Wikipedia’s most influential people: Carl Linnaeus, Jesus, Hitler, Michael Jackson
SAN SE An algorithmdriven investigation of ikipedia has found a Swedish botanist from the th century to be more influential than Aristotle, Hitler and esus, according to a report by the
Sydney Morning Herald.
Research published by the niversity of Toulouse this week mapped the web of links within the crowdsourced online encyclopaedia in all 2 languages the platform is published in.
The study used Google s PageRank algorithm to assess the incoming links and a similar algorithm called 2d Rank for outgoing links to over , biographical pages selected for the project, the newspaper added.
The fundamental assumption was simple: the more links, the more influential.
According to incoming links, the most influential person is Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus who developed the naming system for plants and animals used today, followed by esus, Napoleon and Hitler.
But according to the links that flow out of each page, the most influential person is Adolf Hitler, followed by Michael ackson, Madonna and Beethoven.
hile the findings don t include musings as to why the relatively little- known Linnaeus has so many links, a uick ikipedia search of a few animals connects their scienifitic name to pages of taxonomy, and from there to the botanist.
Coordinated by Young-Ho e om, the exploration was an attempt to identify influencers beyond the local scope of most en uiries.
Applying the same methodology within just one language creates distinctly different results for each language.
Based on their PageRank score pages linking into their biography page), the most influential three people are:
• English: Napoleon, Barack bama, Carl Linnaeus
• Greek: Alexander the Great, esus, Aristotle
• Chinese: Carl Linnaeus, Mao edong, Napoleon
• Hebrew: Benazir Bhutto, Yitzhak Rabin, Neil Armstrong
• Italian: Napoleon, Aristotle, esus
The 2d Ranks outgoing links) are even more localized.
• English: Frank Sinatra, Michael ackson, Pope Pius XII
• Greek: Plato, Alexander the Great, Eleftherios Venizelos
• Chinese: Chiang KaiShek, Mao edong, Emperor Taizong of Tang
• Hebrew: Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, David Ben-Gurion
• Italian: Pope Bendict XVI, Raphael, Giuseppe Garibaldi
The lists, like history, are dominated by men. The most influential women include several ueens of England, Agatha Christie, Mariah Carey, Indira Ghandi and Catherine the Great.
The internationalized data was also used to identify which cultures have been the most influential beyond just their own language groups and empires.
Greek, Arabic and Turkish cultures were dominant until the s, when English and German took over.