text: 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?' ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| 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.
target: – 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.)