[WikiEN-l] Find-A-Grave's founder provides us with list of famous people

Thu Oct 20 03:24:51 UTC 2005

FindAGrave.com provides genealogists, historians, and others with 
information on people who have died (famous or not). It averages 
millions of hits daily, 500k-700k page views daily, and 30k-50k unique 
visitors daily. They have a separate category for "famous people", each 
of whom were individually approved by the Find-A-Grave staff to be 
"well-known outside his or her local community".

As part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles, I 
contacted their administrators about getting this list of famous people, 
which could then be wikified and used to determine what content is 
missing from Wikipedia. They referred me to the founder, Jim Tipton, who 
at first was hesitant to have the entire list be released and copied by 
mirror sites, but finally said "Go for it...I'm not worried about it, 
anymore...The whole point of  the web is to get as much organized info 
out there as possible...Use  it as you see fit..." (those ellipses are 
his, not mine).

So, after a lot of wrangling with a 4.33MB spreadsheet file, containing 
46,698 individuals, I've posted it at [[Wikipedia:Find-A-Grave famous 
people]]. Of course, there is some overlap with our content, but this 
should give us something to work on for a while :)

brian0918