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<font size="+1">Wikipedia-Mining Algorithm Reveals World’s Most
Influential Universities <br>
</font><br>
<b><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://tinyurl.com/na38zlz">http://tinyurl.com/na38zlz</a> <br>
</b><br>
<b>An algorithm’s list of the most influential universities contains
some surprising entries.<br>
</b><br>
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.
<p>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.</p>
<p>So an independent way of producing a ranking that avoids these
controversies would be widely welcomed.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Biases can crop up remarkably easily. For example, in the last
century, English has become the <em>de facto</em> language of
science, and the advantage this gives English-speaking countries
is hard to quantify.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 “<a
href="http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544036/artificial-intelligence-aims-to-make-wikipedia-friendlier-and-better/">Artificial
Intelligence Aims to Make Wikipedia Friendlier and Better</a>”).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>They then combine the lists to produce a global ranking. The top
20 most influential universities ranked in this way are:</p>
<p>1. University of Cambridge U.K.<br>
2. University of Oxford U.K.<br>
3. Harvard University U.S.<br>
4. Columbia University U.S.<br>
5. Princeton University U.S.<br>
6. Massachusetts Institute of Technology U.S.<br>
7. University of Chicago U.S.<br>
8. Stanford University U.S.<br>
9. Yale University U.S.<br>
10 University of California, Berkeley U.S.<br>
11. Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany<br>
12. Cornell University U.S.<br>
13. University of Pennsylvania U.S.<br>
14. University of London U.K.<br>
15. Uppsala University Sweden<br>
16. University of Edinburgh U.K.<br>
17. Heidelberg University Germany<br>
18. University of California, Los Angeles U.S.<br>
19. New York University U.S.<br>
20. University of Michigan U.S.</p>
<p>The full 100 are at: <a
href="http://perso.utinam.cnrs.fr/%7Elages/datasets/WRWU/theta_PR.php"
target="_blank"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://perso.utinam.cnrs.fr/~lages/datasets/WRWU/theta_PR.php">http://perso.utinam.cnrs.fr/~lages/datasets/WRWU/theta_PR.php</a></a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The top 20 from this ranking (from 2013, when the Wikipedia
database was compiled) are these:</p>
<p>1. Harvard University U.S.<br>
2. Stanford University U.S.<br>
3. University of California, Berkeley U.S.<br>
4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology U.S.<br>
5. University of Cambridge U.K.<br>
6. California Institute of Technology U.S.<br>
7, Princeton University U.S.<br>
8. Columbia University U.S.<br>
9. University of Chicago U.S.<br>
10. University of Oxford U.K.<br>
11. Yale University U.S.<br>
12. University of California, Los Angeles U.S.<br>
13. Cornell University U.S.<br>
14. University of California, San Diego U.S.<br>
15. University of Pennsylvania U.S.<br>
16. University of Washington U.S.<br>
17. The Johns Hopkins University U.S.<br>
18. University of California, San Francisco U.S.<br>
19. University of Wisconsin, Madison U.S.<br>
20. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Ref: <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.09021" target="_blank">http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.09021</a>:
Wikipedia Ranking of World Universities<br>
</p>
<p><br>
Ken<br>
</p>
<p><br>
P.S.: UW at 55, WSU at 752<br>
</p>
<p>P.P.S.: Moscow State outranks Boise State by 25 to 989, which is
great for the Moscow in Russia.<br>
<br>
</p>
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