Skip to content

TimeMagazine/wikipedia-rankings

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 

History

9 Commits
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

wikipedia-rankings

Support files for TIME's ranking of the prominent people on Wikipedia.

Data was collected over several days in May using node-wikipedia, a Node.js module maintained by @wilson428.

We considered eight data points for each entry:

  • Number of words
  • Number of links to other Wikipedia pages
  • Number of external links (which are typically references)
  • Number of categories the person is in
  • Total number of revisions to the page
  • Number of unique individuals who have edited the page as a signed-in editors
  • Number of anonymous edits
  • Number of vandalisms, as identified in editing notes

Data for the top 100,000-or-so people is available as a 15MB CSV file.

Analysis

Using out-of-the-box R functions, we reduced these eight variables to their principal components (using this handy guide). As you can see, a huge amount of the variance is contained in the first PC:

variance

You can rerun the principal component analysis like so:

RScript wikipedia.r

(This may require installing the relevant libraries first).

By trial and error, the ranking that most satisfied our anecdotal sense for "influence" in the real world was PC1 + PC2, which becomes the score for each person.

About

Measuring the most prominent people on Wikipedia

Resources

License

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published

Languages