Wikihistory – Finding the World’s Leaders through the Ages through Wikipedia Social Networks

All software development has been done by Patrick de Boer

The goal of this project at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to create an interactive history book of the most important people of all times from Wikipedia. In a first step towards that goal, we focus on the English Wikipedia, extracting its 800,000 people pages. In future work we intend to repeat this process with other language Wikipedias, to get an understanding of the key influencers over time in different cultures.

In this first prototype created from the English Wikipedia, all people pages are dated, by extracting the dates of birth and of death of each individual. Moreover, the links originating and pointing to their Wikipedia page are gathered. Using this information, 4900 networks through history, from 3000 BC to 1900 CE are calculated, as shown in figure 1. From all the links originating and pointing back to a particular people page, only the links to and from people living at the same time as the person discussed on that page are included.

For instance, in the graph shown in figure 1 above, from all the links to the page about Plutarch, only the links from and to Hadrian, Caesar, and Nero are kept, while the links to Pyrrhus, who died well before Plutarch was born, and the pages to medieval historian Syncellus and modern historian Pisani are ignored as well. Repeating this process leads to 4900 unique networks. For each of these networks, the most central people are determined using the popular PageRank algorithm. To get a second selection criteria among all the influencers, their indegree, i.e. other people pages pointing back to them, is taken. The following list shows the top 50 most influential people of all times, ranked by the Wikipedians, ordered by pagerank and indegree (the number in this list).

	name	indegree	PageRank
1	George_W._Bush	4721	1
2	William_Shakespeare	3914	1
3	Sidney_Lee	3093	1
4	Jesus	2176	1
5	Charles_II_of_England	1519	1
6	Aristotle	1400	1
7	Napoleon	1361	1
8	Muhammad	1123	1
9	Charlemagne	949	1
10	Plutarch	925	1
11	Julius_Caesar	890	1
12	William_III_of_England	890	1
13	Homer	820	1
14	Bede	799	1
15	Athanasius_of_Alexandria	775	1
16	Dante_Alighieri	755	1
17	Gautama_Buddha	747	1
18	Tiberius	697	1
19	Cyril_of_Alexandria	684	1
20	Bernard_of_Clairvaux	655	1
21	Moses	645	1
22	Tacitus	610	1
23	Edward_III_of_England	582	1
24	Justinian_I	532	1
25	David	522	1
26	Ashoka	486	1
27	Origen	337	1
28	Septimius_Severus	334	1
29	Polybius	307	1
30	Confucius	302	1
31	Alexander_Severus	278	1
32	Patriarch_Eutychius_of_Alexandria	276	1
33	Tutankhamun	253	1
34	Akhenaten	238	1
35	Ramesses_II	228	1
36	Pope_Benjamin_I_of_Alexandria	172	1
37	Teti	151	1
38	Amenemhat_II	146	1
39	Pepi_II_Neferkare	145	1
40	Merneith	144	1
41	Terence	142	1
42	Cato_the_Elder	141	1
43	Charles_Martel	116	1
44	Gilgamesh	101	1
45	Deborah	89	1
46	Lugalbanda	68	1
47	Kubaba	65	1
48	Fu_Xi	12	1
49	Henry_I_of_England	417	0.986383431
50	Petrarch	254	0.981669694

These influencers consist primarily of politicians (kings and generals, in red), second of religious leaders (black), and third of poets and historians (blue). It seems it pays to be a historian, to write one's own place in history. This is clearly shown by Sidney Lee, a relatively minor Victorian professor of English and history, who wrote 800 biographies.

These networks can now be used to construct snapshots of social networks of the key leaders through the ages. The following picture shows the Wikipedia link network of 3000 BC to 2000 BC.

As we can see, the Egyptian Pharaohs dominate history in that age, complemented by a tight cluster of Sumerian kings, and a cluster of Chinese kings and princes.

Skipping 1000 years ahead, looking at 1000 BC to 0 BC, Alexander the Great is the dominant figure, surrounded by a tight cluster of patricians of the Roman Republic. The Chinese emperors form a group at the top, while the Indian emperor Ashoka is surrounded by other influencers from the Indian subcontinent.

Making another huge leap to 1800 CE, looking at the 19^th century, the US takes center stage: Abraham Lincoln is the most influential person, surrounded by a roster of US poets and scientists. Queen Victoria, other European policians and scientists form their own, smaller  and less tight-knit cluster, while Chinese and Southeast Asian kings occupy comparatively peripheral positions.

We can also combine these networks in a movie over centuries, below is the world’s leaders from year 0 to year 500, calculated with Condor. As the movie shows, in that age we have two dominant clusters with the Roman and Chinese emperors in the center. From 200 to 300 CE, the Chinese Golden Age of the Han dynasty, the Chinese cluster clearly surpasses the Roman cluster.

If there is one lesson from this preliminary experiment, it is the disproportionally huge role of the historians. Not only is a minor 19th century biographer under the top 10 influencers of all times (which is of course more an artifact of our collection method), but also classical historians like Polybius, Tacitus, and Plutarch get very high ranks. Treating biographers and historians well so they write positively about world leaders is of course no new insight, for instance Roman emperor Vespasian was paying historians  Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus and Pliny the Elder, in return they speak suspiciously well about him, shaping his image in history. Caesar and Winston Churchill took this concept one step further, writing their history themselves. As todays history is written in Wikipedia, the conclusion seems obvious: treat Wikipedians well!