This data's definition of "famous" or "notable" is in the "Measuring notability" section of the linked paper:
we build a synthetic notability index using five dimensions to figure out a ranking for this broader set of individuals. These dimensions are:
1. the number of Wikipedia editions of each individual; [i.e. number of languages in which this person has a Wikipedia article]
2. the length, i.e total number of words found in all available biographies. […]
3. the average number of biography views (hits) for each individual between 2015 and 2018 in all available language editions […]
4. the number of non-missing items retrieved from Wikipedia or Wikidata for birth date, gender and domain of influence. The intuition here is that the more notable the individual, the more documented his/her biographies will be; [!]
5. the total number of external links (sources, references, etc.) from Wikidata.
We then determine the quantile values from each dimension and add them all to define our notability measure
To be fair, Wikipedia has access to a lot more primary and secondary sources for people in the 20th century than for people in the first, so I don’t know that Wikipedia is the best metric.
I find it very hard to believe that Jesus never existed. That he's the son of god is debatable - but I thought his existence has been pretty concretely proven time and time again.
Several prophets (likely more than one with the then common name Jesus) had a following in Roman-occupied Palestine. The bible figure is likely an exaggerated amalgamation.
Thanks so much for digging this out! Very useful to know. So, the notability methodology fails massively, as many have noted. Jesus and Muhammad trailing Britney Spears by a factor of 4 or so is my favorite so far ... LOL. But the question becomes, how can the notability be improved. Of course "AI" is probably the answer here, in the same way it is becoming the answer to so many questions/problems. (Just as the answer to every legal question is "it depends".) Two elements pop to mind: (i) Accessing more things outside of the Wikipedia/Wikidata database. (ii) Within the Wiki world, making associations like Jesus ~ Christian ~ bible ~ best selling books.
> Jesus and Muhammad trailing Britney Spears by a factor of 4 or so is my favorite so far
To play devil's advocate (edit: pun entirely not intended!), I'd bet that way more people today could correctly identify a photo of Britney Spears than an accurate rendition of either Jesus's or Muhammed's faces. Obviously this map isn't supposed to be most "recognizable" people, but I think there's something to be said about whether the person itself is different from the mythos around them (which may or may accurately describe their life).
Ah, right, I actually had known about that before, but I must have forgotten! It would be interesting to see if there weren't as much controversy around depicting Muhammed whether the common versions today would be accurate; depicting Jesus isn't discouraged at all in Christianity, but centuries of Europeans depicting him looking like them have established a common trope of a white, fair-haired Jesus, which would not have been at all what he actually looked like given where and when he was from. Given that Islam has been much more continuously practiced in the region where Muhammed lived, I imagine that depictions of him probably wouldn't have been as egregiously inaccurate in terms of race, although it's possible other sorts of cultural expectations might have been adopted over the years.
1) Apply a discount on notability for people based on how near their birthdate is to now. If Hammurabi and Jordan Peterson have the same score, Hammurabi should win by far.
2) Use an additional book corpus. Someone mentioned in books from 1500, 1800 and 2022 should score higher than someone popular in only one era.
Does Pablo Escobar belong in that conversation? Or am I like many others who have just been exposed to the show Narcos which makes up the entirety of our Colombian experience?
Crazy how little women there are, it's like for our entire recorded history we have been ignoring 50% of our potential. Let's hope it gets a lot more mixed!
They weren’t ignored. For most of recorded history the basic unit was the family.
The men were in charge of public affairs of the family, while women were in charge of private and domestic affairs.
It was only recently the basic unit has been further subdivided into individuals, which required many to rely on institutional support on matters that used to be within the family, eg education, pensions, restaurants, clothing shops, apartment complexes, birth control.
The truly ignored throughout history were the peasants and serfs. Most men of significance were from aristocratic or upper class upbringings.
The divide is not between men and women, but haves vs have nots.
Fame is such a bizarre and frankly perplexing concept. It does not
equate to achievement, to competence or success per se. It says
nothing of the goodness or value of a person, the wealth they created,
the families they raised, the hearts they broke, and very little of
the suffering and joy they experienced as actual people. It's an
ever-fading trace left in the (mostly) written records of
institutions, where the narrow spotlight of social consciousness shone
at some time.
What I find most interesting as I explore history and civilisation is
the marginal web that supports what is "notable". Almost every
breakthough has a "revisionist" version of someone else who made a
simultaneous advance. Or allegedly had the limelight stolen from them.
Every Crick and Watson have their Rosalind Franklin. For every Charles
Babbage and Alan Turing there's an Ada Lovelace or Mavis Batey. And
yet those are at least "noted". Who and what lies behind those figures
in the third and fourth rows of history's group photograph, "fame"?
When people used to live in small villages and interacted with no more than 50-100 people in a life time, what was valued is completely different from what is valued today.
Back then they valued honor and integrity. Now what matters is first impressions, “clout”/fame, and
standing above the crowd.
In today’s society we no longer value things like domestic affairs, honor, integrity, and humbleness. Now we try to maximise visibility, fame, and brand.
There is probably a huge forgotten mass of people who humbly did their work, improved their local communities as they needed, and raised the next generation. Those who specifically seek fame will easily outcompete these humble people.
> Back then they valued honor and integrity. Now what matters is first
impressions, "clout"/fame, and standing above the crowd.
I think you're right about all those things J7ke. Values have really
shifted. Yet that still leaves strange unanswered questions that
puzzle me.
Most all of the intelligent people I know are deeply unhappy about
it. And I've worked with a good few "famous" people. They were all
unhappy too. Now we're all older, and great levellers like health,
children and life fulfilment have come into play those that survived
(drugs and more money than they could handle) are happier being
"nobody" again (or at least getting recognised occasionally on the bus
by strangers who say "Didn't you used to be...?"). I actually think
many who were "successful" and had their 15 minutes feel tricked.
Even though they "made it", in the sense of "Being there", they were
never there. The cake was a lie.
By contrast, my father and grandfather's generation lived through
awful, awful times, in wars, rationing, brothers and sisters died, and
they were certainly never "on" the TV or Internet. If they had
recognition it was a medal and a parade. However they seemed to go to
their graves with a sense of having lived.
What does it mean then, when we talk about "what matters"?
Is "what matters" a cruel trick and illusion? Perhaps a way to rob us
of the ordinary well-lived life that really does matter?
you say this as a linear progression, but you're only paying attention to certain written histories and ignoring a lot of anthro/archaelogical research of (large-scale post discovery of agriculture societies) cases where it was otherwise
> Honestly this comment was a very long winded way of saying "women aren't oppressed"
Important discussions ought to have more nuance than a assigning a binary value of being oppressed or not. One step towards this direction will have to be to abandon the notion that you can say X is "more oppressed" than Y, especially when talking about different categories, societies and historical periods. There is nothing to be gained from these comparisons, except for infighting and wasting opportunities to improve one's understanding of the issues that are being dealt with.
This isn't a nuanced important discussion rife with opportunities to learn or some such BS
If the conversation was about how this map doesn't have a lot of women on it, how open and nuanced are you being when the first thing you say is "women aren't being ignored"?
Talk about assigning binary values. I'm not the one denying anything. I'm just pointing our the non sequitur
They are saying that you have to look at the past from the perspective of the people who lived in the past, and not from the perspective of the present.
While from your perspective as someone living in an individualist culture in 2022 there are few women, someone in the past would not have perceived it from that viewpoint as modern individualism had not yet been developed.
The history of our culture and in fact all of humanity is the history of kin groups, that then developed into families, then into individualism (in some places).
If you look at the past from the perspective of the people who lived in in, then it's plain fact that many cultures oppressed women and that women were often seen as less strong, able, smart, etc. which led to reduced opportunities for whatever education existed at the time, learning specialized skills, or ability to hold positions of power.
All of these circumstances existed because of how people in the past thought and acted. This has a direct impact on the map we're looking at, which has mostly famous men. Men who had education, learned specialized skills, ascended to positions of power, etc.
So again like GP said, it's a bad-faith argument to try and shift to talking about class issues when the original point was simply about the gender inequality. They are different issues.
It's somewhat of a misconception that women did not work to produce food as men did. They did and do. An idle pair of hands was a luxury that only the rich could afford. The only reason that we think that there was such a disparity between the sexes is because our history is distorted by the perspective of the rich and privileged classes, who created an entirely separate world for themselves, while also contributing the most accounts of their time. We only remember those who were so well off that they had free time to indulge in the arts and sciences.
Before mechanized agriculture and the green revolution, the vast majority of society was involved in the act of producing food. It had to be that way. People lived in a position of abject food insecurity. Failed harvests killed, and in particularly bad cases such as the great Irish Famine, wiped out vast quarters of the population.
Beliefs are technologies. Just as an iPhone wouldn't work if you took it back in time (no electricity to charge it), most of our beliefs about how the world ought to be wouldn't work either (no food security to sustain them).
We're not talking about making food, we're talking about notable people on the map that OP shared. None of those people are notable for 'producing food', they advanced science, culture, sports, etc. What are you even talking about?
The life of women in the upper class were objectively better than the male serfs.
The major form of oppression back then was by class, then by gender.
It is of course better to be a male aristocrat than a female aristocrat (measured from today’s individualism values ie domestic duties have zero value), but both lived vastly better lives than serfs. Being a lower class woman was an extremely oppressed state, illustrated vividly by books from Victor Hugo.
Nobody is arguing that being rich doesn't entail privelege. So why are you pointing that out? What purpose does it serve other than to distract from the original statement?
I think Ada Lovelace is actually the perfect example of what the OP is talking about. There are fewer famous women in history because women were given less opportunity to excel (and sometimes had achievements they did make stifled or their contribution hidden). Ada Lovelace was both an extraordinary person, and in a very privileged position. Had she just been extraordinary, she wouldn't have had the tools to leverage her abilities. Her pedigree and circumstances allowed her access to the private education and social circle that allowed her to apply her abilities and excel. The issue is that so fewer women were ever given the opportunity to excel, and that still remains the case!
I felt this was an interesting article about how women were stripped of the opportunities to get into software in the 80s to much the same effect as likely many women were stripped of their opportunities during Ada's time: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
> Intersectionality opposes analytical systems that treat each axis of oppression in isolation.
Edit: I am not saying that explains all the complexity, and there has been a lot of criticism, justified or not. However, it is at least a good starting point.
> Being a lower class woman was an extremely oppressed state, illustrated vividly by books from Victor Hugo.
This is true, but also read The Road To Wigan Pier to see the lives of lower class men in England. Go to work, crawl 2 miles underground (unpaid) to get to your work site, work for hours in a small space mining coal, crawl back, get home, scrub off as best you can, eat, sleep, repeat. Almost nothing that wasn't either a crime or being sent to war was as bad as that nightmare of a life.
It's not really fair to put words into people's mouths like that. It's a pithy thing to do in places like reddit to get laughs and "gotcha" moments but I think HN prefers to give people the chance to explain themselves, and the benefit of the doubt.
If you think that's what they believe, then if you ask questions instead you give them the opportunity to explain it better. When you tell someone what they're saying rather than letting them say it, they have to spend time defending themselves against things they never said.
When, as a reaction to the simple statement that there are less women on this map than there could be, someone says "[women] aren't being ignored, poor people are being ignored", I don't need to assume good faith in that individual. The goal of downplaying doesn't have to be stated to be obvious.
If they wanted open and constructive discussion, they shouldn't start out with a destructive statement.
Your apologetics are frankly worrying. If you really think lines of reasoning that downplay the importance of taking note of women and shoehorn male victimhood into those discussions should be given a chance to breathe, I don't think we can have a productive conversation.
> When, as a reaction to the simple statement that there are less women on this map than there could be, someone says "[women] aren't being ignored, poor people are being ignored", I don't need to assume good faith in that individual. The goal of downplaying doesn't have to be stated to be obvious.
Fair enough, I'm not going to argue too hard on that matter since I do agree with your original statement that there could be more women on the map.
> Your apologetics are frankly worrying. If you really think lines of reasoning that downplay the importance of taking note of women and shoehorn male victimhood into those discussions, I don't think we can have a productive conversation.
You're assuming a position I don't have. I was pointing out that your discussion style is counter-productive, that doesn't mean I side with the other commenter, or yourself. But since your point wasn't to engage in discussion, I guess it doesn't matter.
I went looking to see who the entry was for the nearest town to where I live expecting it to be Mary Somerville and was rather disappointed to find it was some chap I'd never heard of.
Yes, I would much rather be a rich woman than a poor man. But I'd rather be a poor man than a poor woman. I'd rather be a poor white man than a poor black man. I'd rather be a poor black man than a poor black woman.
I don't think it helps to have a contest about which forms of discrimination are more impactful, because they all add up.
Gender, race, social class, within which nation's borders one is born... they all add up, and it gets worse if you "lose" in more than one category.
But there are cases when the comparison should be made, and I hint at it in my first sentence. We do spend more effort on gender equality than racial equality because, frankly, white women have more power and value in our society than black men or women. For example the #MeToo movement was triggered and driven by the injustices done to powerful, privileged white women.
Sadly, social justice is driven too often by self-serving interests rather than social justice itself.
>I don't think it helps to have a contest about which forms of discrimination are more impactful, because they all add up.
But it often seems like some are easily overlooked.
When I was born into a poor working family in Poland, my father's monthly salary was worth 15$.
When I was studying I had to carefully plan things like bread in my budget, and I was eating with homeless people regularly.
Yet, I have preserved, got a job as a programmer and life has been relatively easy from that point.
On the grand scale of things I consider myself lucky.
But it's tilting when I hear German doctor raised in upper middle class loudly complaining about how underprivilaged she is compared to me because I'm a man.
Intersectionality a soooo american because it's like your whole society is so much about fighthing for you own class / race / gender AGAINST the other that someone had to make a new word recently to explain what European nations have defined by "universality" in their constitutions for centuries.
For example in france there was a real movement to make school accessible for "every citizen regarding of race, gender and class" during the 3rd republic. But still the new trend now in america is to promote "black-only school". WTF.
Sorry for trolling especially since we don't disagree but sometimes reading american forums is a constant facepalms i just cant' help.
This is a conversation and people are allowed to bring their knowledge, experience and opinions to the table. This thread started from a map showing the apparent locations of famous persons' birthplaces. I don't see how its any less relevant to steer the conversation towards economic inequality than it is towards gender inequality.
If you'd rather talk about "children in trailer parks", then go ahead - it's the same point.
No, "boys in trailer parks" is decidedly not the same point as women being ignored.
The fact that they are both equally relevant makes it utterly stupid that they are being talked about in the same place. If a separate top level comment were made about how poor people aren't on the map then I wouldn't be arguing that. But as a reply to a point about how women aren't on the map, you aren't doing much other than making it about men, by talking about how some men aren't on the map either. It's some "all lives matter" bullshit and should be recognized as such.
> If a separate top level comment were made about how poor people aren't on the map then I wouldn't be arguing that.
Well that's precisely one of the point I was making: that people only care more about VISIBLE inequalities (the gender) which are, in my opinion which you can disagree with, a lower factor of actual inequalities in societies.
At the end of the day I'm not the one who brought "inequalities for women" about a cool map which had a priori no political message. Everyone is free to make their own point of discussion, and you didn't jump out of your seat when this first point about women was made to say it was out of context as you are doing now.
And as a french person it's insane that your culture is so confrontational and tribal that "all lives matters" has to be a divisive statement. Hope you guys will heal at some point.
>a lower factor of actual inequalities in societies.
You can't, and shouldn't compare independent circumstances. You can be poor and a man, you can be rich and a woman.
>and you didn't jump out of your seat when this first point about women
Imagine being a girl on HN. You see this cool map and see wow, not a lot of women I can look up to it seems. And you go to the comments and see someone agrees with you. OK cool, maybe people would start replying with some important women who should be more famous.
Nope. Turns out it doesn't matter, because there are poor people who aren't famous either. You're actually priveleged to want to look up to women when there are poor people you could look up to.
>And as a french person it's insane that your culture is so confrontational and tribal that "all lives matters"
As a French person you don't know the context and therefore the depth of the idiocy of what you just wrote.
There is a concept, you know, of cultural difference. Where if I say something and you react differently than I would, it makes sense because what I said means something different to you. Obviously "all lives matter" doesn't literally mean "all lives matter" in this context. People started saying that in the US because others were saying "black lives matter". But you know who gets disproportionately killed in police confrontations? Not "all people", but black people. So the meaning of "all lives matter" really is "I need to make this about me as well"/"You're talking about something I don't like, so I'm going to make it about something else."
Sure it's tribal. One tribe wants the other to shut up about how people are getting murdered for no reason.
As the person responding to you said, this is a conversation. It's not here for you to dictate the proper direction of. It's for people who are curious to share ideas back and forth. I personally find the responses significantly more interesting that your insults. If you are only interested in shutting down conversations that don't fit your preferred narrative, perhaps you are the problem.
Imagine being a girl on HN. You see this cool map and see wow, not a lot of women I can look up to it seems. And you go to the comments and see someone agrees with you. OK cool, maybe people would start replying with some important women who should be more famous.
Nope. Turns out it doesn't matter, because there are poor people who aren't famous either. You're actually priveleged to want to look up to women when there are poor people you could look up to.
>I personally find the responses significantly more interesting that your insults.
Have you considered that I'm not responding for the benefit of the enjoyment of some disinterested reader?
>If you are only interested in shutting down conversations that don't fit your preferred narrative, perhaps you are the problem.
And isn't this in and of itself shutting down a narrative? Aren't you just admitting that you would prefer if there wasn't all this unpleasantry, and that I'm a problem for not fitting that preference?
I'm not a moderator. I can't "dictate" anything. What I did was point out the problem inherent in a statement. If you got so offended by that and equate it to shutting down conversation, maybe you should examine your biases.
Don't worry Ill allow you to replace "boys in trailer parks" by "humans in trailer parks" in my argument if you want to go make the EXACT SAME POINT somewhere else.
How many potential geniuses ended up herding yaks, or becoming chemical process workers, or died in some pointless war as cannon fodder, or in some hospital due to substandard care?
Potential is cheap and abundant. Using it is what changes the world.
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Einstein had to flee his country to save his life. From the "Encyclopedia Britannica":
> In December 1932 Einstein decided to leave Germany forever (he would never go back). It became obvious to Einstein that his life was in danger. A Nazi organization published a magazine with Einstein's picture and the caption “Not Yet Hanged” on the cover. There was even a price on his head.
He certainly had an uphill struggle and wasn't simply handed everything because of some innate privilege.
But without the enticement of membership in the elite, with a greater share of society's wealth, power and privileges, no one would bother working hard to become doctors, lawyers, software developers and CEOs. We need a stratified society to have all these things the modern world gives us. It is only the desire to escape the cotton fields and sweatshops that spurs people to work. It is the only reason that our world has seen amazing advancements in science, technology and business. Capitalism depends on inequality, and we depend on capitalism.
This is logic of capitalism. This is our society's justification for incredible differences in pay and wealth.
> It is only the desire to escape the cotton fields and sweatshops that spurs people to work.
Why do rich people work?
They don't need to escape the cotton fields and sweatshops.
Slaves worked the American cotton fields - why did they work with no chance of membership in the elite?
I'm pretty sure people in 1860 justified slavery with the same argument "It is the only reason that our world has seen amazing advancements in science, technology and business."
If you look at the list for the most famous people of all time, and especially for men[1], a large majority seem to have originated (and even remained all their life) outside what most people would consider the "privileged elite". Notably absent are some of the wealthiest individuals of all time, Crassus, Jakob Fugger, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller.
Of course, it doesn't disprove being born in favourable circumstances can and will affect your quality of life. But this list seems largely indifferent to how much money or power daddy has.
>it's like for our entire recorded history we have been ignoring 50% of our potential. Let's hope it gets a lot more mixed!
I'm so sick of shit like this. It's so intellectually offensive, I can't be polite any longer.
It's so incredibly rude to dismiss so many great women just because you didn't hear about them, as if being famous is the ultimate test of potential. As if being a famous author or famous SOMETHING is the ultimate goal in this life.
I'll use my mother as an example. She's a truly great woman. She'll never be famous to you (she has no such vain desires anyway), but she's a great human being, much greater than you'll ever be, for she rejects DEMOGRAPHIC quotas, she's honest, and compassionate, and pious, and loving, and fun, and courageous, and every day she lives up to her potential and more, and she inspires her family and friends to do the same. She does what she does and she loves doing it and she does it well.
And how willfully ignorant it is to ignore the different powers and motivations unique to men and to women.
If you think there's a problem with so few famous women, then that's a personal problem, that's a you problem. You are the problem, because you are imposing your own personal beliefs and personal standards onto women.
If your criteria is "Wikipedia notability", we have been ignoring more like 98 per cent of our potential since antiquity. By far the most people who lived and died were subsistence farmers, most of them not even personally free (either serfs or slaves), and good luck making it to Wikipedia as a serf boy from Upper Nowhere, rural Campania of 635 AD.
Sometimes I wonder whether the entire contemporary American obsession with race and gender has been deliberately and cynically manufactured or at least blown up beyond all proportion to keep everyone's eyes away from class, the most formidable societal barrier almost everywhere, including societies that are ethnically fairly homogenous.
Current estimates are that around 100 billion people have ever lived. So that's a lot more than 50% that have been "ignored".
It turns out that if you look for notability or exceptional attributes you will get mostly men. This is due to biology and essentially the whole reason males and sexual reproduction exists.
This doesn't mean that being male will give you a better chance of being exceptional or notable, though. Quite the opposite, in fact. The bar is lower for women because simply being a woman is considered notable precisely because there are so few notable women.
There is an option in the top left that allows you to show city names. Unfortunately, you cannot see the city names and the people names at the same time.
And sisters and daughters... But somehow they never had the same opportunities to get on this "Famous People" list. Last week I told my Daughter she can be a knight (although granted she usually wants to be a princess), and I felt weird and then I felt extra weird.
Or maybe men don't have high expectations of women, or because they benefit from women having a subservient position, aren't very inclined to change society.
I suppose this is actually representing the most famous people in the -western world's lens- rather than the most famous people to each country respectively. For example, Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author, very famous in the west because their books have been translated into English. But would they be the most famous person from Kyoto to people in Japan?
That's something that's always fascinated me about the internet, it's essentially delineated by language and not country. If you google things in Spanish, you get the spanish web. If you google things in Japanese, you get the Japanese web. For a subtle example of this, there's very little crossover between Japanese memes and English memes, it's a whole different web. Japanese web design is also famously different to western web design, it's formed it's own set of UX expectations and principles.
eh - I vaguely disagree. I think most of the people in the US are also off (or at least historically "dated").
Even without looking, I could pretty immediately tell that this was wikipedia data, since most of the names are "textbook famous".
So really - we're both saying that the word "famous" was probably the wrong pick. Should have just said "Map of wikipedia's most known people from every city" and then the skew is clear.
Yes, and for much of the US it's also "What would a foreigner know in this part of the US".
Ex: Atlanta is "Martin Luther King Jr". It's a great pick if you're going for "internationally recognized". But it's not a great pick for "famous" (at least in my opinion).
Just off the top of my head, more valid alternatives might have been:
I agree with what you are saying but you might have picked the single worst example for your point I could imagine. MLK less famous than Spike Lee? C'mon.
You're saying that we should be defining famous as "known far and wide" - which is fine, but that makes "what would a foreigner recognize" a great fit for the pick.
I'm rebutting the idea that this is limited to non-western countries - It's not. If you want a pick who people from a location would identify with more as a local... this data isn't that: every person on my list is in my news much more often than MLK jr.
Ok, how about this: scrape Wikipedia in multiple languages, combine the notability data, and assign weights to appropriate locations. For example notability in Japanese Wikipedia would have more weight in locations where they speak Japanese.
Yes, I realize location != language and it would get tricky in locations with multiple languages like Switzerland or countries with big diasporas. The dataset would still be biased as not all languages have Wikipedia.
It would be a small step into the right direction.
There's a lot of discussion here of the 'western lens' as you bring up, but I'm not sure that's fair criticism. The creator(s) aggregated data and built something very interesting. To complain that the data they used isn't universal doesn't seem fair. I think Wikipedia is a reasonable starting place, but yes, Wikipedia skews geographically.
All datasets have bias. It's okay to acknowledge that and still find insights in the data.
Honestly curious: what highly accessible dataset that allows for the simple creations of 'fame metrics' would be better? I'm not aware of any.
It wasn't a criticism, of course something like this is limited by the data available and that's no the fault of the author. I was just musing on what might be a side effect of using what's available.
There wouldn't be a 'total complete and true set' of data for this task, since not all countries use wiki's to the same extent, and languages don't actually delineate between country (eg: Spanish wikipedia is not exclusively the view of people from Spain, nor is English wikipedia exclusively the views of people from England).
Sorry, I wasn't complaining about your post specifically, just a general tenor that kind of shits on this work because of an unsolvable problem: as you say there's actually no comprehensive dataset that would make it possible.
Your original comment was valid and insightful. I replied to it because it triggered a lot of secondary criticism about sample bias, and those are the comments I was most trying to respond to.
Yeah, similarly Dorothea Jordan, 17th century actress, is ranked above John O'Shea, premiership footballer, or Thomas Francis Meagher, originator of the Irish flag, leader of the 1848 young irelanders rebellion against British rule, and later US general in the american civil war.
If you're going by contemporary sources, I'd expect O'Shea to be on top, if we're including historical sources, I'd expect Meagher to be on top, unless Dorothea has some significant fame elsewhere than her city of birth
The word 'racist' didn't appear until your post. It's a shame we can't discuss obvious language bias without you becoming defensive about imagined sleights.
Favoring a Western lens or English language sources is racist, whether the word was used or not, insofar as it favors white people and the people white people care about. You might disagree with that definition, but it's not like the commenter above is the first person to use it that way.
IMHO the golden years for making friends are the school years, peaking in High School and College. After that it's a desert compared to that oasis.
That said there's a cheat I've heard of for the terminally lonely extravert: Clubs and Volunteering. I haven't tried either myself as I'm an introvert and near hermit happy with my three super-extravert friends that only need to hear from me a couple times a year.
Then there's the ultimate cheat, get married and have kids. Totally worth it, IMHO.
As soon as I saw Leonardo DaVinci and Picasso for Italy and France, I knew this was going to be the western lens, haha. Would be interesting to select the country as a point of reference.
DaVinci, Picasso & other western artists also score highest on the list of most expensive paintings. Would you consider an economic view to be a more balanced measure of fame? Many of the buyers are Middle Eastern or Asian too.
I have no idea, I'm simply stating that in the absence of certainty, it's presumptuous to assume that people across the world have the same perspective that I would.
I had no idea who this was but I guessed cricketer. I guessed right. Seems like Westerners have better taste in Mumbai-ites than Indians do. I mean--noted author vs. guy who excels at weird ball 'n stick game.
On the language internet point, it's pretty amazing, yeah. For example, all the English youtube niches have Spanish language equivalents, and watchers of one are totally unaware that they are sitting right next to watchers of another. Like some sort of shadowverse.
A pity that so much language-agnostic material we'll never see because search engines and algorithms are so effective at this segregation. Translation is good enough for browsing in completely unknown languages for internet exploration fun, but only one at a time -- still waiting for a practical multilingual search engine.
> For example, in countries bordering Russia, science nobel laureates are missing, but racist pseudoscientists and UFO theorists are listed.
Maybe those pseudoscientists and UFO theorists are more "well known" than the Nobel laureates? Also, these are not opposites: there are various examples of Nobel laureates that later became pseudoscientists (see Luc Montagnier [1]).
"Pseudoscientist" in those cases just means they came to disagree with the current dogma. See also people like Kary Mullis or John Ioannidis.
You can't have done real science at one point and then retroactively be declared a non-scientist by people who in many cases couldn't solve a simple equation, let alone conduct the research those people did. Mullis' case is especially ironic, I've heard him called a "conspiracy theorist" by people who use his invention on a daily basis.
I didn't specify a gender at all, not out of some intentionality, that was just the most natural way for me to write that sentence. So I'm not sure what you're talking about frankly.
Answering a question I had looking at this amazing work, the data set has a heavy English influence, but they are aware of it and also worked toward mitigating the effect. From the source:
> This strategy results in a cross-verified database of 2.29 million unique individuals (an elite of 1/43,000 of human being having ever lived) among which 30% come from the 6 non-English editions of Wikipedia, a significant improvement over earlier works that have only focused on English Wikipedia only.
The difference between the EU and US is wild. EU is mostly historical figures, Picasso, Da Vinci, Erasmus, Van Gogh, and of course Adolf. But US, even though some old presidents, it's mostly pop & movie stars.
It's a cool map, now i would really want to play. If i could color code the names by birthdate it would be possible to get a great new insight in regional relevance over time. Also switching between current residence and birth place would be very interesting as well as color coding the distance between birth and current residence to see where attractive places are or how much of a role to become famous the embedding from birth would be.
Very cool project, and also reveals buggy data to fix.
One note if the creator is here: it looks like deprecated locations are included. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q596717 includes both Indiana (deprecated) and Linton, Indiana, and he shows up on the map near the center of Indiana apparently as its most notable person, which is clearly not the case.
Is this your first time on HN? 90% of comments are people either pedantically picking apart the submissions or, if its a product, plugging their own alternative without commenting on the submission at all
No one wants any of that. I just think a balance of good and constructive criticism would add lots of value, but the internet isn't prepared to have that conversation.
Why should I be forced to enjoy the product as it is? It's one thing to make something like this for fun, but if you post it on an online link-sharing platform, you're bound to find people who don't enjoy what you've made.
The most bizarre thing I found is the 'notability' score for Jesus at 204.5 and Muhammad at 152. Both well behind Britney Spears at 59. Britney's fans will be thrilled, I guess.
Clicking around, the notability of Western pop culture folk generally seem enormously inflated.
Some of this doesn't seem correct? For example, I was surprised to see that Ken Jeong was Canadian (shown up and to the right of Michael J Fox, in what looks like Northern Saskatchewan). But I looked it up and he was born in Detroit.
Lots of surprises (to me) scrolling around. J.R.R.Tolkien and Freddie Mercury from Africa. George Orwell and Cliff Richard from India. Some wrongs, though. I see JP Sartre in South America, but the link says Paris.
Cool idea, the main problem I saw when clicking around is that the granularity of people's place of birth (all via wikipedia) is not consistent. Like, one person has my city listed, so this person "owns" the entry for the city, but 10 other people have parts of the city listed (so their wikipedia entry is more correct), so they're listed for that part of town, be it an official part or not. For some people a specific building is known (usually not a hospital), so they "only" own this building. It's a bit weird.
I noticed the same thing. Boston, for instance has a ton of people in individual neighborhoods but smaller cities have one person representing the whole city.
Also, it relies on birth location. So someone who, say, left a city and moved at age 5 will be associated with the city they only lived in for 5 years not the one they spent their formatives years in.
Considering some of the people on there, the HN title could be "famous & infamous", or as the project puts it on the page, "Notable". Still, very awesome project!
Might be worth updating this with the latest from Wikidata: It looks like Elliot Page [0] is listed under his birth name, with the wrong gender too. Just one example, but also I’m sure other things have changed :)
The website is amazing. Maybe we should start a discussion on some of the errors so they can improve the website. So far I know of Diego Maradona, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Washington, and Jake Gyllenhaal. Btw who are the people who ended up in the poles lmaooooo? Have no clue about any of them.
Some surprises when you find people in odd places or don't find them where you expect due to them being born somewhere obscure far from where they gained their fame. For example the "Greatest Canadian" (voted as such in some CBC special) Tommy Douglas does not appear in Saskachewan (most famous person here... Wrestler Roddy Piper actually) but rather a suburb of Edinburgh. Hey I'm learning something!
Would be tricker to compose a map that factors in where they lived independent from where they were born .
When i see young people around me share this with enthusiasm despite the environment that’s been created mostly because of social media, I can’t help but think if this was meant to be a warning.
There's plenty of discussion in this thread on the methodology.
Clearly Hillary has a longer and more verbose Wikipedia entry than any of those other people, which is no way surprising considering her length of tenure as a high profile national politician.
You could be more helpful by presenting your superior approach to programmatically ranking 'fame'.
I wonder what they mean by "notable". Notable folks from my town include announcers for major sports teams, a famous cartoonist, a former director of an international organization, and a Grammy winning musician (among others).
The map indicates the "notable" from my town is a playbook centerfold that married an football player and wrestled a few times, who I had to actually look up.
I always fancied saying to Brad Pitt when I see him, "Ever go to Bea Brittons and play songs on the table's jukebox?". He grew up in Shawnee, Oklahoma.
I spent a lot of time searching and playing songs on the jukebox there, which had all these little remote units for selecting songs on each table. I still wonder what the network for that looked like.
This map has huge generational and institutional biases.
Who is Lee Norris of Greenville, NC? Does anyone know of him here?
I can tell you 8/10 people under 20 know who Mr Beast is.
Does being the leading content producer on the leading content platform not make you more "notable" than someone who had two backing roles on 90's TV sitcoms?
Wikidata has MrBeast listed as being born in Wichita, KS, where he's competing with Joe Walsh for notability. There's probably still a very reasonable argument to be made that MrBeast is more notable, but it's much less clear than Lee Norris.
Dev feedback: It seems the map can get in this weird state where the "focus" is on the horizon rather than the center of the globe, and you can no longer rotate it sensibly. Maybe the rotations get gimbal locked or something? Fixed by refreshing the page. Safari on MacBook Air / trackpad.
Creator here. I've restricted the access token for the data to only incoming traffic from that specific domain (tjukanovt.github.io), so maybe Firefox is doing something weird there. As if you can't access the tileset, you only get that blue ball.
Ha, nice visualization. Some surprises, e.g. I didn't know about Orwell, but literature isn't my strong suite.
The data source seems a bit outdated, as it has Elliot Page still listed as Ellen Page (or there is some other notable person with that name which I don't know).
I'm surprised by the data, to be honest. I've never heard of either of the two "famous" people shown in my hometown. Strange considering we're known for a very famous actress and a very famous hockey player, neither of which showed up at all.
I've lived in about 15 different locations, and the only names I recognize are in very major cities, and one 2nd-largest-in-state city. I have the impression that I've heard of famous people coming from the other towns in the past but I can't remember the specifics.
Just alt-tabbed from an OpenStreetMap chat to HN and took "map" in the title as a verb. Mildly disappointed I don't get to map with them! (Was already wondering how this was going to work, figured it probably means the most well-known mapper or so.)
This is wonderful. I just learnt that a composer I love the music of was born where I currently live (Michael Nyman) and that some of my favourite actors come from where I grew up (UK South coast).
Great idea, good way to learn more about people and places.
This is a fantastically fun project. You can lose hours just wandering around the globe. Its things like this that remind you why the internet can be such a glorious thing. Its inaccurate and with few uses, but so what, its fun!
I didn't know Frida Kahlo was the most famous mexican, but I guess some famous mexicans I'd have thought of (say, Benito Juárez) are mostly famous locally and not globally. EDIT: their rank difference is huge, 156 vs 1733.
It's a neat project, but does it ignore movie stars?
I zoomed into my hometown of Springfield, MO where Brad Pitt is from and he wasn't listed. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure he is a globally recognized actor.
Is this just for city in world; do people = lookupNotableOnWikipediaForCity(city); for person in people; do rank = rankPeople(person); storeRank(rank, person, city); done; done
With some obvious logic behind the ranking algorithm?
What are those guys doing at the poles? Pretty sure that William Lounsbery wasn't born in Antarctica. There's also a Finnish politician born near the North Pole.
The container for the radio buttons stretches to at least to the center, isn't visible, and prevents clicking/tapping on map items. This is on mobile in FF.
It says the most famous person in my area was Ronald Ross, but he was only born there and left when he was 8. Also nobody in my state even knows about him.
I absolutely love it.
So interesting to find out that the mayor of Kyiv was born pretty close to where I am now.
Do you have any plans on monetizing it?
I was concerned for New York for a bit, since choosing one person must be brutal to all others. But apparently NYC actually consists of a ton of cities.
That's because both Sean Connery and Maxwell have their birthplace as just "Edinburgh", and Connery's notability rank is 261, while Maxwell's is 683. So Connery is shown instead of Maxwell.
ah! I was actually confused to find Maradona at the north of Colombia for some reason. The source dataset seems correct so something must have gone wrong with the map
There are some errors I think - According to wikidata & wikipedia the famous Diego Maradonna is not
born in Colombia but Argentina. It strikes me as worrysome since this is such a famous person - I‘d rather expect such errors for less famous persons, right?
If you zoom in on Philly it seems like they position Grace Kelly in Center City and Noam Chomsky in North Philly somewhere. Noam Chomsky was actually born in North Philly (according to Wikipedia) - I can't tell what part of Philadelphia Grace Kelly should be associated with.
But then they don't have anyone in West Philly. I don't know if Will Smith is the most famous person associated with Philadelphia, but he is surely the famous person most associated with West Philadelphia.
Darwin was born in Shrewbury if I recall correctly. Newton in rural Lincolnshire. I don’t remember Hawking off hand but I suspect he wasn’t born there.
Depends what you mean by "Asia" I guess but in the part I've looked at, not really. For Taiwan the largest names are Ang Lee (film director), Teresa Teng (singer), Jay Chou and Jolin Tsai (also singers). For HK, the actor Jackie Chan trumps anybody else. Hayao Miyazaki (animator) is one of the most prominent in Japan. And in South Korea around Seoul, there's Psy and a couple of other artists as well.
Huge recency bias though, with Obama and Trump on 1 and 2.
I wonder what the map would look like if you multiplied everyone's score with the number of people born in the same decade, and divided by the total score of people born in the same decade.
She shows up under culture. I'd have thought that Pushkin would have outranked her there, certainly outside the Anglosphere. Or one could make a case for Anna Akhmatova.
Hitler is also on the map. "Famous" isn't the word used on the webpage - that can sometimes mean "celebrated". The word they use is "notable", which is perhaps more appropriate when talking about people who have committed heinous acts.
Hitler might be the most (in)famous person ever to have lived and so much so that his name has become a synonym for evil (colloquially). There is a reason that every page on Wikipedia is 6 clicks away from his article.
Guessing you are not a native English speaker. Fuck is a very strong word that is very seldom used. Rap videos and movies are not representative of the real world.
It does say that at the top, but I too was initially confused as to why Charles Darwin was in Shrewsberry, rather than the place he lived for most of his adult life - the very splendid Down House https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/home-of-cha...
we build a synthetic notability index using five dimensions to figure out a ranking for this broader set of individuals. These dimensions are:
1. the number of Wikipedia editions of each individual; [i.e. number of languages in which this person has a Wikipedia article]
2. the length, i.e total number of words found in all available biographies. […]
3. the average number of biography views (hits) for each individual between 2015 and 2018 in all available language editions […]
4. the number of non-missing items retrieved from Wikipedia or Wikidata for birth date, gender and domain of influence. The intuition here is that the more notable the individual, the more documented his/her biographies will be; [!]
5. the total number of external links (sources, references, etc.) from Wikidata.
We then determine the quantile values from each dimension and add them all to define our notability measure
They also have a table of what this metric throws up as the most "notable" from each time period: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4/tables/3 and how the "domain" varies over time: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4/figures/2 (note Nobility and Religious in 500–1000, to Sports and Culture post 1950).