Predicting Importance of Historical Persons using Wikipedia

Adam Jatowt, Daisuke Kawai, Katsumi Tanaka

Abstract: Wikipedia contains a lot of contemporary as well as history-related information, and given its vast coverage and richness, it can be used to rank entities in a variety of different ways. In this work, we are interested in utilizing Wikipedia for judging historical person's importance. Based on the two well-known lists of the most important people in the last millennium, we look closely into factors that determine significance of historical persons. We predict person's importance using six classifiers equipped with features derived from link structure, visit logs and article content.