My Take | Fortune article on Joshua Wong Chi-fung in the top 10 for errors

Editors love running top lists for all sorts of things, like the best hamburger joints, worst celebrities' tattoos and top movies of the year. They are cheap to produce and get readers talking. Fortune's latest list of 50 of the world's greatest leaders is another one of those.

So we are told without a hint of irony that US singer Taylor Swift and our very own Joshua Wong Chi-fung are among the world's top 10 leaders. Interestingly, Swift at sixth place is well ahead of Wong, who rounds off the top 10.

Many people have disputed the magazine's judgment. Here, I only dispute the facts. It's rare to manage to get so many key facts wrong about your subject in the same article. Yet, Fortune seems to have achieved a gold standard of error in its write-up on Wong.

"His non-violent protest message and energetic idealism galvanised crowds that, over months, numbered in the hundreds of thousands," it said.

"[T]he protesters paralysed Hong Kong for three months." Really?

The whole Occupy idea was firstly the brainchild of a university law lecturer. Of the three main Occupy sites, only one - Admiralty - was planned and organised by student leaders. And of these, virtually all the leaders were from the University of Hong Kong and the Federation of Students, which represents university students. Wong's Scholarism did call for a boycott of secondary school classes, a call deeply resented and resisted by most parents and teachers. It was mostly university students who responded to a class boycott and mobilised for Occupy.