A map of the US where city names are replaced by most Wikipedia’ed resident | Hacker News Reader

A map of the US where city names are replaced by most Wikipedia’ed resident

pudding.cool

630 pointsbrandonhall214 comments

Ah fuck, what a good idea and fun project this must have been.

How do people come up with awesome ideas like this? Whenever I have time for a personal project it'll be like... "guess I'll uh.... make this LED on a raspberry pi blink... wheee"

I would bet you probably come up with a really good idea about once a week, and that's being conservative.

The trick is just to store them in some always-accessible note taking app (e.g. Evernote, OneNote, Apple's Notes app) as soon as they come to you (i.e. in the middle of a totally unrelated lecture), and accumulate them over a long period of time (talking years here).

OP here. This idea was from looking at this map. https://www.wearedorothy.com/collections/music/products/u-s-...

It’s beautiful, and reminds me of an idea that I had ... hint ... hint.

I live in Melbourne, Australia. Idle Googling led me to the discovery that someone had rated – as in on Maps, with stars – a tram stop. A municipal function, a concrete slab, a place you must necessarily and unavoidably go if you want a tram. Rated. People! Crazy.

So I want a map that, at the level of ‘Melbourne’, aggregates the Google review for everything in view and gives the entire city a score. Then as I zoom in, eventually to the tram stop, I see the ratings of individual things.

Ultimately I suppose you’d be able to zoom out to the world and see its Google review score.

That would probably just end up being a map of economic conditions in any given section of town. The seedy parts will be lower rated overall (even if there's a highly rated ethnic food joint or whatever), while the swanky parts will have nicer things. That's my guess, although I think you should still do it, because I might be totally wrong. And interesting patterns might still appear even if I'm right.

Even if it is just a map of economic conditions, that's a useful thing to have.

I could imagine it being a great way to find "diamonds in the rough" too where certain places are much higher rated than the places around them.

If it's based only on Google reviews I think it'll be static. For example, the taco Bell in my hometown has 4.5 stars on Google because it's one of the only restaurants in the area.

> Ultimately I suppose you’d be able to zoom out to the world and see its Google review score.

“Music, a mode of creative expression consisting of sound and silence expressed through time, was given a 6.8 out of 10 rating in an review published Monday on Pitchfork Media, a well-known music-criticism website.” [1]

[1] https://entertainment.theonion.com/pitchfork-gives-music-6-8...

> Ultimately I suppose you’d be able to zoom out to the world and see its Google review score.

Mostly harmless?

Huh, it looks like the author of that older map might not have realized that "Pennsylvania 6-5000" is about the telephone number of a hotel in New York City (whose telephone exchange was named after Pennsylvania Station, which was named after the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was named after the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_6-5000_(song)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEnnsylvania_6-5000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Pennsylvania

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Railroad

"Washington Bullets" isn't about Washington state either, which seems like a thing he'd be likely to know, so maybe he wasn't trying to be that strict.

The map was designed to make money, not to be a historical record.

I'm amused that in the blowup of New York State, Canajoharie is called out.

I lived in upstate New York for about 15 years and would not have been able to identify the town -- until a few years ago when They Might Be Giants wrote a song with that title.

http://tmbw.net/wiki/Canajoharie

This is also the reason the well known 1940 swing song of the same name recorded by the Glen Miller band - after the phone number of the Pennsylvania hotel on 8th Ave whose ballroom they regularly played.

And Wyoming, the state, is named for Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_Valley

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming

Also, you need practice, write 5 ideas a day. Doesn't matter what ideas, things might exist or not exist. After a while, you will have a pile of garbage with some really good jewels between them.

PS. It was mentioned in the book, I don't recall which one.

James Altucher's "Choose Yourself" mentions 10 a day, but I don't think it was original.

The real "trick" is to be able to execute on any one of those. Whenever people see some cool project they instantly go "wish I had thought of that", but 99% of the time it's overcoming all the implementation challenges which is the hard part, not coming up with the idea.

This isn't a personal project, it's a piece of content from an actual media company (the pudding is awesome). It's a lot easier to do things like this when you it's literally your job and you have things like a budget and a team to make it happen.

The creator of the Rockstar language was apparently inspired by a tweet he saw. So inspiriaton can come from all sorts of places, but cultivating it into something tangibale is a whole other beast.

It's too bad there are so many duplicates. I think it would be more interesting if it was based on birthplace, since big cities that attract lots of businesspeople/celebrities just get tagged with someone really famous who doesn't have any particular connection with the city (e.g. Elon Musk on Los Angeles, Steve Jobs on basically everywhere in the Bay Area).

The Wikidata "place of birth" field would probably be a reasonably reliable source: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P19

Birthplace would be interesting, but there’s plenty of famous/important people who are connected to a location other than their birthplace. Think sports stars who were on a team far away from their home.

Maybe, but it's still lame that Denver is represented by Peyton Manning. He was there a few years, but he isn't even the first person that the phrase "Denver quarterback" calls to mind.

I mean that probably proves he is Wiki'ed much more than John Elway. Mostly a recency thing I would guess.

Right, but I think that's a problem for large cities like Los Angeles. There's nothing particularly "Los Angeles" about Elon Musk that I know of, he's just really famous and (maybe?) happens to live there.

And with birthplace, I think it's pretty interesting to browse the map for random tiny towns no one has heard of that happen to be the birthplaces of very famous people.

If I had to associate a place with Elon Musk, LA would probably be it. SpaceX is based in the LA area, and IIRC Musk does live down there somewhere (although I don't think it's in LA proper). Musk has also captured quite a lot of attention lately for his various antics and ventures.

The problem that LA has is that there are a lot of very famous people you might associate with it. It seems like a nearly impossible problem to solve.

I do agree that birthplace would be a more interesting map, but I think it would be more interesting for tiny places. I think LA would suffer from the exact same problem.

The person for my hometown on that website seems to only have been born there but moved away before elementary school, so I'm not sure how that's really all that interesting.

Well, it’s interesting to some people because they keep searching for that person.

It’s probably because they were trying to find out when that person lived there.

I grew up in Visalia, CA which lists Kevin Costner, the actor. He was in my high school class in my sophomore and part of my junior year when his family moved away. Although his later fame is what puts him there, we had a Nobel Prize-winning physicist actually grow up there but he never won an Oscar. Seems unfair.

I don't think popularity contests (which is pretty close to what this is) are meant to be fair.

Hulk Hogan is credited as being born in Augusta, GA; but his family moved to Florida when he was one and a half. Also, I'm not sure why Viggo Mortensen is listed way up in north Idaho, he only lived there three years?

Jobs shows up in Palo Alto, San Jose, Mountain View, Cupertino, and strangely, Portland, OR.

Probably because he went to Reed College there before dropping out.

That explains it.

Some more info: https://pdxpeople.com/steve-jobs/

I was born in Houston, Texas, but subsequently lived in 8 other cities in 6 states before I graduated from High School. I usually tell people I am from the last city I lived in when I graduated from High School (even though I haven't had any family that has lived there in decades and I haven't been back since I left for college), but really I don't have a "hometown". I'm not sure what the appropriate city would be for me if I became famous.

Hey, are you me? My childhood wasn't as spread out as yours, but I still lived in four separate towns before I graduated high school, and then went off to college in a fifth town. The first two towns I lived in were close enough together I can name a vague region when someone asks where I'm from, but if they press for details I have a little story to tell.

I think there's also a lot of missing entries because the person's page and/or the town's page doesn't directly link to that person.

I figured the one lone dot in northern Idaho would be Randy Weaver. Nope. Upon checking it turns out there's no direct link between Randy Weaver and Naples, Idaho. The path goes through the Ruby Ridge page.

This is interesting in large part as a demonstration of how bizarre/indefinite the idea of being "from" a place is. For instance, Cambridge, MA isn't headlined by a famous MIT/Harvard academic, or local political figure, or even Neil Gaiman- but instead by Bhumibol Adulyadej, the previous king of Thailand, who was born there while his father was studying at Harvard, and left at the age of 2. Meanwhile, Boston gets John Cena, who was born in a far-out suburb.

That is strange; most places I checked were dominated by figures from popular culture. Huntsville, AL, for example...

No mention of Bruce Springsteen along the entire Jersey shore too.

He's attached to Bradley Beach. Oddly, his actual birthplace (Long Branch) went to Audrey Hepburn's first husband.

Jersey shore resident under the age of 100 here: Good! /s

That said, it's very weird. he's listed on wikipedia as tagged with "People from..." several towns in Monmouth county. Max Weinberg takes one town, but several of the towns Bruce is listed with are taken over by relatively unknown people (Sorry Mel Ferrer and Charlie Puth)

Another point is that in some parts of the country the concept of “city” breaks down. There is basically no meaningful difference between being from suburban neighborhoods of Glendale, AZ and nearby suburban neighborhoods of Phoenix. (People who are too young to be dealing with water bills, garbage collection, etc. often don’t even know which one they live in).

Even the US Postal Service doesn’t necessarily respect local political boundaries. I grew up in Phoenix, close to the Glendale border, and my address said “Glendale, AZ”.

> Even the US Postal Service doesn’t necessarily respect local political boundaries. I grew up in Phoenix, close to the Glendale border, and my address said “Glendale, AZ”.

Oh what the heck! How does that even work? So the official city you live in is not the city that USPS considers you to live in? If a federal form asks you what city you live in, what do you put down (without committing perjury if there is such a risk)? Do you write something different for state and local governments? And how does one figure out what city they officially live in then? Sorry I have so many questions but this one is just twisting my brain in so many ways!

Where I am from cities cannot legally cross county boundaries. But the people who live just across the county line still have a postal address with the name of the city because doing anything else would not make sense on a practical level. In fact I'm not sure if they are technically in a city at all.

Cities can cross county boundaries in some states, though -- NYC, for example, contains five counties within its city borders.

Well, not everyone even lives in an incorporated city or town. Rural areas are usually not part of them, for example. So I don't think there are any federal forms that would ask you that. As far as I know they just ask for your address.

For example, the form to apply for a passport is here: https://eforms.state.gov/Forms/ds11.pdf . The only place it asks for city is as part of the mailing address.

In general, the ways individual states decide to divide up their local administration are just not something the federal government cares about. Arizona could decide tomorrow to abolish all its cities and counties and just administer everything centrally, and they'd be perfectly allowed to do that under federal law.

Another example of federal institutions not matching local ones is court districts. The Southern District of New York (i.e., of New York State) contains part of NYC. The Eastern District contains a different part, and also land that is not part of NYC.

> In general, the ways individual states decide to divide up their local administration are just not something the federal government cares about. Arizona could decide tomorrow to abolish all its cities and counties and just administer everything centrally, and they'd be perfectly allowed to do that under federal law.

This isn't the impression I've gotten though? Just looking at tax forms, 1040 literally asks for "home address" on one line, and "city, town or post office, state, and ZIP code" on the next line. They certainly seem to care about the city? Now the problem is my common sense would dictate that the city should be the one used for the mailing address rather than what you officially live in, but that's not what it literally says -- it just says "city, town or post office". And given you're signing under penalty of perjury it seems kind of awful that there should be this kind of ambiguity?

Yes, "city" is one of the fields in your postal address, which is not necessarily related to what your particular state decides to call its "cities".

If you live in Phoenix but your postal address says "Glendale, AZ", then you would put "Glendale" on that form.

If you are genuinely confused about this and write "Phoenix" instead, (or, for example, "New York, NY" even though your address says "Brooklyn, NY"), I would be very surprised if any court would convict you of perjury. Your statement having been literally true is an affirmative defense to a perjury charge. The worst that will happen is the IRS won't be able to send you mail.

> So I would be surprised if there is any federal form that requires you to put the "city" you live in, outside the context of a USPS address.

Forms that ask for separate physical and mailing addresses often use the shape of a USPS address for the physical address (including ZIP code), even though many of the fields may not apply. “Physical locations all have addresses shaped like postal addresses” is a common belief that is often reflected in form (and software/DB) design.

I would describe the issue here, though, as "Federal government believes everyone has a USPS address (mailing and/or physical)", as opposed to "local political divisions within a state are particularly meaningful to the federal government".

The thrust of my point is the same -- the feds don't ask you to write a city outside the context of an address. The fact that they assume addresses exist is a separate issue, IMO.

> So the official city you live in is not the city that USPS considers you to live in?

Postal addresses have to do with mail delivery and are only loosely associated with political geography.

> If a federal form asks you what city you live in, what do you put down (without committing perjury if there is such a risk)?

The city you live in. See above regarding postal addresses and political geography.

> And how does one figure out what city they officially live in then?

The high latency method is “register to vote, then find out what city’s elections you get ballot material for”. Election authorities can reliably translate postal addresses to electoral districts. (The mappings are publicly available and you can use them directly, but it takes more research to locate them.)

Wow, I see. Thanks!

A substantial portion of people do not live in any incorporated city, town, village, etc. This is part of why the concept of census-designated place exists. It's not just a farmer thing -- a lot of what you would consider to be small towns are unincorporated.

Example: Black Canyon City, a small town (arguably becoming a very outer suburb of Phoenix). Population ~5,000 in 2010. Totally unincorporated with no city hall, mayor, or anything like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Canyon_City,_Arizona

So I would be surprised if there is any federal form that requires you to put the "city" you live in, outside the context of a USPS address.

Nope, the "City" in the address is the name of the Post Office that delivers the mail.

So you may be on the west end of one town, and the post office that's closest to you is in another town (or is just named after another town, the name of the post office can be arbitrary as well). That's your address.

It even affects property values. You can look at boundaries between post offices and people will pay more to have an address with a desirable post-office name.

Learning more every day! Thanks!

> So you may be on the west end of one town, and the post office that's closest to you is in another town (or is just named after another town, the name of the post office can be arbitrary as well). That's your address.

it isn't even that consistent. when living in a rural area, the city in my address was the (very nearby) city. my post office was located in a rural area on the other side of that city, and its address had the name of a small town that maybe legally it was in, but wasn't thought of as being near there.

People even fight over city boundaries all the time, just so their side of the street would fall into a posh area.

The "city" in your postal address is simply the city of your closest post office, the one that delivers your mail.

Municipal boundaries don't matter at all to USPS because that's simply not how they deliver mail. I've lived in three different addresses in three different cities in New York whose mailing address city was a different city than where that place was located.

There exists entire towns that don't have any mailing addresses.

To answer your questions:

you don't really tell government forms when you live, you tell them your address. If anyone (government or not) asked where I lived I'd tell them the city where my house was located, not it's mailing address. But your mailing address could also be a "valid" response, because it's got that mailing address. It's just not at all a big deal and "close enough" is not a problem, honestly, because people don't often know exact political boundaries.

>And how does one figure out what city they officially live in then?

A map, property records, memos from town/city, nearby signage, looking at who's provides your municipal services (garbage, police..), looking who's sending you your property tax bill, maybe your state's website, or just call the closest town/city hall and ask (they can at the very least tell you if your address is or is not in their political jurisdiction)

Voter registration will also usually show which political divisions you occupy.

Much different. East Valley suburbs have more to offer.

Not sure what you mean. Glendale isn't in the East Valley.

Yes. Glendale is West.

I think it's the same error in their methodology that I described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20054845 .

The map uses the list of people from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Cambridge... . However, that page contains sub- and even sub-sub-categories.

Matt Damon, who likely has more page views than Adulyadej, is listed in subcategory "Actors from Cambridge, Massachusetts‎", sub-sub-category "Male actors from Cambridge, Massachusetts‎".

John Cena was apparently born in many places, just like Dwayne Johnson.

The connection seems to be "a link to this city's Wikipedia page appears in the named person's Wikipedia page". It does not look like the contents of the city's page have any bearing, only the person's page.

Yes, this is what I've seen too. Basically if the person's individual wikipedia page has a category at the bottom like "People from X city", then they will be included in the rankings for the city. So it leaves out a bunch of people who were missing that tag.

It would be cool if they could also include the "Notable People" for each city in this ranking in the future.

That’s made obvious by Steve Jobs having an oversized presence on the map in Portland, Oregon... having only gone to college there briefly, before dropping out, and having no other connection to the city. He was more like a visitor than a resident.

That can't be right, or at leats not the whole story. For example, "Joaquin Pheonix" is the most searched person from Gainesville. But there's no mention of Gainesville, or even the state of Florida, on his Wikipedia page. But it does appear to be true that he was a "resident" (more or less) during his teenage years [0].

[0] https://www.gainesville.com/article/LK/20040526/News/6041599...

EDIT: However, he is on Wikipedia's "List of People from Gainesville, FL" [1], so I bet those lists were the primary source of information.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_Gainesvill...

They explicitly say that in their "data and methods" blurb:

> Person/city associations were based on the thousands of “People from X city” pages on Wikipedia. The top person from each city was determined by using median pageviews (with a minimum of 1 year of traffic). We chose to include multiple occurrences for a single person because there is both no way to determine which is more accurate and people can “be from” multiple places.

Expected Lansing would be Magic Johnson but instead its Larry Page. Magic comes back often and is active in local charities, even leading efforts to raise money for college scholarships.

On the other hand Larry Page has to my knowledge never returned or given a dime to local charities. So perhaps that makes people ever more curious about him.

It's not "The person people from Lansing searched the most." It's "the person from Lansing that people search the most". Worldwide, Larry Page is certainly more of a public figure than Magic Johnson.

"Worldwide, Larry Page is certainly more of a public figure than Magic Johnson."

This is HN bubble thinking.

Very few regular people know who 'Larry Page' is.

Almost everyone knows who 'Magic Johnson' is.

Have a look at Google search trends.

Not really. This is people looking at Wikipedia.

Guess: Who's the Alan with the most pageviews in Wikipedia? Who's the Steve?

I left the answers here:

- https://medium.com/towards-data-science/bigquery-without-a-c...

Basically a show-off for BigQuery, but to answer this specific question: The most viewed Alan and Steve in Wikipedia are the ones closer to HN.

    SELECT title, SUM(views) views
    FROM `fh-bigquery.wikipedia_v3.pageviews_2019`
    WHERE DATE(datehour) BETWEEN '2019-01-01' AND '2019-01-10'
    AND wiki='en'
    AND title LIKE r'Alan\_%'
    GROUP BY title
    ORDER BY views DESC
    LIMIT 10

"Worldwide, Larry Page is certainly more of a public figure than Magic Johnson."

Is what I responded to.

Don't misconstrue how much people do not care about business people, and how much they do care about sports figures.

Nobody in my family knows who Larry Page is.

Ok, I see.

Just for fun:

- In Silicon Valley... Magic Johnson has more google searches than Larry Page.

- In India... Larry Page has more google searches than Magic Johnson.

- https://imgur.com/a/KwQ5wJt

Just checking Google Trends, as you suggested...

Larry > Magic might be the HN bubble, but Magic > Larry definitely is the US bubble.

Most of the world does not care about basketball at all.

Except China. I’m always asked about the NBA when I visit China, and I know nothing about basketball.

In the US, the number one Larry that is a rival to Magic is not even Larry Page.

Hilarious: in the US, Larry Bird a guy who has not played ball in almost 30 years (!) is still way more popular than Larry Page. At least according to G trends.

The the OPs point however, Wikipedia is a special place.

How many people ever paid money to go watch Larry Page at work for a day? Corporate executives have wealth and power; let the ballplayers have the celebrity :)

> The most viewed Alan and Steve in Wikipedia are the Silicon Valley ones.

You had me well baffled with this - who is the "Silicon Valley Alan"? The only candidate I could think of was Alan Kay who, with all respect, was never likely to be the most-viewed of all Alans.

(Turns out to mean Alan Turing - I don't think he had any connection with Silicon Valley)

Oops, edited for clarity/intentions to "closer to HN".

Except that it's really "person whose Wikipedia page references Lansing searched the most," which is how you end up with Phil Knight (an Oregon native who started a company famously headquartered in Oregon, and continues to donate huge amounts of money to an Oregon university) for La Quinta, CA, a suburb of Palm Springs in which he happens to have a house.

Actually, no Larry Page isn't according to their stats [1].

So either it's a stats bug, or Magic Johnson is missing a link at all to Lansing in their data.

[1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.or...

They are using category pages like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_East_Lans... to determine the links. Larry Page is in there, while Magic Johnson is in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Dana_Poin...

As a resident of East Lansing I’ve often wondered what was the deal with Larry Page never having anything to do with the town. I figured it’s a tradition if you “make it big” to throw money around in your hometown even if it’s purely for egocentric reasons. Is there bad blood somehow?

East Lansing is best known as the home of Michigan State University which is best known as the school that harbored Larry Nassar while he molested hundreds of american gymnasts.

Who wants to be associated with that?

Larry Nassar is decidedly bad. But you've lost all sense of perspective if you think he defines the place. Or you're a hyper-partisan Wolverine fan;<).

I'll just name one thing that came out of MSU and that the cancer drug Cisplatin. It's saved millions of lives and is known as the gold standard of cancer drugs. I could easily name hundreds more with more impact than Larry Nassar.

https://msutoday.msu.edu/feature/2018/discovering-the-gold-s...

I didn't cherry pick Larry Nassar to make MSU look bad, it was just the first news story from Google when I googled Michigan State University.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/05/29/fears-about-a...

It wouldn't take too many more revelations for deviant sexual exploitation to be the first thing non-sports people think of when they hear the phrase "Big 10". Penn State, Michigan State, Ohio State...

Ok but Larry Page has been ignoring East Lansing since well before the Larry Nassar shit came to light so this is not relevant to the discussion. Tarring an entire city because of a few assholes also doesn’t seem very sporting.

I don't blame the townies. The results seem to be the same whether it's East Lansing MI or State College PA. There is a culture in the Big 10, of tolerating exploitation in service of dubious collegiate athletic achievement. Does the school administration spend a fraction of the time thinking about lifesaving drugs that they spend thinking about football? If legislatures had any regard for their states, they would shut down such rotten institutions.

Well, he did go to the University of Michigan...

I wonder why James Earl Jones isn't listed for Jackson, MI. His page contains a link to Jackson, and Jackson's page contains a link to him. His page has more views than than Paula Faris'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Earl_Jones

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Michigan

https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.or...

Because the creators of the map got their list of names from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Jackson,_... .

Paula Faris is in that list. James Earl Jones is not.

Yes, there is overlap between that category page and the "Notable people" under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Michigan .

> Data and Methods

> Data for this story were collected and processed using the Wikipedia API. The period of collection was from July, 2015–May, 2019, from English Wikipedia. It was inspired in part by this map.

There is a flaw in their method.

Take for example Santa Fe, New Mexico. I expected the most Wikipediaed person would be George R. R. Martin.

Instead, it's Murray Gell-Mann.

Odd. I mean, yes, famous physicist, coiner of 'quark', etc. But, c'mon, compared to George R. R. Martin?

Then go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Santa_Fe,... . While Gell-Mann is on that page, there are also seven subcategories.

  - Actors from Santa Fe, New Mexico‎ (2 C, 16 P)
  - Archbishops of Santa Fe‎ (12 P)
  - Artists from Santa Fe, New Mexico‎ (78 P)
  - Musicians from Santa Fe, New Mexico‎ (16 P)
  - Politicians from Santa Fe, New Mexico‎ (1 C, 26 P)
  - Sportspeople from Santa Fe, New Mexico‎ (11 P)
  - Writers from Santa Fe, New Mexico‎

GRRM is in that last subcategory.

However, it appears to be an uncommon pattern. I tried another 15 or so cities and none of them used subcategories.

Well, Gell-Mann just died, so it could be one of those "whoever is in the news more recently gets the most pageviews" effects.

Sort of like how any mildly funny post on a growing subreddit will become top/all time simply because a lot of people looked at it that day. The next day, there will be even more people to look at it, etc.

"The period of collection was from July, 2015–May, 2019" and it seems unlikely that a one week bump due to Gell-Mann's recent death would be enough to change the balance.

I don't know how to get page view statistics from the Wikipedia API to double-check this.

GRRM's page views far exceed that of Gell-Mann over the years. https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.or... .

There is no way the news of Gell-Mann's recent death could cause the balance to change that significantly. Over 8 million people would have needed to visit his page in a week, for a page which normally gets 9,000 views each month.

Wow, it's not even close.

This is awesome. Fun to zoom in/out and see the names fade in and out.

Thanks!

I'm impressed by how responsive the zooming is.

So it's not "this is the person most wikipediaed in this city" but rather, "this is the person amongst those who are affiliated with this city, who is the most wikipediaed"

Your two version aren't in conflict, although the first is ambiguous. Are you just clarifying that that, in the first version, "in this city" is supposed to be a modifier of "person" rather than the "wikipediaed"?

They are totally different things. The first is influenced solely by Wikipedia users in the city in question. The second is influenced by a combination of all Wikipedia users and Wikipedia's association of people with the city in question.

I understand the claim but I'm disputing it

Is this why San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Mountain View are all Steve Jobs?

SF shouldn't be associated with SJ in my opinion. He lived and worked in the peninsula and just came up here to give talks.

I'm not opposed to renaming Minneapolis, "Prince Town"...

He shows up twice though, once for Minneapolis and once for Chanhassen.

Prince Town and Other Prince Town

... and the town formerly known as ...

Interesting.. I've literally never heard of Anna Kendrick before.

She's a B-list movie star who does some indie stuff.

* She was in two of the Twilight films.

* Pitch Perfect (trilogy).

* Mr. Right. The Accountant. (hitmen with a heart of gold movies).

* A Simple Favor. (stepford wife mystery).

* Drinking Buddies (a brewery drama, it's great)

* Scott Pilgrim vs The World

Scott Pilgrim vs The World

B-list is pretty harsh. She has an Oscar nomination (albeit 10 years ago), and the Pitch Perfect movies made $$$.

Most people can't name her. She's a great actress. That's not contradictory.

see: https://worldwidevitalpr.wordpress.com/2014/09/08/learn-the-...

Nicholas Cage is definitely more famous than Anna Kendrick, for differing reasons.

That list of accolades makes me think B-list is generous... even if I do have a crush on her.

Up in the Air is her biggest movie. Nominated for an Oscar.

Trolls! She's Poppy

They've got an interesting definition of city... Seattle is all one city, but DC has Georgetown, Capitol Hill, and Dupont Circle in addition to a label for the entire city.

Go look at how far NYC gets broken down. Weird choices.

It's based on what wikipedia pages exist. Several neighborhoods in my city are on this map, but nearby incorporated cites are not.

Curious. Why are they almost all men?

And, what's with all the wrestlers!?!

Probably because many of these people are historical figures and - historical records exhibit significant bias toward info about men.

Are you implying the results are doctored in some way?

I believe a more charitable interpretation is wondering why men are searched more often than women when it comes to the data set "people wikipedia'd correlated with location".

Until recently (and still today but to a lesser extent) women were excluded from certain professions (politics, science, engineering, ...) or were not given proper recognition for their contributions (Ex: Margaret Keane, Katherine Johnson, Rosalind Franklin, ...)

IIRC one of the most controversial/edit-warred Wikipedia pages is wresting-related. (Can't find the reference I'm thinking of right now though, so [citation needed] I guess.)

Germans love David Hasselhoff, and Wikipedians love wrestling.

I don't follow wrestling but I've googled some wrestlers before. Their stories (both on and off stage) are often super convoluted and interesting/funny.

See Gwen Stefani from both Anaheim and Fullerton, California. She grew up in fullerton but famously got neighbors agitated from her own rental in Anaheim. Perfecting "I'm just a girl" out of her garage took a long time.

Because wrestling is hugely popular.

That was surprisingly interesting; especially when you zoom in to the small towns.

"Those connected to and victims of criminal acts" are supposed to be excluded, so Ted Bundy should probably be removed from Burlington and Salt Lake City.

edit: and while I'm looking at Lake Champlain, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are in Plattsburgh, NY, though the link doesn't work.

edit 2: Oops, I read "including" as "excluding" because that's what I expected, never mind!

Where do you see that?

I see this:

"Note: any person on Wikipedia is considered, including those connected to and victims of criminal acts. See more about our data and method."

It says in the header that they include them. At least on mobile.

I think it would be interesting if they filtered out any entertainment & sports celebrities to see who remained.

This is really cool! Something that would be nice would be an option to toggle "born in/native" vs. "any association." My hometown, La Quinta, California, has Phil Knight simply because he has a home there. No one I know associates him with La Quinta.

This is interesting as an example of how a person can be well-known yet their biographical details unknown.

Andy Warhol is a good example. Almost everyone in America knows his name and yet (in my experience) almost no one knows that he grew up in Pittsburgh (outside of Pittsburgh, of course.)

Doesn't work for me in Firefox.

If web developers aren't going to bother with cross-browser compatibility it'd be nice if they at least went back to telling visitors which browsers they do support.

Works for me in Firefox 67

Me too. It likes FF 67.0 64 bit on win but dislikes FF 67.0 on 64 bit FreeBSD. The mapbox URLs aren't called on the latter. Are you also on a unix-like system?

Yep, Debian. Other map sites work fine for me (caltopo.com, ridewithgps.com).

Yup same here, other mapping sites are just fine. Do you have a User-Agent masquerader add on available? I have no connectivity to my freebsd box at home now (no, thank you Frontier) or I'd try it and report back. But for the browser dependency it's a good looking site.

worked for me on palemoon

Works for me (FF on Ubuntu)

Works for me with FF 68 on Mac

This was really cool to look at. This was really educational having grown up in a rural area where (I thought) no one of consequence came from. Thanks for sharing!

This is a super cool project. Spot checking WA state (where I was born and still live), the results are accurate and interesting! There are some comments about wanting to resolve duplicates (though duplicates are intentional), would be neat to include a "Born in this city" setting. I believe if the person was born in X city, they would show up in the "List of people from X" page - so not many changes needed.

Bravo!

we sure do love our entertainers!

a little interest makes sense but i've never understood the intense interest that most people have with entertainers and celebrities in general. i'm more interested in people who have, and can, impact my life, like historical figures, friends, family, scientists, and local/regional leaders (political or otherwise).

I was kinda surprised by the Los Alamos result. I was expecting Oppenheimer, instead it was some guy named Drew Goddard.

Ok, that was way more interesting than I expected...

A few bits that are interesting to me (and probably no one else).

The two towns I've lived in are both renamed Grover Cleveland (he was born in one, and spent most of his childhood in the other).

Megyn Kelly attended elementary school in the next town over from where I live currently.

This got me to update Edward Norton's wikipedia entry. He's most likely the most famous person from Columbia, Maryland, he just wasn't categorized as from the town. Though it was interesting seeing Randy Pausch (computer scientist) listed as the town's rep.

Funny how a porn star is the #1 for Miami Beach. I would have expected some other kind of celebrity.

Nitpick: Allen Iverson is from Hampton, Va. Hampton Roads is a name for the region that includes 5+ cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Roads

The map seems like it doesn't specifically stick to municipalities. In New York City it gets granular enough to show that Sylvester Stallone was born in Hell's Kitchen. But for the city of Chicago, it only shows Barack Obama.

What tools are used to create this?

Interesting to see Elon Musk as LA.

Probably because of the Boring Company press about building tunnels under the city.

I think Spacex being located in LA is the more likely candidate.

SpaceX is located in Hawthorne (just south of LA), which has its own dot. It seems that there dataset is just Wikipedia's own lists of people from places. In this case, Elon Musk appears on [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_Los_Angele...

Probably because his residence is listed as "Bel Air, Los Angeles, California" on his Wikipedia page.

Using Wikipedia leads to some weird results. I checked my hometown in NC and would have expected Michael Jordan to be listed as the most famous associated person, but he doesn’t appear on the main Wikipedia entry so we instead got James Taylor.

I saw the same thing, so I checked the Micheal Jordan Wikipedia page and it actually does not contain the text "Chapel Hill".

Hm, I would also be interested in how cities look if your measure is "highest lookup rate relative to national average".

That is, sure, Dwayne Johnson is looked up a lot in some city, but who is looked up most compared to everywhere else?

It's not "people from here look up this person a lot", it's "who is the most-looked-up person that's linked to here <somehow>", where <somehow> is whatever dataset they're using to connect people to places (it's not birthplace; it might be lived-here-at-some-point? or "has the place mentioned in their Wikipedia page", or some composite). The location of the searcher is irrelevant.

Some surprising holes, of towns with famous people but aren't showing at all. For example

* Jayson Williams, NBA player and murderer, Alexandria NJ

* Malcolm Baldridge, US Secretary of Commerce, Woodbury CT

Ninja edit: but I'm glad to see Dennis Ritchie in Summit, NJ

I'm from Utah....I love how Ted Bundy is #1 for not just Salt lake but looks like the whole state.

Edit: I'm living in utah, from Ohio, I do not claim Utah citizenship. I'm also not Mormon (ex-mormon/agnostic). Cheers!

Robert Redford comes up ironically enough for Provo. I thought his house was in Park City, but I guess it’s a weird city limits thing. Hope he isn’t letting any unmarried couples stay over!

It would be cool to see the same map for people worldwide, not just in the US.

TIL Samuel L. Jackson is the most wikipedia'd person who's ever lived in Washington DC. That's kind of wild considering the competition includes every US president ever, among many others.

The controls are terrible. I can't figure out how to zoom, and if I right click I get into some sort of "tilt" mode that can't be escaped from without reloading the page.

Doesn't seem to work in Firefox/Linux/Privacy mode.

(Ahh, WebGL)

I'm surprised that George R R Martin doesn't show up for Santa Fe. Surely he's more-googled / wikipediaed than Murray Gell-Mann?

Gell-Mann recently died, so it probably skews the results

I think it has do with how they're pulling the data. GRRM doesn't seem to appear on the wikipedia category page for people from Santa Fe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Santa_Fe,...

That has a link to here, where he's listed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers_from_Santa_Fe...

Edited 2015. So they must not have pulled this data.

Well, you did miss Jimmy Wales, who grew up in Huntsville, AL, and attended Randolph School there. How did you select your data?

Louisville, KY: Tom Cruise (born in Syracuse, NY, but parents born there) replaces Muhammed Ali (by far most famous native).

Seems a bit unfair.

Muhammad Ali was born in Louisville, KY and not Paradise Valley (CA?). Wikipedia says this. Noticed this right off the bat.

Birthplace isn't the criteria, residence is.

Very cool, but...Murray Gell-Man for Santa Fe? Not George R.R. Martin? Drew Goddard for Los Alamos, not Richard Feynman?

Besides the physics, Gell-Mann is known for the place that makes Santa Fe known to people who have no idea where it is -- the famous Santa Fe Institute.

Danny DeVito upsets The Boss in Asbury Park! Did not see that one coming. Any other notable upsets?

It seems to be the person has lived there at any point in their life?

Southwest Florida is an interesting one...

I love this! Thanks for sharing!

I think I'd go with largest Wikipedia article, probably in most cases the same.

Interesting, it should be fun to extend this to the rest of the world

Weird that they have Kurt Cobain in Montesano, not Aberdeen.

This is very cool! Maybe you could add Puerto Rico as well.

No fair, Ted Bundy gets Tallahassee AND Salt Lake City?

Marilyn Monroe -> Compton was unexpected…

aah I always knew Sarah Palin was famous for something...didn't know until now she is from Alaska.

Vienna, VA >> Robert Hanssen

question : why do WWE-related queries account for so much Wikipedia traffic?

Wrestling is massively massively popular...on a scale that most people in upper middle class bubbles do not realize.

Good job, Oak Harbor, WA.

I don't think Lynyrd Skynyrd from Jacksonville FL is a person.

How do I zoom?

mouse wheel.

double tap to zoom in on my trackpad. don't know how to zoom out.

shift+double click zooms out for me.

Why US only?

Really was expecting this to be an XKCD thing.

Elon Musk has LA? hahahaha

I'm a bit disappointing that Mr Hands, the guy that died from getting penetrated by a horse, isn't the most Wikipedia'ed resident of Enumclaw

Story for anyone interested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumclaw_horse_sex_case

Why isn't Linus used for Portland?! Steve Jobs. Pfft.

Torvalds or Pauling?

Torvalds!

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