This interactive world map visualizes “a cross-verified database of notable people‘ to show you the most notable person in your hometown – or wherever you want to look.
Topi Tjukanov, a geographer and senior map designer at Mapbox, has compiled the visualization, featuring several influential people from different fields such as culture, science, leadership, and sports. What one contributes to society should be considered remarkable can vary, so researchers tried to refine it and take bias into account where possible.
Each name on the map was determined using a baseline of information extracted from Wikipedia and Wikidata for use in a recent study published in Nature who tried to calculate the fame of a person based on several rules:
The number of Wikipedia editions of each individual;
The length, ie the total number of words found in all available biographies. It equals zero for individuals with only one Wikidata entry and no Wikipedia biography;
The average number of biography views (hits) for each individual between 2015 and 2018 in all available language editions, using an API available in https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/AQS/Pageviews or zero in the absence of a Wikipedia biography;
The number of non-missing items retrieved from Wikipedia or Wikidata for date of birth, gender, and influence domain. The intuition here is that the more striking the individual, the more documented his/her biographies will be;
The total number of external links (sources, references, etc.) of Wikidata.
When you click on each name – larger ones that are more visible from further away rank higher – you can see where each individual ranks notable.
If you are a fan of geography and people, this site can be a cool way to discover people near and far. Or, as it was for me, another reminder that I share the same hometown as Beyoncé.
