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

pudding.cool

121–130 of 225 posts

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

#121
post #70
post #64

> 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).…

There is a flaw in their method. Take for example Santa Fe, New Mexico. I expected the most Wikipediaed person would be George R. R. Martin. Instead, it's Murray Gell-Mann. Odd. I mean, yes, famous physicist, coiner of 'quark', etc. But, c'mon, compared to George R. R. Martin ? Then go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Santa_Fe,... . While Gell-Mann is on that page, there are also seven subcategor…

Well, Gell-Mann just died, so it could be one of those "whoever is in the news more recently gets the most pageviews" effects.

Sort of like how any mildly funny post on a growing subreddit will become top/all time simply because a lot of people looked at it that day. The next day, there will be even more people to look at it, etc.

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

#122
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.)

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

#124
post #105
post #59

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"

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).

Also, you need practice, write 5 ideas a day. Doesn't matter what ideas, things might exist or not exist. After a while, you will have a pile of garbage with some really good jewels between them.

PS. It was mentioned in the book, I don't recall which one.

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

#125

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 Jo…

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”.

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

#126
post #106
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. This is people looking at Wikipedia. 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. SELECT title, SUM(views) views FROM `fh-bigquery.wikipedia_…

> 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)

Oops, edited for clarity/intentions to "closer to HN".

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

#128
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because of the Boring Company press about building tunnels under the city.

I think Spacex being located in LA is the more likely candidate.

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].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from_Los_Angele...

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

#129
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

OP here. This idea was from looking at this map. https://www.wearedorothy.com/collections/music/products/u-s-...

It’s beautiful, and reminds me of an idea that I had ... hint ... hint.

I live in Melbourne, Australia. Idle Googling led me to the discovery that someone had rated – as in on Maps, with stars – a tram stop. A municipal function, a concrete slab, a place you must necessarily and unavoidably go if you want a tram. Rated. People! Crazy.

So I want a map that, at the level of ‘Melbourne’, aggregates the Google review for everything in view and gives the entire city a score. Then as I zoom in, eventually to the tram stop, I see the ratings of individual things.

Ultimately I suppose you’d be able to zoom out to the world and see its Google review score.

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