So I was perusing The World’s Most Famous Disabled People, and I found myself wondering if one could do this in a more quantifiable way. Without futher ado, here are the World’s famous people with disabilities, as worked out by counting the page views on all Wikipedia articles that are both biographies and disability related.

It’s an interesting list – Frida Kahlo was a painter who happened to be missing a leg. Barbara Gordon is interesting, because, of course, she’s fictional (the former Batgirl).  But we’re also missing such ones as Roosevelt, Lord Nelson, and Ludwig van Beethoven, all of whom might reasonably be expected to turn up (I suspect it’s actually that their articles haven’t been tagged by Wikipedia as being disability-related).

This is the first iteration of this article, I’m going to come back and iterate it in a couple of weeks, sort out the links, and maybe add some wikicommons pictures – I think it will be interesting to maintain and it’s also interesting to distinguish between ‘people whose fame is tied to a disability’ and ‘people who are famously disabled’ and finally ‘people whose disability isn’t in the first five facts you know about them’. 

EDIT – October 16:

I should say that the number of views comes from this wikipedia page. And it’s clear from reading the comments here and on Twitter that there are a bunch of people not turing up on the disability wikiproject who should. If anyone has a better methology I’m interested to hear it 🙂

Also I have no idea why wikipedia has Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon, and Gene Vincent, (Reddit tells me Wilma Rudolph wore leg braces as a child…) as  disability related articles – anyone help me out?

Future plans – If I can get some wiki-support I’d like to extend this list to be able to split this list so we had, for example ‘famous people with learning disabilities’ as well.