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Comment by lcuff | Hacker News Reader

Thanks so much for digging this out! Very useful to know. So, the notability methodology fails massively, as many have noted. Jesus and Muhammad trailing Britney Spears by a factor of 4 or so is my favorite so far ... LOL. But the question becomes, how can the notability be improved. Of course "AI" is probably the answer here, in the same way it is becoming the answer to so many questions/problems. (Just as the answer to every legal question is "it depends".) Two elements pop to mind: (i) Accessing more things outside of the Wikipedia/Wikidata database. (ii) Within the Wiki world, making associations like Jesus ~ Christian ~ bible ~ best selling books.

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> Jesus and Muhammad trailing Britney Spears by a factor of 4 or so is my favorite so far

To play devil's advocate (edit: pun entirely not intended!), I'd bet that way more people today could correctly identify a photo of Britney Spears than an accurate rendition of either Jesus's or Muhammed's faces. Obviously this map isn't supposed to be most "recognizable" people, but I think there's something to be said about whether the person itself is different from the mythos around them (which may or may accurately describe their life).

> an accurate rendition of... Muhammed's faces.

Accurate depictions of Muhammed[0] are difficult to come by.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depictions_of_Muhammad

Ah, right, I actually had known about that before, but I must have forgotten! It would be interesting to see if there weren't as much controversy around depicting Muhammed whether the common versions today would be accurate; depicting Jesus isn't discouraged at all in Christianity, but centuries of Europeans depicting him looking like them have established a common trope of a white, fair-haired Jesus, which would not have been at all what he actually looked like given where and when he was from. Given that Islam has been much more continuously practiced in the region where Muhammed lived, I imagine that depictions of him probably wouldn't have been as egregiously inaccurate in terms of race, although it's possible other sorts of cultural expectations might have been adopted over the years.

1) Apply a discount on notability for people based on how near their birthdate is to now. If Hammurabi and Jordan Peterson have the same score, Hammurabi should win by far.

2) Use an additional book corpus. Someone mentioned in books from 1500, 1800 and 2022 should score higher than someone popular in only one era.

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