The most famous persons of every country based on street names (13.000 names) | Hacker News Reader

The most famous persons of every country based on street names (13.000 names)

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12 pointsmolteanu25 comments

If I understand https://github.com/mihaiolteanu/ulitza/blob/7df974105aaf9776... correctly, it means the 9 mentions of "Polhem" are ignored.

I think it should point to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Polhem

"Bellmans" very likely refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Michael_Bellman

Ulricehamn is named in honour of Queen Ulrica Eleonora, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulricehamn but I can see how a street containing "Ulricehamn" may be more directly named after the city.

"Sankt Pers" is an older Swedish term for St. Peter. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrus

"Sankt Eriks" is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_IX_of_Sweden

"Nordenskiölds" is difficult since it can refer to several members of the family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordenski%C3%B6ld_(surname) including (and most likely) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Erik_Nordenski%C3%B6ld .

"Olof Palme" is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olof_Palme with at least 5 streets in Google Maps (the entry has a "3", which I guess is the number of entries in the source data).

"Strindberg" is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Strindberg

The Tegnérsgatan in Stockholm is named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esaias_Tegn%C3%A9r (connection written at https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tegn%C3%A9rgatan). There are at least 5 different cities with a Tegnérsgatan.

Also, in the US data "Santa Fe", "St. Francis", and "San Francisco" all refer to Saint Francis of Assisi.

"The name "Santa Fe" means 'Holy Faith' in Spanish, and the city's full name as founded remains La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís ('The Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi').[5][6]" from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe%2C_New_Mexico

"San Francisco was founded on June 29, 1776, when settlers from New Spain established the Presidio of San Francisco at the Golden Gate, and the Mission San Francisco de Asís a few miles away, both named for Francis of Assisi." from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco

"Sir Francis Drake" is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Drake .

The author has take on a very heavy mantle. This is not a task that can easily be automated. Two streets with the same name may easily be named after two different people.

It is not (fully) automated. What is automated is the parsing of raw street names from openstreetmap. Figuring out which name refers to which person and adding the wikipedia link is done by hand. The errors are due to the lack of missing the cultural information, for all the 182 countries currently available, needed to make the right choices (or any choice at at all).

I will consider your input and thank you for it. You can also consider opening a PR if you feel some info is missing or is wrongly laid out.

Thank you for your input.

Yes, Sweden, Norway, US, Canada, UK and some other countries often times only include the last name on the street sign, it seems. If you're not immersed in the local culture it is quite hard to figure out who that person is. Again, thank you for your time and links.

"Two streets with the same name may easily be named after two different people." - that is 100% correct

US names:

"Johnson" is a tough one. It's likely not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson , because the name is so common that we've had two presidents with that surname. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Johnson succeeded Lincoln.

"Roosevelt" could be President FDR but it could also be President Teddy Roosevelt, from which the teddy bear is named. Or it could be someone else.

"Warren" is almost certainly not Warren G. Harding as we rarely named things after someone's first name. Warren is a very common name. For example, Warren, PA was named after Major General Joseph Warren, says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren,_Pennsylvania .

Very few of the "Clinton" street names will be for Bill Clinton. It's a very common name. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton and for a list of US place names with "Clinton" see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_(disambiguation)#Unite... .

Some of the Clevelands are named after President Cleveland, but some, like Cleveland, OH, are named after Moses Cleaveland (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Cleaveland#Founding_of_C... for the spelling difference). Cleveland, MN was named after Cleveland, OH (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland,_Minnesota).

There are a lot of Douglas names in the US. Two blocks from my childhood home was Douglas Road, named after John Douglas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Road_(Miami)

At this point I don't think it's possible to get much good data out of this data set without years of manual effort.

Toponymy is hard, slow work.

Would you consider making a pull request?

Indeed, if it's 50-50 for a name, then there is no solution out of it. If it's close to 90-10, then maybe it is safe to pick the 90%. It depends on the scope of the project, I suppose.

Yes, the street names of US, Australia, Canada and a few other countries contain only the person's last name. Hard to figure out which is which. I agree with you.

Apart from the data processing problems already mentioned, there is also a possible bias towards locally-known artists. For Denmark, one of the top scorers is Niels Bjerre, who is fairly obscure in Denmark at large. But if he was well liked in a number of smaller towns that were growing at the right time, he could get streets named for him many times over, while the bar in big cities would be much higher.

I think you are talking about the problem of considering just one person / city.

Big cities can have schools, squares, streets, etc all named after a single person. But they will all be considered as a count of 1. So one city of, say, 2 million has the same "vote" as a small town of 10.000. If that's is what you're thinking about, then yes, you are correct.

What happens in the osm data, though, is that the exact same street can be tagged multiple times, sometimes with slightly different names by different users. That would result in dozen of occurrences for the same person even though there is just one street named after them. The one person/city is a way to avoid that. With the unintended consequences, as you've mentioned, unfortunately.

In the list for The Netherlands, the Dutch painter "Jan Steen" scores remarkably high.

If I understand equivalents.js correctly, this is probably due to the many occurrences of a "Steenstraat", which typically refers to the first street being paved ("steen" is Dutch for stone), and not to the painter.

Yes, Steen is (currently) considered to be the same as Jan Steen.

That's the kind of info that I'm missing not being thoroughly knowledgeable with each country's culture.

Fortunately, it is easy to remedy from the equivalents.js file, as you correctly noticed. I'll modify it and see what comes out.

Thank you for your input.

Jas Steen goes from 200 to 127, without the equivalent.

Haha, that's nice, thank you for this!

I feel a bit awkward for not reaching out directly, and using Hacker News as a large intercom to voice bug reports :)

Don't discount the effects of damnatio memoriae. There have been quite famous men whose name was affixed to major monuments and streets, but having fallen out of favor or becoming quite notorious instead, their names are effaced from the public records, in order to rewrite a more genteel and positive history.

For example, my town recently completed a public campaign to rename anything that bore the name of a KKK member. Of course, the town was founded and built on top of Native American land by Freemasons, KKK, and Odd Fellows, but they don't count anymore.

Yes, that is quite true. The most recent example that I could find is with the current conflict in Ukraine,

https://www.wionews.com/world/zelenskyy-signs-law-banning-ru...

But there are countless examples recorded instances in history,

Street Names and Political Identity: The Case of East Berlin (https://www.jstor.org/stable/260587),

Street Names in Colonial Singapore (https://www.jstor.org/stable/215354)

Street names and political regimes in an andalusian town (https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.2307/3774079)

From Classic to Classy: Changing Fashions in Street Names ( https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/article/download/870/869)

TRACING THE HISTORY OF TEL AVIV THROUGH ITS STREET NAMES ( https://www.israel21c.org/tracing-the-history-of-tel-aviv-th...)

Naming city streets—A chapter in the history of Tel-Aviv, 1909–1947 ( https://www.academia.edu/download/67078055/bf029655702021050...)

Cultural-geographical aspects of street names in the towns of Israel ( http://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/article/download/1226/1225)

Street Names in Beirut, Lebanon ( https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/article/download/790/789)

Street Names in Baghdad, Iraq (Part I & Part II) ( https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/article/download/393/392, https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/article/download/405/404)

There are probably more. The study of naming places has, indeed, a long history. From personal experience, after having skimmed through more than 13.000 wikipedia entries for this project, most of the names are, surprisingly for me, of national heroes, political leaders and religious figures. Science and the arts are way lower than I've expected.

I'm pretty sure the multitude of roads, rivers, and national parks in Western Australia named Fitzgerald are after the 1840s governor of Western Australia Charles Fitzgerald and not the US singer Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996)

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

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

more's the pity.

Would you consider making a pull request?

Your path forward here is global crowd sourcing local knowledge of placenames, documenting disputes and reasons for change, and a system of judgement tied back to regional hubs of naming authority (which themselves can get muddled by time).

You don't get that with pull requests. Many of the people who care most about this kind of data set and it's integrity will not be git - savy.

It's worth taking a shot at it, at least.

No drama, thank you for asking, and I can assure 100% that no Fitzgerald features in Westeran Australia were named after Ella F. and very likely no Australia features older than now - 50 years were either.

I think your datbase is worthy of improvement, I do not think that git operations from program savy viewers is the best way to refine it.

Hypothetically, what's the best framework for harnessing the wisdom of the masses?

Is that a product|project you can leverage|develop to open crowd source better { feature name <--> namesake } mapping across global locales?

Checked this for Finland. I doubt the two top are correct associations.

Kallio does not always refer to person, but is word for visible rock in ground or in mountain. Same goes for kivi which is also a rock. These are for reason common enough surnames. With some famous people associated with them.

Third one Mannerheim is the real winner.

So I could guess there is same issue in also other places.

Of course there are issues and limitation. I am only 99% confident in my own country and culture (Romania). That's what we've learnt in school, that is what we know. There is also a strong German and French influence so those names I've heard as well. This is still just a one-man project.

I can warmly invite you to contribute to the github project. Feel free to open a PR. I value the knowledge of natives more than my own. I often time can only guess.

Thank you for your comment.

Ranked fourth for Germany, a nationalist and likely an anti-Semite [0]. Why is it so difficult to rename stuff? Programmers managed to rename millions of branches from `master` to `main`, just for consistency with their values. I believe a nation should be able to rename a couple of thousand street names and schools as well..

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

The name is just "Jahn" in the openstreet map data.

Can it refer to somebody else?

Every second street name (primarily in front of schools) is named [Friedrich Ludwig] Jahn here. He is often also only referred to by "Jahn" (e.g. "Jahn School"), so I doubt there is any ambiguity in the data. Other examples are `Jahnweg`, `Jahnstrasse`, `Jahnstiege`, all referring to the same person.

The number is 93 if you parse the data from Geofabrik.

I think you are referring to ""Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn", directly. I've also considered "Jahn" and "F.-L.-Jahn" to be the same as the above. That is why it goes higher. To 1873, to be exactly.

As I am not from Germany, though, I am more than willing to adjust it, if there is consensus on it.

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