The most important person in the English-language world is Frank Sinatra, according to an analysis of Wikipedia articles led by the University of Toulouse's Young-Ho Eom. 
 
 Number two is Michael Jackson, and number three is Pope Pius XII. 
 
 Eom arrived at this somewhat surprising conclusion by using methods borrowed from Google to analyse Wikipedia pages and determine which individuals have the most important articles linking to them. 
 
 Taking all 24 major language editions of Wikipedia into account, Eom's team carried out the same study and came to a more plausible conclusion: Adolf Hitler. (Even then, Michael Jackson takes the second slot, and Madonna is in third place.) 
 
 The point of the study wasn't strictly to determine who the most important people are on Wikipedia, but instead to discover if the online encyclopaedia was skewed in the level of attention it gives to various figures, either by gender, time, or location. 
 
 "Our analysis shows that most important historical ﬁgures across Wikipedia language editions are born in western countries after the 17th century, and are male," the authors write. But, they add, "each Wikipedia edition highlights local figures, so that most of its own historical figures are born in the countries which use the language of the edition. The emergence of such pronounced accent to local figures seems to be natural since there are more links and interactions within one culture." 
 
 The study takes as its starting point Google's PageRank algorithm. This is still the basic method the search engine uses to decide the basic importance of webpages in its index, although the system has received an almost total overhaul since it was first introduced in 1998. 
 
 PageRank says that a page is important if a lot of important pages link to it. While the definition sounds self-referential, in practice, it recreates a lot of features which we intuitively understand: the more sites link to a newspaper's website, for instance, the more important that website is; and being linked to from a national newspaper probably says more about a site's importance than being linked to from a nondescript blog. 
 
 But when the study applied PageRank to figures on Wikipedia, the results were odd. The most important person in the world comes out as Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish naturalist – certainly an important feature in natural history, but possibly not the most important in the world. 
 
 It seems the algorithm was thrown by a quirk of Wikipedia: the site contains an almost complete collection of named species – as well as who named them. Since Linnaeus' life work was coming up with a system to classify organisms, and applying that system as widely as possible, he is linked to from a lot of pages, and important ones at that. From the Domestic Cat to the Red Fox, through the mighty Asian elephant and the lowly moss gall, Linnaeus named, and is linked from, them all. 
 
 To get around that issue, the researchers applied a second way of measuring importance: CheiRank. Simply put, "the PageRank… of an article is proportional to the number of incoming links, while the CheiRank… of an article is proportional to the number of outgoing links. Thus a top PageRank article is important since other articles refer to it, while a top CheiRank article is highly connected because it refers to other articles." In other words, an important person is likely to have a lot of other important people and things involved in their lives. 
 
 Mix Pagerank and CheiRank together, and you get the final measure: 2DRank. That's how the authors arrived at the top 100 for all 24 editions of Wikipedia – and how Frank Sinatra took pole position. 
 
 • Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales: 'It's true, I'm not a billionaire. So?' ||||| Even Sir Isaac Newton recognized that intellectual success depended on what had come before: "If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants,” he so famously said. But while we may all wield influence in our own domains, some people (say, the ones who inspired Newton) are just more influential than others. 
 
 In an intriguing new study, a team led by University of Tolouse researcher Young-Ho Eom sought to figure out who, exactly, should be considered the most influential thinker in the world. Trawling through 24 different language editions of Wikipedia, Eom's team calculated whose intellectual fingers stretched out the furthest. The goal was to study who was at the heart of the biggest branching web of links, the page of the person who, if you spent long enough link jumping through Wikipedia's nearly endless treasures, you'd end up on the most. 
 
 The result was... somewhat surprising. According to Eom and co., the world's most influential mind was Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Linneaus beat out everyone, from the Pope to President Obama to Frank Sinatra, Hitler, Caesar—even Jesus. 
 
 If it's been a while since introductory biology, you may be scratching your head trying to remember who Carl Linnaeus even is. "The Father of Taxonomy," Linneaus invented the scientific system of naming that is still, generally, in use today. It's under Linnaeus' system that human beings became Homo sapiens, and taxonomical gifts like Llama glama, Vini vidivici, Apopyllus now and Ytu brutus came to be. 
 
 It was Linnaeus' particular scientific penchant, combined with the specifics of Young-Ho Eom's method of searching Wikipedia, says New Scientist, that led to the unexpected result: “Linnaeus topped the chart across all languages because there are so many Wikipedia pages with scientific names in every edition, and they all eventually lead back to him.” 
 
 This isn't the first time people have tried to figure out the influence of various historical people, of course, and Linnaeus is not a reliable entrant on the list. Last year Jasleen Kaur, Filippo Radicchi and Filippo Menczer tried to calculate which academic has had the most influence over the years. Using their approach, which studied how often academics referenced each other in their own work, the team found that Karl Marx was history's most influential scholar. ||||| On a Friday in July 2012, two employees of the Wikimedia Foundation gave a talk at Wikimania, their organization’s annual conference. Maryana Pinchuk and Steven Walling addressed a packed room as they answered a question that has likely popped into the minds of even the most casual users of Wikipedia: who the hell edits the site, and why do they do it? 
 
 Pinchuk and Walling conducted hundreds of interviews to find out. They learned that many serious contributors have an independent streak and thrive off the opportunity to work on any topic they like. Other prolific editors highlight the encyclopedia’s huge global audience or say they derive satisfaction from feeling that their work is of use to someone, no matter how arcane their interests. Then Walling lands on a slide entitled, ‘perfectionism.’ The bespectacled young man pauses, frowning. 
 
 Follow Backchannel: Facebook | Twitter 
 
 “I feel sometimes that this motivation feels a little bit fuzzy, or a little bit negative in some ways… Like, one of my favorite Wikipedians of all time is this user called Giraffedata,” he says. “He has, like, 15,000 edits, and he’s done almost nothing except fix the incorrect use of ‘comprised of’ in articles.” 
 
 A couple of audience members applaud loudly. 
 
 “By hand, manually. No tools!” interjects Pinchuk, her green-painted fingernails fluttering as she gestures for emphasis. 
 
 “It’s not a bot!” adds Walling. “It’s totally contextual in every article. He’s, like, my hero!” 
 
 “If anybody knows him, get him to come to our office. We’ll give him a Barnstar in person,” says Pinchuk, referring to the coveted virtual medallion that Wikipedia editors award one another. 
 
 Walling continues: “I don’t think he wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I’m gonna serve widows in Africa with the sum of all human knowledge.’” He begins shaking his hands in mock frustration. “He wakes up and says, ‘Those fuckers — they messed it up again!’” 
 
 Giraffedata is something of a superstar among the tiny circle of people who closely monitor Wikipedia, one of the most popular websites in the English-speaking world. About 8 million English Wikipedia articles are visited every hour, yet only a tiny fraction of readers click the ‘edit’ button in the top right corner of every page. And only 30,000 or so people make at least five edits per month to the quickly growing site. 
 
 Giraffedata—a 51-year-old software engineer named Bryan Henderson—is among the most prolific contributors, ranking in the top 1,000 most active editors. While some Wikipedia editors focus on adding content or vetting its accuracy, and others work to streamline the site’s grammar and style, generally few, if any, adopt Giraffedata’s approach to editing: an unrelenting, multi-year project to fix exactly one grammatical error. 
 
 Henderson has now made over 47,000 edits to the site since 2007, virtually all of them addressing this one linguistic pet peeve. Article by article, week by week, Henderson redacts imperfect sentences, tightening them almost imperceptibly. “I’m proud of it,” says Henderson of the project. “It’s just fun for me. I’m not doing it to have any impact on the world.” 
 
 Every Sunday night before going to bed, Henderson follows an editing routine that allows him to efficiently work on the approximately 70 to 80 new ‘comprised of’ errors that appear on the encyclopedia each week. The entire process takes an hour, at most. 
 
 He begins by running a software program that he wrote himself, which sends a request to Wikipedia’s server for articles containing the phrase ‘comprised of.’ His program parses the HTML code from the search results page to extract a list of dozens of article titles: ‘PlayStation 4,’ for example, in addition to ‘High Court (Ireland),’ and ‘British Armoured formations of World War II.’ The program then compares these titles against an offline database of articles that Henderson has edited within the last six months. Any matches get removed from the list. (He does this to avoid hitting the same article too often and pissing off overprotective editors who claim ‘ownership’ of certain articles.) 
 
 Next, a simple Web page is generated on the giraffe-data.com Web server, which contains a list of links to the edit page for each remaining article. Henderson can now easily click on each entry and make the necessary changes. Finally, the program updates the database of recently edited pages. “An edit typically takes about ten seconds, but that’s because I’ve gotten really, really good at it,” he says. “I’m actually putting a lot of thought into those ten seconds. Some of them take a lot longer; some of them take minutes.” 
 
 In the interest of saving himself those precious minutes, Henderson is more than happy to explain the trouble with ‘comprised of.’ Take the following sentence, for example: 
 
 The Wikipedia editorial community is comprised of many interesting people. 
 
 The problem is rooted in confusion over the verbs ‘to comprise’ and ‘to compose.’ Most style manuals advise against this usage. Better alternatives to the above example include the following: 
 
 The Wikipedia editorial community is composed of many interesting people. 
 
 Or: 
 
 The Wikipedia editorial community consists of many interesting people. 
 
 In a 6,000-word essay, Henderson lays out his case for why that phrase is ungrammatical. It is one of the top Google results for ‘comprised of.’ “There’s nothing else that completely beats it to death like that article does,” Henderson says. Under the subheading ‘Pointlessness of caring about it,’ he writes that some editors seem to think he’s wasting his time. “I won’t offer a rebuttal of that,” he writes, “Because an individual editor’s allocation of his time shouldn’t be anyone else’s concern.” 
 
 Activity of Top Editors Versus the Rest of the Wikipedia Community Giraffedata, currently ranked 978, is one of the most prolific. Yet the bulk of the site’s edits come from infrequent contributors. Credit: Ktr101 
 
 Not everyone has welcomed his mission. In the essay he mentions that he once “attracted a stalker, a single editor who reverted about 30 [‘comprised of’ edits] in a row in the same order in which I made them.” On 15 June, 2009, an editor left a comment on the ‘Talk’ page of Jimmy Wales, a founder of the encyclopedia. Entitled ‘Intercession needed,’ the writer began: “Please refer to user Talk:Giraffedata. Even though numerous editors have objected to his obsessive removal of the gramatically [sic] acceptable term ‘comprised of’ from hundreds of articles, he defiantly continues to do so. Your assistance here is appreciated.” 
 
 Wales replied later that day: “I believe that Giraffedata’s arguments against our using it are persuasive,” though he abstained from passing further judgment. 
 
 On his own ‘Talk’ page, Henderson notes, “Dozens of editors have let me know that they learned of the grammatical issue from my edit, had consequently decided to avoid ‘comprised of’ in their writing, and thanked me.” 
 
 I am one such editor. As a freelance journalist I had occasionally used the phrase ‘comprised of’ in my writing, most often when discussing musical acts. In a 2011 feature published in Rolling Stone Australia, for example, I wrote this sentence: 
 
 “A four-piece comprised of members from three Brisbane bands you’ve never heard of, Millions realised during their initial rehearsals that their sound might appeal to the national broadcaster.” 
 
 I discovered Henderson’s ‘comprised of’ essay last March, while working on edits for my first book, Talking Smack. In the first draft, I wrote the following: 
 
 “Completely improvisational in nature, the band is comprised of a bassist, two rappers, three members poking at laptops, and, occasionally, a singer.” 
 
 My editor switched the verb to ‘composed’ but gave no explanation. I googled my original phrase and discovered, to my horror, the prevalence of the error. I read Giraffedata’s essay. Thoroughly impressed, I shared it on Facebook. “Spectacular. A true hero,” one fellow writer commented in response. 
 
 As a stickler for correct grammar, I am appalled at the thought of incorrect English in my published work. So in March 2014, I thanked Henderson for saving me from further embarrassment by awarding him an ‘Original Barnstar.’ “You’re a legend, Bryan,” I wrote on his ‘Talk’ page. “Thanks for correcting my semi-regular use of ‘comprised of.’ Never again will I use it!” 
 
 Within an hour, Henderson had replied. “Thank you,” he wrote. “I love it when people are able to change their grammar based on a logical argument. I’m like that — in fact, I actually enjoy learning and adopting new grammar—but I frequently run into people so emotionally attached to their grammar that they will defend what ‘sounds right’ to the death.” 
 
 My curiosity piqued, I arranged a phone interview with Henderson the following week. I wondered how closely he fit the Wikipedia editor stereotype, which Steven Walling, in his Wikimania talk, had characterized as a loner living in his mother’s basement, with little more than an IV drip and a keyboard. 
 
 Henderson was born in Olympia, Washington, the middle child of a father who worked for the state government and a mother who taught math in middle school. He discovered an early affinity for computer science, and his first job out of college was working for IBM. He spent a decade working out of the company’s San Jose office before he felt the itch to do something different. He left the company at the end of 1995. 
 
 Swept up by the optimism of the dot-com boom, he decided to start his own company. Henderson purchased a neighborhood video store and, inspired by Apple, named it Giraffe Data Systems. “They picked a fruit; I picked an animal,” he says. 
 
 His idea was essentially what Netflix is now, except using the technology of the time, the VHS videotape. A customer would order a movie online, and perhaps a pizza, too, to be delivered to their house. “It would have worked, except that neighborhood video stores were on the way out, as the industry was being consumed by Blockbuster,” he says. He dissolved Giraffe Data Systems in 1999 but kept the company name and web domain, and he moved back home, to Olympia. 
 
 About a year later his former bosses at IBM heard that Henderson was unemployed. They lured him back to San Jose, and he soon met his partner, Chun Xue, online. “I basically ordered him from a catalogue,” Henderson jokes. “It was pretty much love at first sight.” The pair began cohabiting in 2001, and they now share a condo in San Jose.
– Using methods borrowed from Google, a group of researchers has analyzed all Wikipedia pages and determined that, at least on the English language version of the site, Frank Sinatra is the world's most important person. Second place goes to Michael Jackson, and third to Pope Pius XII. When factoring in all 24 language editions of the online encyclopedia, the team found that Adolf Hitler ranked the most important person, while Michael Jackson was again second and Madonna third, reports the Guardian. "Our analysis shows that most important historical figures across Wikipedia language editions are born in western countries after the 17th century, and are male," the authors write. The researchers combined two algorithms to reach these conclusions. First, Google's PageRank algorithm, which determines a page's importance based on how many other pages link to it. In using PageRank on Wikipedia, the most important person in the world was 18th-century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, likely because the pages of organism after organism link back to the "father of taxonomy." So the researchers added an algorithm called CheiRank, which determines importance based on the number of outgoing links, the thought being that an important person would himself be connected to other important people, things, and events. Using the two together—an approach they dubbed 2DRank—no one beat out Frank Sinatra on English pages or Adolf Hitler across all language versions. Last year, in a separate study analyzing academic references, one team deemed Karl Marx to be the world's most important scholar, according to the Smithsonian. (Click to read about one of Sinatra's quirks.)