I believe a more charitable interpretation is wondering why men are searched more often than women when it comes to the data set "people wikipedia'd correlated with location".
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, ...)
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.
I don't follow wrestling but I've googled some wrestlers before. Their stories (both on and off stage) are often super convoluted and interesting/funny.
See Gwen Stefani from both Anaheim and Fullerton, California. She grew up in fullerton but famously got neighbors agitated from her own rental in Anaheim. Perfecting "I'm just a girl" out of her garage took a long time.
SpaceX is located in Hawthorne (just south of LA), which has its own dot. It seems that there dataset is just Wikipedia's own lists of people from places. In this case, Elon Musk appears on [0].
It's not "people from here look up this person a lot", it's "who is the most-looked-up person that's linked to here <somehow>", where <somehow> is whatever dataset they're using to connect people to places (it's not birthplace; it might be lived-here-at-some-point? or "has the place mentioned in their Wikipedia page", or some composite). The location of the searcher is irrelevant.
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"
Your two version aren't in conflict, although the first is ambiguous. Are you just clarifying that that, in the first version, "in this city" is supposed to be a modifier of "person" rather than the "wikipediaed"?
They are totally different things. The first is influenced solely by Wikipedia users in the city in question. The second is influenced by a combination of all Wikipedia users and Wikipedia's association of people with the city in question.
Using Wikipedia leads to some weird results. I checked my hometown in NC and would have expected Michael Jordan to be listed as the most famous associated person, but he doesn’t appear on the main Wikipedia entry so we instead got James Taylor.
"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!
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.
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.
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.
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].
They explicitly say that in their "data and methods" blurb:
> 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.
Robert Redford comes up ironically enough for Provo. I thought his house was in Park City, but I guess it’s a weird city limits thing. Hope he isn’t letting any unmarried couples stay over!
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.
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.
Basically a show-off for BigQuery, but to answer this specific question: The most viewed Alan and Steve in Wikipedia are the ones closer to HN.
SELECT title, SUM(views) views
FROM `fh-bigquery.wikipedia_v3.pageviews_2019`
WHERE DATE(datehour) BETWEEN '2019-01-01' AND '2019-01-10'
AND wiki='en'
AND title LIKE r'Alan\_%'
GROUP BY title
ORDER BY views DESC
LIMIT 10
Hilarious: in the US, Larry Bird a guy who has not played ball in almost 30 years (!) is still way more popular than Larry Page. At least according to G trends.
The the OPs point however, Wikipedia is a special place.
How many people ever paid money to go watch Larry Page at work for a day? Corporate executives have wealth and power; let the ballplayers have the celebrity :)
> The most viewed Alan and Steve in Wikipedia are the Silicon Valley ones.
You had me well baffled with this - who is the "Silicon Valley Alan"? The only candidate I could think of was Alan Kay who, with all respect, was never likely to be the most-viewed of all Alans.
(Turns out to mean Alan Turing - I don't think he had any connection with Silicon Valley)
Except that it's really "person whose Wikipedia page references Lansing searched the most," which is how you end up with Phil Knight (an Oregon native who started a company famously headquartered in Oregon, and continues to donate huge amounts of money to an Oregon university) for La Quinta, CA, a suburb of Palm Springs in which he happens to have a house.
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?
East Lansing is best known as the home of Michigan State University which is best known as the school that harbored Larry Nassar while he molested hundreds of american gymnasts.
Larry Nassar is decidedly bad. But you've lost all sense of perspective if you think he defines the place. Or you're a hyper-partisan Wolverine fan;<).
I'll just name one thing that came out of MSU and that the cancer drug Cisplatin. It's saved millions of lives and is known as the gold standard of cancer drugs. I could easily name hundreds more with more impact than Larry Nassar.
It wouldn't take too many more revelations for deviant sexual exploitation to be the first thing non-sports people think of when they hear the phrase "Big 10". Penn State, Michigan State, Ohio State...
Ok but Larry Page has been ignoring East Lansing since well before the Larry Nassar shit came to light so this is not relevant to the discussion. Tarring an entire city because of a few assholes also doesn’t seem very sporting.
I don't blame the townies. The results seem to be the same whether it's East Lansing MI or State College PA. There is a culture in the Big 10, of tolerating exploitation in service of dubious collegiate athletic achievement. Does the school administration spend a fraction of the time thinking about lifesaving drugs that they spend thinking about football? If legislatures had any regard for their states, they would shut down such rotten institutions.
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).
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.
Maybe, but it's still lame that Denver is represented by Peyton Manning. He was there a few years, but he isn't even the first person that the phrase "Denver quarterback" calls to mind.
Right, but I think that's a problem for large cities like Los Angeles. There's nothing particularly "Los Angeles" about Elon Musk that I know of, he's just really famous and (maybe?) happens to live there.
And with birthplace, I think it's pretty interesting to browse the map for random tiny towns no one has heard of that happen to be the birthplaces of very famous people.
If I had to associate a place with Elon Musk, LA would probably be it. SpaceX is based in the LA area, and IIRC Musk does live down there somewhere (although I don't think it's in LA proper). Musk has also captured quite a lot of attention lately for his various antics and ventures.
The problem that LA has is that there are a lot of very famous people you might associate with it. It seems like a nearly impossible problem to solve.
I do agree that birthplace would be a more interesting map, but I think it would be more interesting for tiny places. I think LA would suffer from the exact same problem.
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.
I grew up in Visalia, CA which lists Kevin Costner, the actor. He was in my high school class in my sophomore and part of my junior year when his family moved away. Although his later fame is what puts him there, we had a Nobel Prize-winning physicist actually grow up there but he never won an Oscar. Seems unfair.
Hulk Hogan is credited as being born in Augusta, GA; but his family moved to Florida when he was one and a half. Also, I'm not sure why Viggo Mortensen is listed way up in north Idaho, he only lived there three years?
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.
Hey, are you me? My childhood wasn't as spread out as yours, but I still lived in four separate towns before I graduated high school, and then went off to college in a fifth town. The first two towns I lived in were close enough together I can name a vague region when someone asks where I'm from, but if they press for details I have a little story to tell.
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.
224 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadAnd, what's with all the wrestlers!?!
Germans love David Hasselhoff, and Wikipedians love wrestling.
Edited 2015. So they must not have pulled this data.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_Los_Angele...
That is, sure, Dwayne Johnson is looked up a lot in some city, but who is looked up most compared to everywhere else?
* She was in two of the Twilight films.
* Pitch Perfect (trilogy).
* Mr. Right. The Accountant. (hitmen with a heart of gold movies).
* A Simple Favor. (stepford wife mystery).
* Drinking Buddies (a brewery drama, it's great)
* Scott Pilgrim vs The World
Nicholas Cage is definitely more famous than Anna Kendrick, for differing reasons.
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!
I see this:
"Note: any person on Wikipedia is considered, including those connected to and victims of criminal acts. See more about our data and method."
(Ahh, WebGL)
It would be cool if they could also include the "Notable People" for each city in this ranking in the future.
[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...
> 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.
Edit: I'm living in utah, from Ohio, I do not claim Utah citizenship. I'm also not Mormon (ex-mormon/agnostic). Cheers!
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.
This is HN bubble thinking.
Very few regular people know who 'Larry Page' is.
Almost everyone knows who 'Magic Johnson' is.
Have a look at Google search trends.
Guess: Who's the Alan with the most pageviews in Wikipedia? Who's the Steve?
I left the answers here:
- https://medium.com/towards-data-science/bigquery-without-a-c...
Basically a show-off for BigQuery, but to answer this specific question: The most viewed Alan and Steve in Wikipedia are the ones closer to HN.
Is what I responded to.
Don't misconstrue how much people do not care about business people, and how much they do care about sports figures.
Nobody in my family knows who Larry Page is.
Just for fun:
- In Silicon Valley... Magic Johnson has more google searches than Larry Page.
- In India... Larry Page has more google searches than Magic Johnson.
- https://imgur.com/a/KwQ5wJt
Just checking Google Trends, as you suggested...
Most of the world does not care about basketball at all.
The the OPs point however, Wikipedia is a special place.
You had me well baffled with this - who is the "Silicon Valley Alan"? The only candidate I could think of was Alan Kay who, with all respect, was never likely to be the most-viewed of all Alans.
(Turns out to mean Alan Turing - I don't think he had any connection with Silicon Valley)
So either it's a stats bug, or Magic Johnson is missing a link at all to Lansing in their data.
[1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.or...
Who wants to be associated with that?
I'll just name one thing that came out of MSU and that the cancer drug Cisplatin. It's saved millions of lives and is known as the gold standard of cancer drugs. I could easily name hundreds more with more impact than Larry Nassar.
https://msutoday.msu.edu/feature/2018/discovering-the-gold-s...
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/05/29/fears-about-a...
Southwest Florida is an interesting one...
The Wikidata "place of birth" field would probably be a reasonably reliable source: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P19
And with birthplace, I think it's pretty interesting to browse the map for random tiny towns no one has heard of that happen to be the birthplaces of very famous people.
The problem that LA has is that there are a lot of very famous people you might associate with it. It seems like a nearly impossible problem to solve.
I do agree that birthplace would be a more interesting map, but I think it would be more interesting for tiny places. I think LA would suffer from the exact same problem.
It’s probably because they were trying to find out when that person lived there.
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.