First off: it is clear that there is substantial agreement among our placement of historical figures, with a Spearman rank correlation of 0.65 between us and them. Both sets of rankings incorporate aging as part of the methodology, so much of this agreement rests on our preferences for the tried and true. The Who's Bigger rankings of these figures have a rank correlation of 0.58 with year-of-birth (older historical figures being more highly ranked), while the comparable number is 0.53 with Pantheon.
More revealing is to look at the extremes: the figures whom we assign very different ranks from them. In particular, we computed the difference between our ranks (Pantheon - us) and present the figures with the largest and smallest differences. This is not a perfect statistic, since Pantheon ranks less than 12,000 people while our numbers go well above 800,000. But it is revealing none the less.
Diff Panrank BigRank Name Who's Dat?
10120 10521 401 'John Marshall' Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court
10058 11184 1126 'Donald Bradman' Great Cricket champion
10027 10823 796 'William H. Seward' U.S. Secretary of State (bought Alaska)
9963 11077 1114 'Gough Whitlam' Australian Prime Minister
9933 10812 879 'John Churchill 1st Duke of Marlborough' English Statesman
9915 10802 887 'George Washington Carver' African-American Inventor
9886 10405 519 'Tipu Sultan' Ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore
9735 10146 411 'John Jay' Early U.S. Statesman
9536 9935 399 'John C. Calhoun' U.S. Senator /VP (nullification)
9454 9886 432 'Susan B. Anthony' U.S. Suffragist (women's right to vote)
9439 11243 1804 'Alexander Mackenzie' Second Prime Minister of Canada
9243 10064 821 'Abigail Adams' Wife of President John Adams
9215 10729 1514 'Robert Menzies' Longest serving Australian Prime Min.
9207 10917 1710 'Robert Byrd' Long-serving U.S. Senator
9175 10406 1231 'Sojourner Truth' African-American abolitionist
9171 10562 1391 'Lucille Ball' TV Comedian (I Love Lucy)
9171 9330 159 'John A. Macdonald' First Prime Minister of Canada
9165 10466 1301 'Edmund Barton' First Prime Minister of Australia
9130 10318 1188 'Mary Todd Lincoln' Wife of President Abraham Lincoln
9008 10086 1078 'Svetlana Kuznetsova' Russian tennis star
Almost all of these figures are from the English-speaking world: United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain. It is no surprise that our methods (which only analyze the English language Wikipedia) generally rank these people higher than Pantheon (which analyzes editions from all languages). I personally recognize 14 of the twenty names here, and think they are generally quite Big, although I cringe a bit where some of our rankings are clearly too high (particularly Sultan and Kuznetsova).
The major American figures here are generally from the 19th century, which makes sense given the difference between our aging model and the one employed in Pantheon (full disclosure: Pantheon has recently changed its rankings, and what we have here may not be their current rankings). In particular, our rankings have fully discounted a historical figure 160 years after birth, while they continued historical discounting arbitrarily far into the past). Thus 19th century figures have generally achieved steady state by our analysis, so we value them relatively higher than Pantheon would.
The other side of the coin are the people who Pantheon ranks very much higher than we do. The figures below all ranked in the bottom half of Wikipedia figures by our analysis, yet were identified by Pantheon among the 12,000 most interesting figures for analysis:
The major American figures here are generally from the 19th century, which makes sense given the difference between our aging model and the one employed in Pantheon (full disclosure: Pantheon has recently changed its rankings, and what we have here may not be their current rankings). In particular, our rankings have fully discounted a historical figure 160 years after birth, while they continued historical discounting arbitrarily far into the past). Thus 19th century figures have generally achieved steady state by our analysis, so we value them relatively higher than Pantheon would.
The other side of the coin are the people who Pantheon ranks very much higher than we do. The figures below all ranked in the bottom half of Wikipedia figures by our analysis, yet were identified by Pantheon among the 12,000 most interesting figures for analysis:
Diff Panrank BigRank Name Who's Dat?
-472241 8052 480293 'Alexandra Stan' Romanian singer and model
-484757 11086 495843 'Serge Haroche' French Nobel Prize winner in Physics, 2012
-493874 9471 503345 'Lola Pagnani' Italian actress
-495688 11148 506836 'Stephane Lannoy' French soccer referee
-497360 10133 507493 'Olivier Giroud' French soccer player
-517354 11160 528514 'Wouter Weylandt' Belgian professional cyclist killed in 2011
-525449 9576 535025 'Nathalia Dill' Brazilian television actress
-525475 10601 536076 'Milos Zeman' Current president of the Czech Republic
-525633 11232 536865 'David J. Wineland' Nobel Prize winner in Physics, 2012
-526148 10774 536922 'Gianluca Ramazzotti' Italian singer-songwriter
-555909 11029 566938 'Linda Maria Baros' Contemporary French poet
-558970 10942 569912 'Jules A. Hoffmann' French Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, 2011
-573789 11144 584933 'Pastora Soler' Spanish Eurovision singer
-581161 11286 592447 'Sun Yang' Chinese Olympic swimmer
-601660 10310 611970 'Kevin Grobkreutz' German soccer player
-607491 11318 618809 'Missy Franklin' American Olympic Swimmer, 2012
-613223 11278 624501 'Brian Kobilka' American Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, 2011
-632278 11224 643502 'Lobsang Sangay' Prime minister in exile for Tibet
-685152 10556 695708 'Bernice Bejo' French-Argentine actress
-689256 11296 700552 'Vaclav Pilar' Czech soccer player
-693543 9577 703120 'Raphael Varane' French soccer player
-717448 11231 728679 'Ludmilla Radchenko' Russian model and active
-751460 10907 762367 'Anton Lamazares' Contemporary Spanish painter
-803441 11270 814711 'Petr Jiracek' Czech soccer player
These people are generally Europeans, who have the easiest time rising to the Pantheon Wikipedia language threshold. They are also all very contemporary figures, many of who achieved their greatest renown for achievements occurring after the Wikipedia edition we analyzed in our rankings (October 11, 2010), so presumably they would be ranked somewhat higher if we reran our analysis today.
However, I personally only recognized one name here, and it required some prompting. Bernice Bejo was the lead actress in "The Artist" which, by the way, was a wonderful picture. These people would generally not be in my 12,000 most significant (or famous) historical figures, but Pantheon's objectives are somewhat different than ours. My guess is the both groups are content with our ranking differences given our different motivations.
These people are generally Europeans, who have the easiest time rising to the Pantheon Wikipedia language threshold. They are also all very contemporary figures, many of who achieved their greatest renown for achievements occurring after the Wikipedia edition we analyzed in our rankings (October 11, 2010), so presumably they would be ranked somewhat higher if we reran our analysis today.
However, I personally only recognized one name here, and it required some prompting. Bernice Bejo was the lead actress in "The Artist" which, by the way, was a wonderful picture. These people would generally not be in my 12,000 most significant (or famous) historical figures, but Pantheon's objectives are somewhat different than ours. My guess is the both groups are content with our ranking differences given our different motivations.
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