Cool new interactive map shows the most famous person from your area – check out your hometown

A new interactive map shows you the notable person born in your hometown – ranked based on details from their Wikipedia page.

It allows you to zoom in on anywhere in Wales – or indeed, the world – to discover who the most famous person from that area is.

The map was put together by Topi Tjukanov, a geographer and senior map designer at Mapbox.

It suggests that the most well-known people from Wales are currently the actors Christan Bale and Richard Burton, and ‘Lawrence of Aarbia’ T. E. Lawrence.

More than just a cool gimmick, the map builds on a study published in Nature that tries to use Wikipedia to calculate “aims at building the most comprehensive and accurate database of notable individuals”.

Did you know Freddie Mercury was born in Zanzibar and Barack Obama in Honolulu? Who is the most famous person from your home town?

I made a map of the most notable people around the world. Built with @Mapbox.

Check it out here: https://t.co/NR0J7nqTn1

🧵 pic.twitter.com/GoI4VnGzvd

— Topi Tjukanov (@tjukanov) July 28, 2022

The paper admits however that an emphasis on English Wikipedia may lead to “an Anglo-Saxon bias” in the data.

Zooming in will however unearth a wealth of famous people noted for their Welsh language contribution, from Dafydd ap Gwilym to Williams Williams Pantycelyn.

Some entries may be less well-liked, such as Edward II in Caernarfon.

The final rankings are based on:

• The number of Wikipedia editions of each individual;
• The length, i.e total number of words found in all available biographies. It is equal to zero for individuals with just one Wikidata entry and no biography in Wikipedia;
• The average number of biography views (hits) for each individual between 2015 and 2018 in all available language editions, using an API available here or zero in the absence of a Wikipedia biography;
• 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;
• The total number of external links (sources, references, etc.) from Wikidata.

Let us know who was the most famous person from your area below!