https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00570-w
Research
The most influential philosophers in Wikipedia: a multicultural analysis
Institut UTINAM (UMR 6213), équipe de physique théorique, Université Marie et Louis Pasteur, CNRS, F-25000, Besançon, France
a
guillaume.rollin@univ-fcomte.fr
b
jose.lages@univ-fcomte.fr
Received:
29
January
2025
Accepted:
6
July
2025
Published online:
30
September
2025
We explore the influence and interconnectivity of philosophical thinkers within the Wikipedia knowledge network. Using a dataset of 237 articles dedicated to philosophers across nine different language editions (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish), we apply the PageRank and CheiRank algorithms to analyze their relative ranking and influence in each linguistic context. Our findings suggest that while philosophers, and their associated schools of thought, do not serve as the foundational building blocks of the Wikipedia knowledge structure, they remain critical reference points within it. The top ten articles devoted to philosophers for each language edition is determined. We observe significant cultural variations in the ranking of these figures across language editions, with Western philosophers, in particular, being disproportionately represented among the most influential. Furthermore, we compare these results with entries from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, providing insight into the differences between general knowledge networks like Wikipedia and specialized philosophical databases. A key focus of our analysis is the sub-network of 21 presocratic philosophers, grouped into four traditional schools: Italic (Pythagorean + Eleatic), Ionian, Abderian (Atomist), and Sophist. Using the reduced Google matrix method, we uncover both direct and hidden links between these early thinkers, offering new perspectives on their intellectual relationships and influence within the Western philosophical tradition. Our study demonstrates how network analysis techniques can reveal underlying structures and interactions within large-scale knowledge systems, with implications for both historical research and the understanding of knowledge dynamics in modern digital platforms.
Key words: Wikipedia / Philosophers / Presocratics / PageRank / Cultural analysis
© The Author(s) 2025
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
