Six Israeli Universities in Top 250 in New Wikipedia Ranking

A new academia ranking system proves Israel’s leading role as a global force in academic standing and research.

Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. (Hadas Parush/Flash90)

The Wikipedia Ranking of World Universities, a new technology-based ranking of the world’s most influential universities, has ranked seven Israeli academic institutions in the top 250 universities worldwide, cementing Israel’s position as a global leader in academic research.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is ranked highest among Israeli institutions – 47^th in the world. It is followed by the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) in 108^th place, Tel Aviv University in 168^th place, Weizmann Institute of Science in 183^rd place, Bar-Ilan University in 201^st place, University of Haifa in 211^th place, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 221^st place, Ariel University in 321^st place, and Holon Institute of Technology in 670^th place.

The United Kingdom topped the rankings, with Cambridge and Oxford taking first and second place, followed by American universities of Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton.

Outside the US and the UK, Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany ranked highest at 11^th place, followed by Uppsala University in Sweden in 15^th place.

The Wikipedia Ranking of World Universities is based on a computerized analysis of the number of times that institutions of higher education are mentioned in Wikipedia. The new ranking applies algorithms used by Google to rank websites in search engine results. The ranking is based on the number of references to universities in the 24 different language editions of Wikipedia.

The new ranking method produced results that have an overlap of about 60% with the Top 100 and a 90% overlap with the Top 10 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities, also known as the Shanghai Ranking and widely considered the most objective ranking of the world’s universities.

The creators of the Wikipedia ranking methodology said that the ranking is intended to avoid cultural, historical or geographical biases that can affect traditional ranking systems.

“Ranking approaches are based on human selection rules which cannot be comprehensive and may favor certain cultural choices and preferences,” researchers Jose Lages and Antoine Patt of the Université de Franche-Comte and Dima L. Shepelyansky of the Université de Toulouse wrote in a paper.

“It is thus useful to have an independent statistic method which would rank universities independently of any human rules,” they added. “The Wikipedia ranking can be viewed as a new independent ranking that complements already existing approaches. We hope that our method will be used often together with other rankings.”

By: Michael Bachner/TPS