Famous People of the USA

The Pudding has created a really interesting map which shows the most famous person from each town in America. A People Map of the USA renames every town in the country for its most Wikipedia'ed resident. So on this map Dodge City becomes 'Wyatt Earp Dodge City' and Memphis becomes 'Elvis Presley Memphis'.

I've seen a number of comments online questioning some of the strange results on the map. For example, 'Kublai Khan' for Sherman, Texas. This is a result of using the Wikipedia API to retrieve the names of people on the thousands of "People from X city" pages on Wikipedia. The People from Sherman list for the Texan town includes the band Kublai Khan. Of all the people listed under the Sherman entry Kublai Khan are the most looked up on Wikipedia.

If you want to see whose Wikipedia page has the most page views you can do this yourself by using Pageviews Analysis. Just enter names into Pageviews Analysis and you can view how much traffic their entries on Wikipedia receive.

On The Pudding's map the biggest name labels indicate the most Wikipedia'ed individuals. So the label for Elvis Presley (Memphis) is much bigger than the label for Stevie Nicks (El Paso) because his page on Wikipedia is viewed far more often than hers. On a casual view of the map it does appear that singers and actors are among the most viewed pages of people listed on Wikipedia. For example George Washington isn't even the most notable person associated with the U.S. capital. According to The Pudding's map Washington D.C. should be renamed Samuel L. Jackson D.C..