[Vision2020] Wikipedia-Mining Algorithm Reveals World’s Most Influential Universities

[Kenneth Marcy]

Wikipedia-Mining Algorithm Reveals World’s Most Influential Universities

*http://tinyurl.com/na38zlz
*
*An algorithm’s list of the most influential universities contains some 
surprising entries.
*
Where are the world’s most influential universities? That’s a question 
that increasingly dominates the way the public, governments, and funding 
agencies think about research and higher education.

The problem, of course, is that it’s hard to produce an objective 
ranking of almost anything, let alone universities. Cultural, 
historical, and geographical factors can all influence these rankings in 
ways that are hard to quantify.

So an independent way of producing a ranking that avoids these 
controversies would be widely welcomed.

Today, we get such a ranking thanks to the work of Jose Lages at the 
University of Franche-Comte in France and a few pals. They’ve used the 
way universities are mentioned on Wikipedia to produce a world ranking. 
Their results provide a new way to think about rankings that may help to 
avoid some of the biases that can occur in other ranking systems.

Biases can crop up remarkably easily. For example, in the last century, 
English has become the /de facto/ language of science, and the advantage 
this gives English-speaking countries is hard to quantify.

And there are other factors that are unique to university rankings. Some 
institutions focus more on teaching than on research—how should these 
factors be balanced?

The new work attempts to get around some of these problems using the 
Pagerank algorithm that Google famously uses to rank websites in search 
results. This uses the network of links between nodes on a network to 
determine those that are the most important.

The key insight is that the algorithm counts a node as important if 
other important nodes point to it. So it repeatedly works through the 
links, recalculating the importance of every node on each iteration, to 
come up with a ranking.

Exactly this process can be applied to Wikipedia articles. Each 
university mentioned in an article is a node in the network, and the 
links pointing toward it are used to determine a ranking (see also 
“Artificial Intelligence Aims to Make Wikipedia Friendlier and Better 
<http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544036/artificial-intelligence-aims-to-make-wikipedia-friendlier-and-better/>”).

Lages and co apply this process to 24 different language editions of 
Wikipedia. This database contains some four million articles in English, 
1.5 million in German and around a million in each of French, Dutch, 
Italian, Spanish, and Russian. It also includes Chinese, Hebrew, 
Hungarian, and so on. “These 24 languages cover 59% of world population 
and 68% of the total number of Wikipedia articles in all 287 languages,” 
they say.

The team first determines a ranking for each language and point out that 
each language edition tends to favor its own universities. So the top 
100 list in French includes 32 French-speaking universities, the top 100 
in German includes 63 German-speaking universities, and so on.

They then combine the lists to produce a global ranking. The top 20 most 
influential universities ranked in this way are:

1. University of Cambridge U.K.
2. University of Oxford U.K.
3. Harvard University U.S.
4. Columbia University U.S.
5. Princeton University U.S.
6. Massachusetts Institute of Technology U.S.
7. University of Chicago U.S.
8. Stanford University U.S.
9. Yale University U.S.
10 University of California, Berkeley U.S.
11. Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
12. Cornell University U.S.
13. University of Pennsylvania U.S.
14. University of London U.K.
15. Uppsala University Sweden
16. University of Edinburgh U.K.
17. Heidelberg University Germany
18. University of California, Los Angeles U.S.
19. New York University U.S.
20. University of Michigan U.S.

The full 100 are at: 
http://perso.utinam.cnrs.fr/~lages/datasets/WRWU/theta_PR.php 
<http://perso.utinam.cnrs.fr/%7Elages/datasets/WRWU/theta_PR.php>.

There are many familiar names on this list but there are also some 
interesting differences with conventional rankings. Perhaps the most 
influential of these rankings is the Academic Ranking of World 
Universities compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University since 2003.

The top 20 from this ranking (from 2013, when the Wikipedia database was 
compiled) are these:

1. Harvard University U.S.
2. Stanford University U.S.
3. University of California, Berkeley U.S.
4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology U.S.
5. University of Cambridge U.K.
6. California Institute of Technology U.S.
7, Princeton University U.S.
8. Columbia University U.S.
9. University of Chicago U.S.
10. University of Oxford U.K.
11. Yale University U.S.
12. University of California, Los Angeles U.S.
13. Cornell University U.S.
14. University of California, San Diego U.S.
15. University of Pennsylvania U.S.
16. University of Washington U.S.
17. The Johns Hopkins University U.S.
18. University of California, San Francisco U.S.
19. University of Wisconsin, Madison U.S.
20. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland

Lages and co make some interesting observations. For a start, they point 
out that the Wikipedia list tends to favor older universities that have 
had a greater cultural impact. For example, Humboldt University of 
Berlin is ranked 11 on the Wikipedia list but does not appear in the top 
100 of the conventional ranking, surprising for an institution that has 
educated 29 Nobel Prize winners. The inclusion in the new ranking is 
perhaps because of the greater cultural and historical importance of 
this university in the arts and humanities rather than sciences.

The diversity of countries is greater in the Wikipedia list, including 
universities from Africa such as Al-Azhar University in Egypt, for 
example. Japanese and Indian universities are more prominent. Germany is 
the second highest ranked country after the U.S. and followed by the U.K.

By contrast, the conventional list ranks the U.S. most highly followed 
by the U.K. and then Australia. In general, U.S. universities are less 
prominent in the new ranking, accounting for 38 percent of the total. By 
contrast, more than half the universities in the conventional ranking 
are from the U.S.

The new ranking isn’t perfect, of course. It lists the University of 
London at 14although this institution is actually comprised of several 
institutions such as University College London and Kings College London, 
which have their own separate listings.

The database does not include languages such as Ukrainian, which almost 
certainly introduces other biases. And Wikipedia articles are open to 
abuse, which may allow future rankings to be influenced by nefarious 
practices.

Nevertheless, the new ranking has some merit as an objective approach. 
While universities generally play down the significance of these kinds 
of rankings, these lists can have a significant influence over funding. 
The French strategy toward higher education and research, in particular, 
is thought to have been significantly influenced by the Shanghai 
rankings (which may also explain the interest of the authors in this topic).

Of course, the Wikipedia ranking is unlikely to replace conventional 
rankings—there are significant vested interests at work. However, it 
provides a new way to analyze the current state of affairs and should 
add to the debate in a useful way.

Ref: http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.09021: Wikipedia Ranking of World 
Universities


Ken


P.S.:  UW at 55, WSU at 752

P.P.S.:  Moscow State outranks Boise State by 25 to 989, which is great 
for the Moscow in Russia.

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