Interactive Version

Graphs of Wikipedia: Influential Thinkers –

While I work out how to extract data from Wikipedia thought I should post this here.

The bigger the node, the larger the betweenness centrality score i.e. the bigger influence that person had on the rest of the network.  These are the most influential figures in the network. However I do agree with…

This however brings us to one of the largest problems in doing work like this; the graph is intrinsically “wrong”. Brendan Griffen.

The inspiration for this graph was from Griffen – who had promised to make the interactive version of his graph available but is yet to do so.

To show just how “wrong” these graphs are – here is exactly the same data but this time a different algorithm (hub) has been used to size the nodes…

Interactive map

The map is only useful when you zoom in close to particular areas or type in a name in the search function.

Below is a close up of a red section that on closer inspection is a group of comedians…