Thanks to this interactive map, established from Wikipedia data, it is possible to discover where people known throughout the world come from.
Without knowing it, you may share your city of birth with a famous person.
Celebrities divided into several categories
The map was created by Topi Tjukanov, a Finnish man working at Mapbox, a company specializing in online mapping which has notably provided maps for sites, services and media such as Foursquare, Pinterest, The Financial TimesEtsy, The world or even Snapchat. He also used Mapbox technology to develop this interactive map of famous people.
” Did you know that Freddie Mercury was born in Zanzibar and Barack Obama in Honolulu? Who is the most famous person in your hometown? asks Topi Tjukanov in a tweet featuring his interactive map. It displays the names of celebrities in their place of birth and is divided into different categories that can be selected in order to have a more refined view of the map: culture, research and science, leadership, sports and games. By zooming in on a specific location, more and more names will logically appear in the area.
The names are displayed in different sizes depending on the notoriety of the people, and by clicking on them, it is possible to know if the celebrity is still alive as well as his ” rank of notability “.
Possible work thanks to Wikipedia
Each name was determined from a pool of information pulled from Wikipedia and Wikidata for use in a recent study published in the journal Nature. The latter establishes a cross-checked database of notable people from 3,500 BCE to 2018 CE.
To determine the rank of notability, the researchers based themselves on several elements: the total number of words found in all the biographies available on Wikipedia, the average number of consultations of the biography for each individual between 2015 and 2018 in all the linguistic editions available, the total number of external links from Wikidata, and finally, the number of non-missing items retrieved from Wikipedia or Wikidata for date of birth, gender and area of influence: the more the biography is documented and sourced, the more famous the person.
The card, logically baptized ” Notable People », has its share of surprises in store and should please both history and geography enthusiasts and sports fans.
Source : The Verge
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