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.
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:
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.