Researchers led by Young-Ho Eom at the University of Toulouse used links among Wikipedia articles to examine the prominence of historical figures across 24 language editions. Their study found that the people receiving the most attention were generally men born in Western countries after the 17th century. Individual language editions also tended to emphasize local figures, reflecting the connections within each culture.

The rankings varied considerably with the method used. Using PageRank, which measures the importance of a page partly by the importance of pages linking to it, the researchers found that Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus ranked 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. His result therefore illustrated how the encyclopedia’s structure could shape a ranking of influence.

To account for such effects, the team combined PageRank with CheiRank, a measure based on outgoing links, producing a combined measure called 2DRank. By that method, Frank Sinatra ranked first in the English-language Wikipedia, followed by Michael Jackson and Pope Pius XII. Across all 24 editions, Adolf Hitler ranked first, Jackson second and Madonna third. A separate study that measured how often academics cited one another identified Karl Marx as history’s most influential scholar.

The Internet Archive is also working to preserve the web’s network of references. Its “No More 404” effort crawls supported sites, archiving pages and the pages they reference so readers can recover the versions that were available when the original pages were written. Archived copies could replace broken links or accompany live ones, preserving authors’ intended sources as online content changes or disappears.