An ex-Google data scientist studied thousands of successful people on Wikipedia - here's what they have in common

Advertisement
An ex-Google data scientist studied thousands of successful people on Wikipedia - here's what they have in common

oprah barack obama

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Unless you're famous for doing something terrible, having your own Wikipedia page is probably a point of pride.

Advertisement

The question on Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's mind is: What does it take to actually attain that level of prominence?

Stephens-Davidowitz is a former Google data scientist and Harvard-trained economist. He's also the author of the book "Everybody Lies," which presents research on how internet searches can get at people's innermost thoughts.

Instead of calling people into a lab, Stephens-Davidowitz prefers to look at what the masses are confessing to Google at 8:36 p.m. on a Wednesday. This data can also be harnessed to learn a few things about what makes people successful.

To do that, Stephens-Davidowitz downloaded all of Wikipedia - "You can do that sort of thing nowadays," he wrote - and plucked more than 150,000 editor-approved entries about individuals to comprise his initial dataset. His metric for success was simply that the included individuals had their own Wikipedia page.

Advertisement

Here's what he found.

Get the latest Google stock price here.