Eminem: Important after all?

The Sunday after Thanksgiving I wrote about a new book, “Who’s Bigger?” that uses an algorithm to chew on Wikipedia data and rank the most significant people who ever lived. There are some obvious problems with using Wikipedia as a data source, including its tendency to overemphasize the stature of English speakers, Americans, and contemporary figures. I mentioned these issues and noted that contemporary celebrities like Eminem (ranked the 823d most important person who ever lived) and Miley Cyrus (2,009th) might land a bit too high on the book’s list.
In a blog post published several days later, Steven Skienna, coauthor of the book with Google engineer Charles Ward, jumped in to defend his method. He argued that both Eminem and Miley are “among the most famous individuals in the world, and that has to count for something.” Skienna also wrote that their rankings start to look sturdier when compared with celebrities whose reputations have largely solidified:
Another way to think about this is to look for the rankings of comparable figures. We rank Mick Jagger at 1055, essentially equivalent to Eminem. My guess is many readers will not blanch at where our algorithms put the Rolling Stones lead singer. It seems to me that Eminem’s cultural significance in his time is grossly analogous to that of Jagger in his.

He allows that Miley Cyrus is “more of a stretch”, but not exactly an outlier: Shirley Temple, another child star whose reputation survived, isn’t far away at 2,177.

Ultimately, any argument like this ends up with the question: What is significance? The authors argue that we should think about historical figures as memes that propagate or fade through history. And in this view, they argue that Wikipedia is a particularly good place to measure meme strength—and to find out whether, in the end, Miley Cyrus turns out to matter just as much as Shirley Temple.