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

[Brian]

FindAGrave.com provides genealogists, historians, and others with
information on people who have died (famous or not). It averages millions of
hits daily, and 500k-700k page views 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 "WikiProject Missing 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