Slashdot Mirror
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 ...
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'.
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.
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.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
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.
Even if you aren't Christian, your civilization has probably been influenced (converted, overrun, allied) by one that was acting in Jesus' name.
If you believe that then you believe nonsense. The lack of personal belief in the divinity of Jesus and his offer of salvation doesn't undo his enormous influence as Messiah, the subsequent spread of Christianity beyond its Jewish origin, and the enormous influence Christianity has had in turn on religion, literature, music, law, and many other aspects of life and culture across the globe.
A non-Christian may not hold to the belief and sentiment that inspired Handal's Messiah, but the music is still played and sung. They don't cease to exist because of non-belief. The same holds true for the rest of the influence Jesus has had though the spread of Christianity.
Christianity spread in the Roman empire despite persecution. But if you think a Roman emperor 1700 years ago was the "real power" behind Christianity, how do you explain this today? The Romans are long gone.
China on course to become 'world's most Christian nation' within 15 years
Study: Christianity grows exponentially in Africa
You seem to be underestimating the influence of Jesus.
The Good, the Bad and the Forgiven
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
If you believe that then you believe nonsense. The lack of personal belief in the divinity of Jesus and his offer of salvation doesn't undo his enormous influence as Messiah, the subsequent spread of Christianity beyond its Jewish origin, and the enormous influence Christianity has had in turn on religion, literature, music, law, and many other aspects of life and culture across the globe.
You confuse the religion with the picture they decided to hang on their walls. It's like saying the greek gods are still very powerful because whole planets are named after them. Jesus supplied the persona unto which the church then projected everything they wanted to have accepted without questioning. At this point, he stops being a person and instead becomes an idea. To be fair, you should remove him from the comparison because he belongs into a different conceptual class.
The same is true of some ancient philosophers and many kings. We have a couple kings in history who basically did nothing, and yet their names stand for an entire period of their country.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org