A study led by Young-Ho Eom of the University of Toulouse used links between Wikipedia articles to examine which historical figures receive the most attention across 24 language editions. The researchers found a strong tilt toward men born in Western countries after the 17th century. They also found that individual language editions tend to emphasize figures from countries where those languages are spoken, reflecting connections within cultures.

The rankings varied with the method used. An approach based on Google’s PageRank, which weighs incoming links according to the importance of the pages providing them, placed Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus first across languages. Linnaeus developed the scientific system for naming organisms, and Wikipedia’s many species articles link back to him. His ranking illustrates how the encyclopedia’s structure can affect such measurements.

To account for this effect, the researchers combined PageRank with CheiRank, a measure based on outgoing links, to create a ranking called 2DRank. By that measure, Frank Sinatra ranked first in the English-language edition, followed by Michael Jackson and Pope Pius XII. Across all 24 editions, Adolf Hitler ranked first, followed by Jackson and Madonna. A separate earlier study that measured citations among academics identified Karl Marx as the most influential scholar.

The Internet Archive is pursuing a different effort to preserve online knowledge. Its crawlers archive new pages and the pages they reference, so readers can later access the versions available when the links were created. The archive hopes those preserved copies can replace broken links or accompany live links, allowing readers to see what authors originally intended. Its broader goal is to address broken links across the web.