A very fun map by Matt Daniels and Russell Goldenberg shows the people most associated with cities, towns, and neighborhoods around the US. The two say they used Wikipedia’s API to comb the site’s “Category:People from” pages (like this one) to find the most-viewed person by median page views.
Here are some of the people most associated with DC-area localities, according to the map. There are many enjoyable weirdnesses: Samuel L. Jackson is listed as the most-Wikipedia’d person from the District, though Ina Garten is the most-Wiki’d from Dupont Circle and John F. Kennedy owns Georgetown. Some people appear twice because people can be “from” more than one area—Sergey Brin, for example, has claims to both Adelphi and Greenbelt, according to the map. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, do not use Daniels’s and Goldenberg’s “A People Map of the US” to drive.
[su_table]
| Locality | Person |
| Annandale | Mark Hamill |
| District of Columbia | Samuel L. Jackson |
| Arlington | Sandra Bullock |
| Hyattsville | Jim Henson |
| Landover | Martin Lawrence |
| Bethesda | Julia Louis-Dreyfus |
| Alexandria | Jim Morrison |
| Oxon Hill | Taraji P. Henson |
| Fairfax | Jason Sudeikis |
| Centreville | Ludacris |
| Waldorf | Christina Milian |
| Herndon | Sean Parker |
| Largo | Wale |
| Falls Church | Tom Shadyac |
[/su_table]
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
