Name: 1,204,986 Votes Decided: What Is The Best Thing?
Uploaded: 2022-02-23T10:56:40.000Z
Duration: 11 min 12 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

The polling site for this  video was powered by Fasthosts.

UK viewers can enter  their competition to win

a tech bundle and dream PC  setup worth up to £5,000.

This isn't the first time that  this question's been asked.

Several web projects have  tried to answer it before,

some are still running,  and some are defunct.

And the question itself has  been used as a punchline,

asked by an inept, self-obsessed  radio DJ character.

Of course there isn't a meaningful  answer to that question. Of course.

But I think there are  some really interesting  

challenges in trying to  find an answer anyway,

and the results can reveal a  lot more than you might think.

The first problem is  trying to list everything.

I know it's an obvious  thing to say, but:

there are a lot of  things in the universe.

"everything that most people  could form an opinion about".

How do you get a list  of everything like that?

Everything that has a Wikipedia  article also has an entry in Wikidata,

but so does every category of things,  

every property that  something might have,

and every link and connection  between all of those.

And it's all designed to  be processed by computers.

So I figured I'd start  by downloading it.

more than 88 million things exhaustively described.

And most of those things  are not interesting.

More than that, they're going to  be a mystery to almost everyone.

Every named location in the world no matter how obscure,

every species and genus of animal,  enormous numbers of scholarly articles.

If you show most of those to people  and ask them to form an opinion,

the answer isn't just  going to be "I don't know":

So I had to filter  those 88 million things.

And the first steps were  actually kind of easy.

First, I removed all  listings for people.

We're ranking things, so someone  else can do "who is the best person".

But I just removed any item that  was tagged with Q5, "human".

Also, I removed all listings for  groups of people, because: yikes.

Next, places. If you're doing  "what is the best thing",

no country or river or building is ever going to win,

it'll get voted down by political rivalries or people elsewhere  who've never heard of it,

so if the item was tagged  with a latitude and longitude,

Also, anything tagged as  fictional got removed too:

but characters and events  that aren't part of reality.

That still left an  enormous number of items.

But we're only looking for things  that most people will know about,

and there's a really  good metric for that:

I kept anything that had a Wikipedia article in at least fifty different languages.

but fifty seemed to have  the right balance where

almost everything that remained  would be recognisable to most people.

And that brought it down to 8,850 things. Which is a managable number.

But there was no way to  automate the last part.

I had to manually check through all  those thousands of things to find  

Not just things that most people  would vote against because they're  

but things that no-one should be asking  about in a lighthearted web poll.

A couple of disturbing things that were  just listed as "rituals".

Anything to do with the Nazis.  Which it turns out is quite a lot.

They kept showing up under  apparently-innocent categories?

Like, eugenics was just  tagged as "social philosophy".

Mein Kampf, just listed  as "written work".

Unless you kept constantly vigilant  for them, they kept trying to sneak in.

Then there were the dull  groups of things that could  

Every time zone. Every language, every  country's flag and national anthem.

Every individual book  of every religious text.

A lot of mythological figures who weren't tagged as either "human" or "fictional".

"Okay, you know what? I talked  about that for far too long.

"Let's just say I removed the boring  ones, okay? There were a lot of them.

All of which has since been corrected,  but in the snapshot I downloaded,

someone had replaced the title of  "graphics" with "Pro player de fifa"

and the description of  "worm" with "dog go fishing".

Also, "pipe organ" was described as  "wind instrument that causes cancer".

So there's someone out there who  really, really doesn't like pipe organs.

people would still find mistakes, and they did.

But it was good enough. It was time  to ask the world which was best.

One of the best approaches  for ranking items in a list

and then ask them to pick  the best of each random pair.

The best ones will be  consistently voted for,

And as long as you have  enough votes in total,

you don't need to keep track  of all the different pairings:

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1,204,986 Votes Decided: What Is The Best Thing?

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extremely

enormous

reveal