  It is arguable whether history is made by great men and women or vice versa,
but undoubtably social connections shape history. Analysing Wikipedia, a global
collective memory place, we aim to understand how social links are recorded
across cultures. Starting with the set of biographies in the English Wikipedia
we focus on the networks of links between these biographical articles on the 15
largest language Wikipedias. We detect the most central characters in these
networks and point out culture-related peculiarities. Furthermore, we reveal
remarkable similarities between distinct groups of language Wikipedias and
highlight the shared knowledge about connections between persons across
cultures.
