Comment by madcaptenor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by madcaptenor | Hacker News Reader

Here is an interesting list of the most famous humans, where fame is measured by how many languages they have a Wikipedia article in.

333: David Woodard

275: Michael Jackson

274: Jesus

252: Donald Trump, who is very happy he's ahead of...

251: Barack Obama

250: Ronald Reagan

242: Adolf Hitler

239: Leonardo da Vinci

234: Isaac Newton

233: Confucius

230: William Shakespeare

229: Albert Einstein, Vladimir Putin, Nelson Mandela

225: Joe Biden

224: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

223: Muhammad

222: Aristotle, Basshunter (Swedish musician)

218: Johann Sebastian Bach

217: Plato

215: Julius Caesar

213: Napoleon

212: The Beatles (not bigger than Jesus), Corbin Bleu (American actor and singer), Alexander the Great

211: George W. Bush, Ludwig van Beethoven, Vincent Van Gogh

210: Vladimir Lenin, Michelangelo

209: Christopher Columbus, Buddha

206: Augustus, Karl Marx

205: Charles Darwin, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Elizabeth II

204: Pablo Picasso

203: Abraham Lincoln, Galileo Galilei, Mahatma Gandhi

202: Joseph Stalin

201: Socrates

200: Salvador Dalí

I generated this list by hand, so it's possible I missed some, especially one-named people. Most of these seem legitimate, but I do wonder what David Woodard, Basshunter, and Corbin Bleu did.

The Corbin Bleu thing has been a fascination for awhile, I think. I seem to remember a thread on SomethingAwful or 4chan or something years ago.

I am pretty convinced it was just an in-joke in some online community or even just a group of friends to make this perfectly-fine-but-completely-unremarkable actor on of the most famous people on Wikipedia. Like, some completely mundane actor immortal by making him one of the most ubiquitous pages on Wikipedia is pretty funny.

I honestly could see myself doing that if I had more friends.

It's almost certainly all one individual in Saudi Arabia, though their motivation is unknown as is why they try so hard to obscure their identity. The full story is pretty fascinating and I highly recommend this video on it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ_pEP3fRvM

Yeah I actually saw that video.

The Saudi Arabia thing seems compelling, but I stand by that it’s likely just a joke among friends, probably a friend group within Saudi Arabia.

Regarding Corbin Bleu the english wikipedia article itself mentions this oddity [0] apparently some great fan from Saudi Arabia [1](the article in Arabic itself is also unusually verbose [2]) put in the effort. The number (212) essentially didn't move since 2019 (then #5).

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbin_Bleu

>In 2013, an MIT study discovered that Bleu was the third most-common biography article subject among all the different language versions of Wikipedia; pages on him were available in 194 languages, placing below only Jesus (214) and Barack Obama (200), and above Confucius (192) and Isaac Newton (191). The contradiction between Bleu's high notability on Wikipedia and low real-life notability comparative to the aforementioned historical figures made the creation of these pages unusual.[171][172] Years later, a Reddit user found that these translations were likely done by a single user whose IP addresses on Wikipedia locate to Saudi Arabia. By 2019, Bleu had dropped to #5 on the list of biographies, but increased in Wikipedia notability, by then being available in 213 languages.[173]

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/aetmh9...

[2]https://ar.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%83%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%...

There seems to be a recency bias, as the odds of our present day politicians all being as historically important as the rest of the list is unlikely. Makes sense that things of recent media attention are higher priority for translation, irrespective of how "important" they are in the grand scheme of history.

I think the requirement for sources also makes it harder to have more information about people from earlier times in history. Present day politicians are all over the internet and mentioned in reputable newspapers, so easy to find sources for a lot of things, but less easy for people to find reputable (and easily accessible) sources for earlier people.

And an American bias, with American editors still being a relative majority of Wikipedia editors. And a Western bias too, etc.

I don't think we could ever come up with an objective list of "who are the best people ever". Though it could be a fun project to define some criterions and search for who maxes them in history.

Now I wouldn't be so quick to say this, because after all, we are talking about far more than the English Wikipedia here.

The English Wikipedia is the original, the largest, and the most visible project, but it's completely independent from the other ones.

I would say that many of the other language projects have majority non-American editors, because fluent and native speakers are more likely to be able to contribute in a big way to them. Perhaps immigrants to America may hold down a large part as well, but if you peer under the hood of some of these projects, you'll find a lot of their controversies and biases result from nationalism and adherence to regional cultures and customs that differ with American ones.

Now it wouldn't be surprising that most/all projects exhibit an incipient Western bias, because the WMF is a Western organization and based in Western culture, so any editor drawn to that ethos may tend to be less in line with foreign biases. But we have seen, just from disputes that bubble over into enwiki, or Commons or Wikidata, that there is a true diversity to editors, and I think it's a disservice that anyone projects enwiki demographics onto the other projects.

Hum, sure. I would add too that all Wikipedia projects are still related to each other, with the English one being at the center of the graph.

A lot of articles in the French Wikipedia use translated paragraphs from the English one, and I would think it is a similar story for the other Wikipedias, although I don't speak any other languages well enough to verify that.

Similarly, I would think English Wikipedia benefits from articles or bits of articles ported to it from other languages. All that to say, Wikipedia is more connected that you may think.

> Wikipedia is more connected that you may think.

Actually I wrote this same idea 17 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44036737

So I don't know what you think I think, but I already said this is so. Nobody has said any different. The independent governance of the projects is nevertheless a fact, though; they all make independent decisions in terms of content retention as we are discussing in this thread. All the editors who "port" or translate bits of articles are operating independently, and there is actually no way to logically link the material using wikicode; if the text is edited in one place, then its content will diverge from every other place it appears. In other words, the projects are independent from one another, despite "cross-pollination", translation, or "porting" of text from one to another.

> but I do wonder what David Woodard, Basshunter, and Corbin Bleu did

I don't know who the others are, but as someone who grew up 1990s/2000s in Sweden playing video games and being at LAN parties, Basshunter was wildly popular in Sweden at the time, and looking him up now, apparently around the world too. I'm guessing the combination of making songs about video games/internet culture (like "The bot Anna" and "We sit in Ventrilo and playing DOTA") as early as that, with songs translated into other languages had some impact on his popularity, and I feel like many people who'd enjoy Basshunter probably likes nerdy things like editing Wikipedia too.

No one from sports, until 184 Lionel Messi

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