Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Core biographies/Core list by field

User:Maurreen copied this list from a version of the page on 24 Oct 2007. The names are still believed to be correct, as of 14 Feb 2010. But quality levels have changed.

Listing by field should help give us an idea of the breadth of the list.

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 CORE BIOGRAPHIES

This page has been developed by the WikiProject Biography to be a list of the 200 most important biographies in WP as a way to have a work list of articles to improve. Any such list will be subjective and unlikely to find universal agreement. For the time being, we are no longer accepting any suggestions to change the list.

Currently, this is being used as a worklist for the Version 1.0 Editorial Team. The live worklist can be found at Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Biographies. It is essentially a work list for anyone who chooses to use it.

Biographies followed by (R) are on Wikipedia's Most Referenced Articles Announcements/To do ([ edit] )

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See also and external links

 * 1) A list of "The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History", chosen by Michael H. Hart.
 * 2) 1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millennium (Book published in 1998)
 * 3) Life magazine's list of the Top 100 people who made the Millennium, ranked in order of importance.
 * 4) Lists by Charles Murray, from the book "Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950", compiled mathematically
 * 5) 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, from book by Martin Seymour-Smith
 * 6) Time magazine's 100 people of the century

See also: Wikipedia talk:Core biographies/Published Lists

Criteria
For placement on this list, consider the following criteria.


 * Top - Must have had a large impact outside of their main discipline, across several generations, and in the majority of the world. For instance, Einstein, brilliant physicist, but his theories have affected people outside of physics and in many other countries besides his nation of origin and several generations. His ideas have changed the way people think. No member should give this rating to any biography without first getting Project approval from the other members.

For an understanding of how "Top" relates to potential lower-importance categories, keep this in mind, as it might help decide if a biography is really "Top" or "High," etc.:


 * High - Must have had a large impact in their main discipline, across a couple of generations. Had some impact outside their country of origin.


 * Mid - Important in their discipline


 * Low - A contributor to their discipline and is included in Wikipedia to expand depth of knowledge of other articles.

Athletes and related, 7

 * 1) Muhammad Ali
 * 2)  Michael Jordan
 * 3) Bruce Lee
 * 4)  Pelé
 * 5) Jackie Robinson
 * 6) Babe Ruth
 * 7) Jesse Owens

Artists and architects, 11

 * 1) Giotto di Bondone
 * 2)  Vincent van Gogh
 * 3) Michelangelo
 * 4) Claude Monet
 * 5) Pablo Picasso
 * 6) Raphael
 * 7)  Rembrandt
 * 8)  Auguste Rodin
 * 9)  Leonardo da Vinci
 * 10) Andy Warhol
 * 11) Frank Lloyd Wright

Music, 7

 * 1) Johann Sebastian Bach
 * 2)  The Beatles (R)
 * 3) Ludwig van Beethoven
 * 4)  Michael Jackson
 * 5) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
 * 6)  Elvis Presley
 * 7) Giuseppe Verdi

Performing arts misc., 5

 * 1) Charlie Chaplin
 * 2) Walt Disney
 * 3) Alfred Hitchcock
 * 4) Akira Kurosawa
 * 5) Mikhail Baryshnikov

Writers, 30

 * Non-Western, 0

Ancient world, 3

 * 1)  Aeschylus
 * 2) Homer
 * 3) Virgil

English language, 15

 * 1) Jane Austen
 * 2) Lord Byron
 * 3) Charles Dickens
 * 4) T.S. Eliot
 * 5)  Ernest Hemingway
 * 6)  James Joyce
 * 7) John Milton
 * 8)  Edgar Allan Poe
 * 9) Ezra Pound
 * 10)  William Shakespeare
 * 11) Walter Scott
 * 12) Mark Twain
 * 13)  Walt Whitman
 * 14)  W. B. Yeats
 * 15) William Wordsworth

Continental European languages, 12

 * 1) Dante Alighieri
 * 2)  Jorge Luis Borges
 * 3) Miguel de Cervantes
 * 4) Fyodor Dostoevsky
 * 5) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 * 6) Brothers Grimm
 * 7) Victor Hugo
 * 8) Henrik Ibsen
 * 9) Franz Kafka
 * 10) Marcel Proust
 * 11) Leo Tolstoy
 * 12) Voltaire

Americas, 7

 * 1) Simón Bolívar
 * 2) Hernando Cortes
 * 3) Benjamin Franklin
 * 4)  Thomas Jefferson
 * 5) Abraham Lincoln
 * 6)  Franklin D. Roosevelt
 * 7)  George Washington

Asia and Africa, 15

 * Africa, 4
 * 1) Cleopatra VII of Egypt
 * 2) Hannibal
 * 3) Nelson Mandela
 * 4) Shaka


 * Asia, to 1000 AD, 4
 * 1)  Cyrus the Great, 500s, Persia
 * 2)  Hammurabi, 1700s BC, Babylon
 * 3) Qin Shi Huang, 200s BC, China
 * 4) Emperor Taizong of Tang, 600s, China


 * Asia, 1000 to 1899 AD, 5
 * 1) Akbar, 1500s, Central Asia, Mughal Empire
 * 2) Genghis Khan, 1200s, Mongol Empire, SE Asia
 * 3) Saladin, 1100s, Egypt
 * 4)  Suleiman the Magnificent, 1500s. Ottoman Empire
 * 5) Timur, 1300s, Central Asia


 * Asia, 20th century, 2
 * 1) Ho Chi Minh, 1900s, Vietnam
 * 2) Mao Zedong, 1900s, China

Europe, 29

 * Ancient world to 500 AD, 5
 * 1) Alexander the Great
 * 2) Attila the Hun
 * 3)  Augustus
 * 4) Constantine I
 * 5) Julius Caesar


 * 500 AD to 1600 AD, 6
 * 1)  Charlemagne
 * 2) Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor
 * 3) Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor
 * 4) Heraclius
 * 5) Ivan IV of Russia
 * 6) Philip II of Spain


 * British Isles, 6
 * 1) Winston Churchill
 * 2) Edmund Burke
 * 3)  Elizabeth I of England
 * 4) Henry II of England
 * 5) Henry VIII of England
 * 6) William I of England (William the Conqueror)


 * France, 3
 * 1)  Joan of Arc
 * 2) Louis XIV of France (the Sun King)
 * 3) Napoleon I of France


 * Germany, 3
 * 1) Otto von Bismarck
 * 2) Frederick the Great
 * 3) Adolf Hitler


 * Russia, 5
 * 1) Catherine the Great
 * 2) Mikhail Gorbachev
 * 3) Vladimir Lenin
 * 4) Peter I of Russia
 * 5) Joseph Stalin


 * Elsewhere, 1
 * 1) Benito Mussolini

Religious figures, 9

 * 1) Augustine of Hippo
 * 2) Gautama Buddha
 * 3)  John Calvin
 * 4) Francis of Assisi
 * 5)  Jesus (R)
 * 6) Martin Luther
 * 7) Muhammad
 * 8) Paul the Apostle
 * 9) Zoroaster

Revolutionaries and activists, 7

 * 1) Frederick Douglass
 * 2)  Mahatma Gandhi
 * 3)  Che Guevara
 * 4) Martin Luther King, Jr.
 * 5) Margaret Sanger
 * 6)  Mother Teresa
 * 7)  Mary Wollstonecraft

Explorers, 5

 * 1)  Neil Armstrong
 * 2) Christopher Columbus
 * 3) Ferdinand Magellan
 * 4) Marco Polo
 * 5) Zheng He

Biologists and doctors, 7

 * 1)  Hippocrates
 * 2)  Charles Darwin
 * 3)  Carolus Linnaeus
 * 4) Alexander Fleming
 * 5) Joseph Lister
 * 6) Gregor Mendel
 * 7) Louis Pasteur

Inventors, 9

 * 1) Charles Babbage
 * 2) Alexander Graham Bell
 * 3) Louis Daguerre
 * 4)  Thomas Edison
 * 5) Johann Gutenberg
 * 6) Henry Ford
 * 7) Guglielmo Marconi
 * 8) Cai Lun
 * 9)  Wright brothers

Physical scientists, 17

 * 1) Nicolaus Copernicus
 * 2) Marie Curie
 * 3)  Albert Einstein
 * 4) Michael Faraday
 * 5) Galileo Galilei
 * 6) Stephen Hawking
 * 7)  Johannes Kepler
 * 8) Antoine Lavoisier
 * 9) James Clerk Maxwell
 * 10)  Isaac Newton
 * 11) Robert Oppenheimer
 * 12) Linus Pauling
 * 13) Max Planck
 * 14) Ptolemy
 * 15) Ernest Rutherford
 * 16)  Nikola Tesla
 * 17) James Watt

Mathematicians, 9

 * 1)  Archimedes
 * 2) Euclid
 * 3)  Leonhard Euler
 * 4) Pierre de Fermat
 * 5)  Carl Friedrich Gauss
 * 6) Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
 * 7) Gottfried Leibniz
 * 8)  Blaise Pascal
 * 9) Pythagoras

Ancient China, 3

 * 1) Confucius
 * 2) Laozi
 * 3) Sun Tzu

Ancient Greece, 3

 * 1) Aristotle
 * 2) Plato
 * 3) Socrates

Middle Ages and modern, 12

 * 1)  Thomas Aquinas
 * 2) Francis Bacon
 * 3) René Descartes
 * 4) Thomas Hobbes
 * 5)  David Hume
 * 6) Immanuel Kant
 * 7)  Søren Kierkegaard
 * 8) John Locke
 * 9) Niccolò Machiavelli
 * 10) Friedrich Nietzsche
 * 11) Jean-Jacques Rousseau
 * 12) Henry David Thoreau

Social scientists, 9

 * 1) Sigmund Freud
 * 2) Edward Gibbon
 * 3) Herodotus
 * 4) John Maynard Keynes
 * 5) Karl Marx
 * 6) Thomas Malthus
 * 7) Adam Smith
 * 8)  Thucydides
 * 9)  Max Weber

Non-Western
Noting these, for the sake of breadth:


 * Akbar the Great
 * Akira Kurosawa
 * Bruce Lee?
 * Cai Lun
 * Che Guevara
 * Confucius
 * Cyrus the Great
 * Emperor Taizong of Tang
 * Gautama Buddha
 * Genghis Khan
 * Heraclius?
 * Hernán Cortés
 * Ho Chi Minh
 * Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
 * Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī
 * Saladin
 * Akira Kurosawa
 * Jorge Luis Borges
 * Hernán Cortés
 * Ho Chi Minh
 * Mao Zedong
 * Mother Teresa?
 * Nelson Mandela
 * Qin Shi Huang
 * Saladin
 * Shaka
 * Simón Bolívar
 * Suleiman the Magnificent
 * Sun Tzu
 * Timur
 * Zheng He
 * Zoroaster