blindly dismissing things, which is ironically exactly what you and others have been accusing people supporting the historic evidence of Jesus's existence of doing.
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Indian?! Is that a language? Spoken where?
Jesus also becomes influential by the amount of discredit and disbelief his identity gets. And not to mention the sheer amount of advert dollars spent. Adolf gets to the top of the list too.
Politicians and entertainers are walking and talking advertisements of themselves. Unfortunately scientists and engineers are not, It's their works. The ranking algorithm will reveal them if the pages of their works are ranked.
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.
At the time or my original comment the the main article used the term "scholars of antiquity", which in the context would be the the relevant majority of historians. It has since emerged that the evidence to support that claim is less then originally represented in the articles (see the comment below yours).
However it appears that the majority of scholars who have studied the issue (which appears to mainly be bible scholars, so must be taken with a grain of salt) do support this issue, but not many historians have studied it. I would still argue however that there it is still unreasonable to claim that jesus did not exist when there is a reasonably strong body of evidence (as listed in the wikipedia article) to support his existence, and little to no statements from historians to the contrary.
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Thank you, it appears that my assumption that an wikipedia article on such a controversial topic would have been reasonably neutral (or biased away from a Christian perspective) was mistaken. However, from the talk it still seems to appear that there is reasonable evidence for Jesus's existence, although not a consensus as the original article implied.
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Actually whilst this is written by someone clearly biased, it does explain quite reasonably the point I am trying to make (and in a clearer manor then the orignal article): Wikipedia: Talk: Historicity of Jesus FAQ
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