User:Zelkia1101/Vital people

This is a personal project that runs concurrent with the 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.

=People (500 articles)=

Actors, comedians, and performers (15 articles)

 * 1)  Julie Andrews
 * 2)   Lucille Ball
 * 3)  Sarah Bernhardt
 * 4)   Humphrey Bogart
 * 5)  Marlon Brando
 * 6)  Clint Eastwood
 * 7)   Judy Garland
 * 8)   Audrey Hepburn
 * 9)  Katharine Hepburn
 * 10)  Harry Houdini
 * 11)  Madhubala
 * 12)  Marilyn Monroe
 * 13)   Monty Python
 * 14)  Laurence Olivier
 * 15)  John Wayne

Directors and screenwriters (10 articles)

 * 1)  Charlie Chaplin
 * 2)  Walt Disney
 * 3)  D. W. Griffith
 * 4)   Alfred Hitchcock
 * 5)  Stanley Kubrick
 * 6)  Akira Kurosawa
 * 7)  Leni Riefenstahl
 * 8)  Martin Scorsese
 * 9)   Andrei Tarkovsky
 * 10)  Orson Welles

Painters (22 articles)

 * 1)  Hieronymus Bosch
 * 2)  Pieter Bruegel the Elder
 * 3)   Caravaggio
 * 4)   Salvador Dalí
 * 5)   Jacques-Louis David
 * 6)  Albrecht Dürer
 * 7)  Vincent van Gogh
 * 8)  Francisco Goya
 * 9)  El Greco
 * 10)  Hokusai
 * 11)  Frida Kahlo
 * 12)  René Magritte
 * 13)  Henri Matisse
 * 14)   Claude Monet
 * 15)  Georgia O'Keeffe
 * 16)  Pablo Picasso
 * 17)  Raphael
 * 18)   Rembrandt
 * 19)  Peter Paul Rubens
 * 20)   Leonardo da Vinci (Level 1)
 * 21)  Johannes Vermeer
 * 22)   Andy Warhol

Cartoonists and illustrators (3 articles)

 * 1)  Hergé
 * 2)  Norman Rockwell
 * 3)  Dr. Seuss

Sculptors (3 articles)

 * 1)  Gian Lorenzo Bernini
 * 2)   Michelangelo (Level 1)
 * 3)  Auguste Rodin

Architects (6 articles)

 * 1)  Filippo Brunelleschi
 * 2)  Le Corbusier
 * 3)  Antoni Gaudí
 * 4)  Imhotep
 * 5)  Vitruvius
 * 6)  Frank Lloyd Wright

Photographers (1 article)

 * 1)  Ansel Adams

Ancient (8 articles)

 * 1)   Aeschylus
 * 2)  Aesop
 * 3)  Euripides
 * 4)  Homer (Level 1)
 * 5)  Ovid
 * 6)  Sappho
 * 7)  Sophocles
 * 8)  Virgil

Post-classical (8 articles)

 * 1)  Dante Alighieri (Level 1)
 * 2)  Geoffrey Chaucer
 * 3)  Du Fu
 * 4)  Omar Khayyam
 * 5)  Li Bai
 * 6)  Petrarch
 * 7)   Rumi
 * 8)  Murasaki Shikibu

Early modern (8 articles)

 * 1)   William Blake
 * 2)  Miguel de Cervantes
 * 3)  Matsuo Bashō
 * 4)  John Milton
 * 5)  Molière
 * 6)  William Shakespeare (Level 1)
 * 7)  Jonathan Swift
 * 8)  Voltaire

Modern (26 articles)

 * 1)  Chinua Achebe
 * 2)  Hans Christian Andersen
 * 3)  Jane Austen
 * 4)   Lord Byron
 * 5)  Albert Camus
 * 6)  Agatha Christie
 * 7)  Charles Dickens
 * 8)  Emily Dickinson
 * 9)   Fyodor Dostoevsky
 * 10)  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 * 11)  Ernest Hemingway
 * 12)   Victor Hugo
 * 13)  Henrik Ibsen
 * 14)  James Joyce
 * 15)  Franz Kafka
 * 16)  Gabriel García Márquez
 * 17)  Yukio Mishima
 * 18)  Toni Morrison
 * 19)  George Orwell
 * 20)  Edgar Allan Poe
 * 21)   Rabindranath Tagore
 * 22)  J. R. R. Tolkien
 * 23)  Leo Tolstoy (Level 1)
 * 24)   Mark Twain
 * 25)  Walt Whitman
 * 26)  Virginia Woolf

Art music (18 articles)

 * 1)    Johann Sebastian Bach
 * 2)  Ludwig van Beethoven (Level 1)
 * 3)  Johannes Brahms
 * 4)  Frédéric Chopin
 * 5)  Claude Debussy
 * 6)   George Frideric Handel
 * 7)  Joseph Haydn
 * 8)  Edward Elgar
 * 9)  Hildegard of Bingen
 * 10)  Franz Liszt
 * 11)  Gustav Mahler
 * 12)   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Level 1)
 * 13)  Niccolò Paganini
 * 14)  Ravi Shankar
 * 15)   Igor Stravinsky
 * 16)  Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
 * 17)  Antonio Vivaldi
 * 18)  Richard Wagner

Popular music (17 articles)

 * 1)   Louis Armstrong
 * 2)  The Beatles
 * 3)  Chuck Berry
 * 4)   Johnny Cash
 * 5)   Miles Davis
 * 6)  Bob Dylan
 * 7)   Marvin Gaye
 * 8)   Billie Holiday
 * 9)  Michael Jackson
 * 10)  Aretha Franklin
 * 11)  Umm Kulthum
 * 12)  Fela Kuti
 * 13)  Bob Marley
 * 14)  Édith Piaf
 * 15)  Elvis Presley
 * 16)  Frank Sinatra
 * 17)   Selena

Businesspeople (10 articles)

 * 1)   Al Capone
 * 2)   Andrew Carnegie
 * 3)  Marcus Licinius Crassus
 * 4)  Henry Ford
 * 5)  Jakob Fugger
 * 6)  Bill Gates
 * 7)   Steve Jobs
 * 8)   J. P. Morgan
 * 9)  John D. Rockefeller
 * 10)  Cornelius Vanderbilt

Land exploration (8 articles)

 * 1)  Roald Amundsen
 * 2)   Ibn Battuta
 * 3)  Samuel de Champlain
 * 4)  David Livingstone
 * 5)  Marco Polo (Level 1)
 * 6)  Robert Falcon Scott
 * 7)  Ernest Shackleton
 * 8)  Henry Morton Stanley

Sea exploration (10 articles)

 * 1)  Jacques Cartier
 * 2)  Leif Erikson
 * 3)   Christopher Columbus (Level 1)
 * 4)  James Cook
 * 5)  Vasco da Gama (Level 1)
 * 6)   Ferdinand Magellan
 * 7)  Juan Ponce de León
 * 8)  Hernando de Soto
 * 9)  Amerigo Vespucci
 * 10)  Zheng He

Air and space exploration (7 articles)

 * 1)  Buzz Aldrin
 * 2)  Neil Armstrong
 * 3)   Amelia Earhart
 * 4)  Yuri Gagarin
 * 5)  John Glenn
 * 6)   Charles Lindbergh
 * 7)  Valentina Tereshkova

Ancient (14 articles)

 * 1)  Aristotle  (Level 1)
 * 2)  Augustine of Hippo
 * 3)  Cicero
 * 4)   Confucius (Level 1)
 * 5)  Diogenes
 * 6)  Epicurus
 * 7)  Herodotus
 * 8)   Laozi
 * 9)   Plato (Level 1)
 * 10)  Pāṇini
 * 11)  Pythagoras
 * 12)  Socrates
 * 13)  Sun Tzu
 * 14)   Thucydides

Post-classical (5 articles)

 * 1)  Avicenna
 * 2)   Thomas Aquinas
 * 3)  Erasmus
 * 4)  Ibn Khaldun
 * 5)  Niccolò Machiavelli

Early modern (18 articles)

 * 1)  Francis Bacon
 * 2)  Jeremy Bentham
 * 3)   Edmund Burke
 * 4)   René Descartes (Level 1)
 * 5)  Denis Diderot
 * 6)  Thomas Hobbes
 * 7)    David Hume
 * 8)  William Jones
 * 9)  Immanuel Kant
 * 10)   John Locke (Level 1)
 * 11)  Thomas Robert Malthus
 * 12)  Michel de Montaigne
 * 13)  Montesquieu
 * 14)  David Ricardo
 * 15)  Jean-Jacques Rousseau
 * 16)   Adam Smith (Level 1)
 * 17)  Baruch Spinoza
 * 18)  Mary Wollstonecraft

Modern (18 articles)

 * 1)  Simone de Beauvoir
 * 2)  Franz Boas
 * 3)  John Dewey
 * 4)  Friedrich Engels
 * 5)   Sigmund Freud (Level 1)
 * 6)  William James
 * 7)  Carl Jung
 * 8)  John Maynard Keynes
 * 9)   Søren Kierkegaard
 * 10)  Karl Marx (Level 1)
 * 11)  John Stuart Mill
 * 12)  Friedrich Nietzche
 * 13)  Ivan Pavlov
 * 14)    Bertrand Russell
 * 15)  Arthur Schopenhauer
 * 16)  Alexis de Tocqueville
 * 17)   Max Weber
 * 18)   Ludwig Wittgenstein

Christianity (16 articles)

 * 1)  John Calvin
 * 2)  Francis of Assisi
 * 3)   Saint George
 * 4)  Ignatius of Loyola
 * 5)  Jesus (Level 1)
 * 6)  John the Apostle
 * 7)  John the Baptist
 * 8)  Judas Iscariot
 * 9)   Pope John Paul II
 * 10)  John Knox
 * 11)    Martin Luther (Level 1)
 * 12)  Mary, mother of Jesus
 * 13)  Saints Cyril and Methodius
 * 14)   Paul the Apostle (Level 1)
 * 15)  Saint Peter
 * 16)  Grigori Rasputin

Islam (5 articles)

 * 1)  Aisha
 * 2)   Ali
 * 3)  Abu Bakr
 * 4)  Muhammad (Level 1)
 * 5)  Omar

Judaism (1 article)

 * 1)  Maimonides

Buddhism (3 articles)

 * 1)  Gautama Buddha (Level 1)
 * 2)  Nagarjuna
 * 3)  Kūkai

Hinduism (3 articles)

 * 1)   Adi Shankara
 * 2)  Swami Vivekananda
 * 3)  Vyasa

Other (2 articles)

 * 1)   Mahavira
 * 2)  Zoroaster

Ancient (20 articles)

 * 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)

 * 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)

 * 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)

Africa (6 articles)

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

Asia (11 articles)

 * 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)

 * 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)

 * 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)

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

United States (9 articles)

 * 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)

 * 1)  B. R. Ambedkar
 * 2)  Susan B. Anthony
 * 3)  Steve Biko
 * 4)  Blackbeard
 * 5)  John Brown
 * 6)  Bartolomé de las Casas
 * 7)  Frederick Douglass
 * 8)   Mahatma Gandhi (Level 1)
 * 9)   Che Guevara
 * 10)   Theodor Herzl
 * 11)   Helen Keller
 * 12)  Martin Luther King Jr.
 * 13)   Osama bin Laden
 * 14)  Maximilien Robespierre
 * 15)   Rosa Parks
 * 16)   Margaret Sanger
 * 17)  Spartacus
 * 18)  William Wilberforce
 * 19)   Mother Teresa
 * 20)  Harriet Tubman

Ancient figures (8 articles)

 * 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)

 * 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)

 * 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)

 * 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)

 * 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)

 * 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)

 * 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)

 * 1)   Muhammad Ali
 * 2)  Wilt Chamberlain
 * 3)  Bobby Fischer
 * 4)  Edmund Hillary
 * 5)  Bruce Lee
 * 6)   Diego Maradona
 * 7)  Jesse Owens
 * 8)  Pelé
 * 9)  Jackie Robinson
 * 10)  Babe Ruth