This is a personal project that runs concurrent with the Wikipedia:Vital articles project. That project selects what its members consider to be the most important Wikipedia articles and sorts them into different rankings.

My project focuses solely on articles of people or groups of people. In order to feature on this list, the Wikipedia article in question must be about a specific real individual (no mythological figures). Level 1 is the listing of 50 people whose contributions to world history are so substantial that everyone alive should at least have some general knowledge about who they are. Level 2 contains 500 biographies of individuals whose contributions to world history are essential that they feature most often on Wikipedia pages. Level 3 contains 5,000 biographies.

Decisions as to where a biography goes are made based on a determination of historical vitality, which involves judging a person's influence, the prominence of their thought or ideas, and the pervasiveness of their name or beliefs in popular culture. Other factors, such as historical rankings or pageviews, are sometimes taken into account.

If you have any suggestions on how this list could be changed, feel free to leave them on the talk page.

I have finished Level 1 and Level 2. Level 3 is in the works. This is the page for Level 2.

Please visit this page's talk page to view the change log.


Level 1     Top 100     Level 2     Level 3    


People (500 articles)

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Entertainers and directors (25 articles)

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Visual artists (35 articles)

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Writers (50 articles)

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Musicians (35 articles)

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Businesspeople (10 articles)

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Explorers (25 articles)

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Land exploration (8 articles)

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Philosophers and social scientists (55 articles)

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Religious figures (30 articles)

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Political and military leaders (115 articles)

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Ancient (20 articles)

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  1.   Alexander the Great (Level 1)
  2.   Ashoka
  3.     Attila
  4.   Augustus (Level 1)
  5.   Marcus Aurelius
  6.     Julius Caesar (Level 1)
  7.     Chandragupta Maurya
  8.   Cleopatra
  9.   Constantine the Great
  10.     Cyrus the Great (Level 1)
  11.   Hammurabi
  12.   Hannibal
  13.     Hatshepsut
  14.   Leonidas I
  15.   Nebuchadnezzar II
  16.   Pericles
  17.   Qin Shi Huang (Level 1)
  18.     Ramesses II
  19.     Sargon of Akkad
  20.   Trajan

Post-classical (20 articles)

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  1.   Pope Alexander VI
  2.   Alfred the Great
  3.     Charlemagne (Level 1)
  4.   Edward I of England
  5.   Edward III of England
  6.   Ferdinand II of Aragon
  7.   Genghis Khan (Level 1)
  8.   Isabella I of Castile
  9.   Joan of Arc
  10.   John, King of England
  11.   Justinian I
  12.   Kublai Khan
  13.   Mansa Musa
  14.   Saladin
  15.   Timur
  16.   Pope Urban II
  17.   Vlad the Impaler
  18.   William Wallace
  19.   William the Conqueror
  20.     Wu Zetian

Early modern (25 articles)

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  1.     Akbar
  2.     Babur
  3.   Catherine the Great
  4.   Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis
  5.   Charles I of England
  6.   Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor
  7.     Hernán Cortés
  8.     Oliver Cromwell
  9.   Elizabeth I (Level 1)
  10.   Francis I of France
  11.   Frederick the Great
  12.   Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden
  13.   Alexander Hamilton
  14.   Henry V of England
  15.   Henry VIII
  16.   Tokugawa Ieyasu
  17.   James VI and I
  18.       Thomas Jefferson
  19.   Louis XIV
  20.   Marie Antoinette
  21.       Napoleon (Level 1)
  22.   Peter the Great
  23.     Cardinal Richelieu
  24.     Suleiman the Magnificent
  25.   George Washington (Level 1)

Modern (50 articles)

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Africa (6 articles)

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  1.     Idi Amin
  2.   Haile Selassie
  3.   Nelson Mandela (Level 1)
  4.   Gamal Abdel Nasser
  5.   Cecil Rhodes
  6.   Shaka

Asia (11 articles)

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  1.   Corazon Aquino
  2.   Deng Xiaoping
  3.   Indira Gandhi
  4.     Hirohito
  5.     Ho Chi Minh
  6.   Muhammad Ali Jinnah
  7.     Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
  8.   Mao Zedong (Level 1)
  9.   Jawaharlal Nehru
  10.   Pol Pot
  11.     Sun Yat-sen

Western Europe (10 articles)

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  1.   Otto von Bismarck
  2.   Winston Churchill
  3.   Charles de Gaulle
  4.   Heinrich Himmler
  5.   Adolf Hitler (Level 1)
  6.   Leopold II of Belgium
  7.   David Lloyd George
  8.     Margaret Thatcher
  9.   Queen Victoria
  10.   Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

Southern and Eastern Europe (9 articles)

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  1.   Francisco Franco
  2.   Giuseppe Garibaldi
  3.     Mikhail Gorbachev
  4.   Nikita Khrushchev
  5.   Vladimir Lenin (Level 1)
  6.   Benito Mussolini
  7.   Nicholas II of Russia
  8.   Joseph Stalin
  9.     Josip Broz Tito

Latin America (5 articles)

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  1.   Simón Bolívar
  2.   Fidel Castro
  3.     Toussaint Louverture
  4.   Antonio López de Santa Anna
  5.   José de San Martín

United States (9 articles)

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  1.     Dwight D. Eisenhower
  2.   Andrew Jackson
  3.     John F. Kennedy
  4.     Robert E. Lee
  5.     Abraham Lincoln
  6.   Douglas MacArthur
  7.   Ronald Reagan
  8.     Franklin D. Roosevelt
  9.     Theodore Roosevelt

Rebels, activists, and social workers (20 articles)

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Scientists, mathematicians, and inventors (90 articles)

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Ancient figures (8 articles)

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  1.   Archimedes (Level 1)
  2.   Brahmagupta
  3.   Fibonacci
  4.   Jabir ibn Hayyan
  5.   Hypatia
  6.   Hippocrates
  7.   Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
  8.   Ptolemy

Physics (16 articles)

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  1.   Niels Bohr
  2.   John Dalton
  3.     Albert Einstein (Level 1)
  4.   Michael Faraday
  5.   Enrico Fermi
  6.   Richard Feynman
  7.     Stephen Hawking
  8.     Werner Heisenberg
  9.   Christiaan Huygens
  10.   James Clerk Maxwell
  11.     Isaac Newton (Level 1)
  12.   J. Robert Oppenheimer
  13.   Max Planck
  14.   Ernest Rutherford
  15.   Erwin Schrödinger
  16.   J. J. Thomson

Astronomy (6 articles)

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  1.     Nicolaus Copernicus (Level 1)
  2.     Galileo Galilei (Level 1)
  3.   William Herschel
  4.   Edwin Hubble
  5.   Johannes Kepler
  6.     Carl Sagan

Chemistry (12 articles)

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  1.   Svante Arrhenius
  2.     Robert Boyle
  3.   Marie Curie (Level 1)
  4.   Humphry Davy
  5.   Rosalind Franklin
  6.   Fritz Haber
  7.     Otto Hahn
  8.   Dorothy Hodgkin
  9.     Antoine Lavoisier
  10.   Dmitri Mendeleev
  11.     Linus Pauling
  12.   Joseph Priestley

Life sciences (14 articles)

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  1.     Norman Borlaug
  2.   Rachel Carson
  3.   George Washington Carver
  4.   Charles Darwin (Level 1)
  5.   Alexander Fleming
  6.   William Harvey
  7.     Edward Jenner
  8.     Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
  9.   Carl Linnaeus
  10.   Joseph Lister
  11.   Gregor Mendel
  12.   Florence Nightingale
  13.   Louis Pasteur (Level 1)
  14.   Jonas Salk

Inventors and engineers (16 articles)

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  1.   Alexander Graham Bell
  2.     Isambard Kingdom Brunel
  3.     Wernher von Braun
  4.   Cai Lun
  5.     Thomas Edison (Level 1)
  6.   Gustave Eiffel
  7.     Benjamin Franklin
  8.   Johannes Gutenberg (Level 1)
  9.   Guglielmo Marconi
  10.   Samuel Morse
  11.   Alfred Nobel
  12.   Wilhelm Röntgen
  13.   Nikola Tesla
  14.   James Watt
  15.   Eli Whitney
  16.   Wright brothers

Mathematicians (18 articles)

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  1.   Jacob Bernoulli
  2.   Georg Cantor
  3.   Leonhard Euler (Level 1)
  4.   Fibonacci
  5.     Ronald Fisher
  6.     Carl Friedrich Gauss
  7.   Kurt Gödel
  8.     David Hilbert
  9.   Pierre-Simon Laplace
  10.     Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
  11.   Ada Lovelace
  12.   John von Neumann
  13.   Emmy Noether
  14.     Blaise Pascal
  15.   Henri Poincaré
  16.   Srinivasa Ramanujan
  17.   Bernhard Riemann
  18.   Alan Turing

Sports figures (10 articles)

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