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

[Robert Dickow]

Well, this was interesting, but the ranking result is suspect. I like the result because my alma mater is pretty high up (10th), but apart from that, one should be quite wary of this list as a raking that is at all accurate. The algorithm itself is actually not new, but using Wikipedia as the source is almost funny to me. Keep in mind how Wikipedia content is contributed. Do we normally rank colleges based on how many times they get mentioned somewhere? I think the interest in the article is certainly there for the contribution to computer science work, but not for college rankings.

 

Bob Dickow, troublemaker

 

From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com] On Behalf Of Kenneth Marcy
Sent: Tuesday, December 08, 2015 8:47 PM
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] Wikipedia-Mining Algorithm Reveals World’s Most Influential Universities

 

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.

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