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