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. 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. 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 . 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.
– 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.)