Hidden revolution of human priorities: An analysis of biographical data from Wikipedia

An innovative study of Wikipedia biographical pages is presented. It is shown that the dates of some historical cataclysms may be reproduced from peculiarities of lifespan changes over time. Time dependence of number of biographical pages related to a year has a broken linear trend in logarithmic scale. It shows a sudden change of the slope from 0.0006 to 0.008 per year near 1700 AC. Presumably, this reflects the emergence of new ways of information dissemination associated with printing of books and newspapers. Cultural or historical significance of a person is measured using a number of proper Wikipedia references. We divided human activity into nine categories using keyword search. They cover over 97% of the extracted data. Time dependencies of shares of each category reveal evolution of priorities or interests of mankind. Finally, categories were merged in just two classes. We call them Personal and Public, introducing a new index of human priorities as a ratio of Personal to Public. Being quite constant during almost the entire history, the index shows a sharp jump at the end of the 20th century mainly due to growth of Sport and Art groups over all others. We consider this as a kind of revolution. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.