First, we sorted the Wikipedia pages by year, which gives us a better sense of how Miles was referenced throughout his career (*for pages without an obvious year, we ignored it or used birth-year if it was a person).

We expected Wikipedia pages to increase in the years in which Miles released an album (Wikipedia pages are often created for each track and entries are added to collaborators’ career’s section). But references to Miles continue well after his death in 1991 (though Wikipedia certainly favors contemporary topics).

Next, we aggregated each Miles Davis reference into categories. For example, the Greenwich Village page mentions Miles Davis’ role in the neighborhood’s history. The anecdote on D'Angelo’s Brown Sugar page references his early exposure to Miles Davis via his mother – a clear instance of influence.

We also broke-out Miles Davis references in the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia pages, which suggests he was intimately related to the topic.

Here’s a breakdown of the pages:

Let’s take a closer look at the influence category, where Miles is referenced as an influence, for example, on the pages for Radiohead’s Kid A and Wilco.

To simplify things, we'll focus on people and recordings, while also removing 50 obscure pages (under 50,000 visits last year)