A study led by Young-Ho Eom of the University of Toulouse used links across 24 language editions of Wikipedia to examine which historical figures receive the most attention and how that attention varies by gender, time and place. The researchers found that prominent figures were predominantly male, born in Western countries and lived after the 17th century. Each language edition also tended to emphasize figures from places where that language is spoken.

The rankings depended heavily on the method used. With PageRank, which measures a page’s importance by the importance of pages linking to it, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus came first across the language editions. Linnaeus developed the scientific naming system still generally used today, and Wikipedia’s many species articles link back to him. That feature of the encyclopedia helped explain his unexpected ranking.

To account for such effects, the researchers combined PageRank with CheiRank, a measure based on outgoing links, to produce 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, which measured how often scholars cited one another, identified Karl Marx as the most influential academic.

The Internet Archive is meanwhile working to preserve web pages and the pages they reference as part of an effort to address broken links. Its crawls save versions of referenced pages so readers can later see what authors originally intended, even if those pages change or disappear. The archive hopes these preserved copies can replace broken links or appear alongside current links.