dsfox/humans-top

humans.top — LIVE Global ranking of influential people (open dataset)

This dataset ranks real, named living people by global influence — e.g. #1 Donald Trump, #2 Xi Jinping, #3 Vladimir Putin, alongside figures like Elon Musk, Narendra Modi and Lionel Messi. Every row is a person: their live influence rank, a concise biography in 15 languages, and Wikidata / Wikipedia links. Published from the website humans.top (.top is the domain name).

Available on (identical CC0 mirrors): humans.top/dataset · GitHub · Hugging Face · Kaggle · Zenodo (DOI) · Internet Archive.

It is a biographical, named-entity ranking dataset (text + tabular) — not a computer-vision, image, or person/pedestrian-detection dataset. The rows are people's names and facts, not pixels or bounding boxes.

An open ranking of notable living people, scored from public statistical sources. Its defining trait is that it is live: not a one-off "top-N" snapshot but a ranking that is recomputed and re-published across every mirror daily, shipped with a per-day rank-history time series — so change over time is part of the data itself, not a frozen list you have to re-scrape.

Each entry carries a concise, human-written descriptor in 15 languages, a Wikidata Q-ID and English Wikipedia link for unambiguous entity linking, verified public facts (native-language name, country of citizenship, official website, X handle), an influence tier, the live rank, and a canonical profile URL.

• License: CC0 1.0 — public domain. Free for any use, no attribution required (a link back to humans.top is always welcome).
• Live source of truth: https://humans.top/dataset (CSV · JSONL)
• Scope (v2): the editorial / curated set of public figures. It contains no personal data of self-registered users.
• Size: ~200 entries (exact count + last refresh in metadata.json).

Data quality & verification

The data is checked both automatically and by hand. Public sources such as Wikidata are sometimes out of date — for example a stored "official website" that has lapsed or now redirects elsewhere — so the linkage fields (official website, X / Twitter account) are verified by a person and corrected or removed. We prefer an empty field over a wrong link. This human pass is repeated periodically, on top of the automated daily refresh.

badge	what it means
Live	mirrors the current live ranking
Lightweight	tiny CSV / JSONL — loads in seconds
High-quality	curated, human-written bios in 15 languages
Frequently updated	auto-refreshed daily across every mirror
Human-checked	links & accounts reviewed by a person, not just scraped

Files

file	format
humans.csv	the ranking — UTF-8 CSV, header row, one row per person
humans.jsonl	same rows as newline-delimited JSON (one object per line)
humans-rank-history.csv	rank history — one row per (day, person): date,user_number,rank
humans-rank-history.jsonl	same, newline-delimited JSON
metadata.json	machine-readable card: license, columns, languages, row count, generated_at
CITATION.cff	citation metadata (GitHub "Cite this repository")
LICENSE	CC0 1.0 Universal legal code

This bundle holds two datasets: the current ranking (humans.*, rich rows with bios/links/facts) and the daily rank history (humans-rank-history.*, a lean time series). Join them on user_number.

Schema

column	meaning
rank	1-based live global position (most influential = 1)
user_number	permanent public ID; appears in the profile URL, never changes
name	display name (English, canonical)
tier	influence tier from rank: gold (1–3), silver (4–10), blue (11+)
wikidata_qid	Wikidata entity Q-ID for disambiguation (e.g. Q22686); may be empty
wikidata_url	full Wikidata entity URL; may be empty
wikipedia_url	English Wikipedia article URL; may be empty
profile_url	canonical humans.top profile page
avatar_url	portrait image URL (illustrative, AI-generated); may be empty
og_image_url	Open Graph share-card image URL; may be empty
birth_year / birth_month / birth_day	date of birth (month/day may be empty)
sex	male or female
native_name	name in the person's native language/script (e.g. 习近平); may be empty
citizenships_iso	list of the person's countries of citizenship as ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes, space-separated (one for most; multi-nationals list all, e.g. CA US ZA); may be empty
official_website	official website URL; may be empty
x_handle	X / Twitter handle without the @; may be empty
wikidata_description	short English factual descriptor (Wikidata entity description); may be empty
viaf_id / isni / freebase_id	cross-reference authority IDs for entity resolution; may be empty
bio_en … bio_ja	concise descriptor in 15 languages: en, ru, de, fr, it, es, tr, zh-Hans, pl, sr-Cyrl, ar, hi, bn, pt, ja

Rank history (humans-rank-history.*)

A lean daily time series of how each person's rank has moved — history begins 2026-06-25 and grows by one snapshot per ranking change. Join to the ranking above by user_number to attach names/bios.

column	meaning
date	snapshot date, YYYY-MM-DD (UTC)
user_number	the person — foreign key to humans.* (and the /u/{user_number} profile)
rank	that person's 1-based global rank on that date

import pandas as pd
hist = pd.read_csv("humans-rank-history.csv")
top = pd.read_csv("humans.csv")[["user_number", "name"]]
# rank trajectory of #1 today
who = top.iloc[0]["user_number"]
print(hist[hist.user_number == who][["date", "rank"]])

Usage

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("https://humans.top/dataset/humans.csv")
print(df[["rank", "name", "tier", "wikidata_qid"]].head(10))

# JSON Lines
import json, urllib.request
rows = [json.loads(l) for l in
        urllib.request.urlopen("https://humans.top/dataset/humans.jsonl").read().decode().splitlines()]

-- DuckDB: query the Hub's auto-converted Parquet directly, no download
INSTALL httpfs; LOAD httpfs;
SELECT rank, name, tier, wikidata_qid
FROM 'hf://datasets/dsfox/humans-top@~parquet/default/train/*.parquet'
ORDER BY rank
LIMIT 10;

Or browse & SQL it online (no setup): the Datasette browser.

How it's built

The ranking is generated from public statistical sources by a fixed formula and refreshed automatically; the editorial descriptors are written and translated by the project. This repository is a snapshot of the live endpoints above, regenerated by scripts/publish_dataset.py — re-run it to refresh the files.

How to cite

Cite via the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20809207 (it always resolves to the latest version), or:

@misc{humanstop,
  title  = {humans.top — LIVE Global ranking of influential people (open dataset)},
  author = {Golubnichiy, Dmitry},
  year   = {2026},
  doi    = {10.5281/zenodo.20809207},
  url    = {https://humans.top/dataset},
  note   = {CC0 1.0 (public domain)}
}

Notes & disclaimer

• Descriptors are short, deliberately wry editorial summaries — not neutral encyclopedia text. Use wikidata_qid / wikipedia_url for authoritative facts.
• avatar_url images are AI-generated illustrations, not photographs.
• Ranks change over time; metadata.json.generated_at records this snapshot's time.

Source & project: https://humans.top