Trivia, they’re our favorite kind of information! Nothing better than blowing away your friends with some little-known-yet-astonishingly-interesting fact. And when you’re playing a game like Trivial Pursuit (what’s in a name) it can come in pretty handy as well. Yet sometimes, it can be quite the challenge to search Wikipedia front to back in order to find some interesting facts. You’re not always in the mood to go down the rabbit hole – you never know where you might get stuck and for most of us, searching for trivia isn’t our day job.
Luckily, some people have decided to come up with tools to make life a little easier for us trivia-seekers. One of those people is Topi Tjukanov, a map designer with a lover for little-known-yet-astonishingly-interesting facts too. Using Mapbox, he built an interactive map showing you the most famous people per town, village or even neighborhood all across the globe. Or yet another way to spend a nice evening at home.
“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”, Tjukanov tweeted.
New map yet no new data
Yet how did he do this? Tjukanov used a study published in the journal Nature as a base for his interactive map. The study ranked a ton of famous people who had lived between 3500BC and 2018. Some of the factors included the length of their Wikipedia biographies, the total number of external links from Wikidata and the average number of biography views for each of them between 2015 and 2018 across all language editions.
Then, the rank value and notability “sum value” determine how big names are shown on the map. The more you zoom in on a certain area, the more you get to see – going as far even as showing you the most famous people within a certain neighborhood. People are also ranked in different fields: ‘culture’, ‘discovery and science’, ‘leadership’ and ‘sports and games’. Switching fields can show you new names, so there’s literally information for days to be found on the map. Sure, the data aren’t always exact as Wikipedia remains somewhat flawed but even then, it’s a pretty funny way to keep yourself entertained and to search for some fine trivia.
1. Europe
2. London
3. Brussels
4. Paris
