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

[komali2]

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"

[pizza]

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).

[pembrook]

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.

[trollsund]

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.

[baddox]

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

[cgy1]

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.

[irrational]

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.

[sizzzzlerz]

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

[snazz]

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.

[dsfyu404ed]

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.

[maxander]

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.

[umanwizard]

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”.

[mcguire]

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

[eesmith]

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".

[jandrese]

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

[rhcom2]

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

[acheron]

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.

[sparky_z]

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...

[Fezzik]

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.

[sudosteph]

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.

[rmason]

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.

[sparky_z]

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.

[stallmanite]

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?

[Thorrez]

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...

[sampo]

> 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.

> 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.

[karmakaze]

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

[hkmurakami]

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"

[duxup]

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

[mark-r]

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

[JCharante]

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

[wharnal]

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.

[moate]

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

[graywh]

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

[cure]

Curious. Why are they almost all men?

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

[acheron]

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.

[gereshes]

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, ...)

[reaperducer]

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

[magissima]

"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!

[digikata]

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

[the_watcher]

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.

[keiferski]

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.)

[jlarocco]

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.

[howard941]

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?

[ascorbic]

Works for me with FF 68 on Mac

[rueynshard]

Works for me (FF on Ubuntu)

[Estyn]

Works for me in Firefox 67

[danmg]

worked for me on palemoon