  We present the Pantheon 1.0 dataset: a manually verified dataset of
individuals that have transcended linguistic, temporal, and geographic
boundaries. The Pantheon 1.0 dataset includes the 11,341 biographies present in
more than 25 languages in Wikipedia and is enriched with: (i) manually verified
demographic information (place and date of birth, gender) (ii) a taxonomy of
occupations classifying each biography at three levels of aggregation and (iii)
two measures of global popularity including the number of languages in which a
biography is present in Wikipedia (L), and the Historical Popularity Index
(HPI) a metric that combines information on L, time since birth, and page-views
(2008-2013). We compare the Pantheon 1.0 dataset to data from the 2003 book,
Human Accomplishments, and also to external measures of accomplishment in
individual games and sports: Tennis, Swimming, Car Racing, and Chess. In all of
these cases we find that measures of popularity (L and HPI) correlate highly
with individual accomplishment, suggesting that measures of global popularity
proxy the historical impact of individuals.
