Most influential person on Wikipedia

The most influential person in history, based on data gleaned from Wikipedia pages about people born before 1950, is Jesus of Nazareth, the central figure of the Christian religion. The study, led by Dr César A. Hildago (Chile) of the MediaLab's MacroConnections group at MIT (USA), ranked people based on their cultural impact according to the world's largest online encyclopaedia, using parameters such as the number of languages in which their Wikipedia page was available and the number of people known to speak that language. Jesus tops the list with 194 language editions and an available readership of 5.4 billion people. By the author's own admission, this is not a definitive study of absolute cultural significance: it is an analysis of data from Wikipedia. "We use historical characters as proxies for culture," said Hidalgo in Wired magazine (UK edition, November 2012, p 32). "It shows you how the world perceives your own national culture."

The Top 20 most influential people according to the study are:
1. Jesus Christ: Prophet and central figure of Christianity

2. Confucius: Chinese philosopher

3. Sir Isaac Newton: British physicist

4. Gandhi: Indian politician and activist

5. Albert Einstein: German physicist

6. Aristotle: Greek philosopher

7. Vasco da Gama: Portuguese explorer

8. Leonardo da Vinci: Italian artist

9. Plato: Greek philosopher

10. Archimedes: Greek philosopher

11. Mao Zedong: Chinese communist revolutionary

12. William Shakespeare: English playwright

13. Socrates: Greek philosopher

14. Karl Marx: German philosopher and socialist

15. Michaelangelo: Italian sculptor

16. Gautama Buddha: Nepalese spiritual teacher

17. Nelson Mandela: South African politician

18. Galileo Galilei: Italian physicist

19. Julius Caesar: Roman emperor

20. Joseph Stalin: Soviet leader