Would you like to know who is the most famous person in a city or town? Whether it’s because you’ll soon be doing tourism or just out of curiosity, now it’s really easy to find out. How? With Notable people: the map that shows the most famous in each city interactive and easy to consult.
An interactive map that tells you who is the most famous person born in your city
Nowadays there are maps for everything: from those that show you the land surface live (Dynamic World), through maps of the ocean floor (Google Earth), to maps that show air quality (Google Maps). However, it seems that someone spotted a niche that was unattended: the map of notable people of each town. Topi Tjukanov, a geographer and senior map designer for Mapbox, decided to take on this project.
The result? Notable People, an interactive map that shows the name of the most important person in virtually any city or town in the world. What areas does the popularity map take into account? fields like the culture, science and discoveries, leadership, as well as sports and games. In addition, the biggest names will be seen from further away on the map, aiming for greater regional or national notoriety, not just local.
How was this selection made? To avoid pointing out possible biases, Tjukanov used as a basis the data of a study published in Nature that purported to calculate who was the most famous person in each place. Specifically, this research followed the following criteria to make the selection:
- The number of edits to the Wikipedia profile of each individual.
- The length (in number of words) of all available biographies. Note: If a person had only one Wikidata entry and no Wikipedia biography, the result for him was zero.
- The average number of visits to the timeline of each individual between 2015 and 2018, including all Wikipedia languages.
- The number of items available in each Wikipedia or Wikidata entry of an individual. The more complete the biography is and the less data is missing, the better your score will be because you consider yourself a “more remarkable” person.
- The total number of external links (sources, references, etc.) from Wikidata related to each profile.
Putting all these criteria together, the result is quite accurate and free of bias, although some people may not like certain results. Have you checked out the Notable people map yet? Depending on the places you check out, you could be in for some surprises, both good and bad.
