![]() ![]() This system helped mitigate the biases of Wikipedia. Then, rather than simply taking their top 100, we developed categories that we believe are significant, and populated our categories with people in Skiena and Ward’s order (even if they ranked below 100). By synthesizing our expertise with the systematic rigor of Skiena and Ward’s rankings, we sought to combine the best of quantitative measures and qualitative judgment.įirst, we asked Skiena and Ward to separate figures significant to American history from the world population. Among the Smithsonian Institution museums we work closely with is the National Museum of American History. Smithsonian magazine has been covering American history in depth from its inaugural issue, published in 1970. In their rankings of Americans only, past presidents occupy 39 of the first 100 spots, suggesting an ex-officio bias. The English-language Wikipedia favors Americans over foreigners, men over women, white people over others and English speakers over everyone else. Their concept of significance has less to do with achievement than with an individual’s strength as an Internet meme-how vividly he or she remains in our collective memory. ![]() Skiena and Ward would be the first to acknowledge that their method has limitations. Their book ranks more than 1,000 individuals from all around the world, providing a new way to look at history. By their reckoning, Jesus, Napoleon, Muhammad, William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln rank as the top five figures in world history. Their algorithms differentiate between two kinds of historical reputation, what they call “gravitas” and “celebrity.” Finally, their method requires a means of correcting for the “decay” in historical reputation that comes with the passage of time they developed an algorithm for that, too. They analyzed this data to produce a single score for each person, using a formula that incorporates the number of links to each page, the number of page visits, the length of each entry and the frequency of edits to each page. ![]() This they found in the English-language Wikipedia, which has more than 840,000 pages devoted to individuals from all times and places, plus data extracted from the 15 million books Google has scanned. Their method requires a massive amount of big data on historical reputation. But while Google ranks web pages according to relevance to your search terms, Skiena and Ward rank people according to their historical significance, which they define as “the result of social and cultural forces acting on the mass of an individual’s achievement.” Their rankings account not only for what individuals have done, but also for how well others remember and value them for it. Simply put, Skiena and Ward have developed an algorithmic method of ranking historical figures, just as Google ranks web pages. They evaluate each person by aggregating the traces of millions of opinions, just as Google ranks webpages. In this fascinating book, Steve Skiena and Charles Ward bring quantitative analysis to bear on ranking and comparing historical reputations. Who's Bigger?: Where Historical Figures Really Rank ![]()
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