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I would like to use a lot of famous people data in a project. Is there a dataset with famous people? Like artists, musicians, politicians, etc.

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Wikipedia has a list of lists of people, from that you can focus on the specific lists that are of interest to you.

They also have a very functional API for collecting data, see here for details. For your lists of interest you can collect whatever data you like for individual "famous people."

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Freebase - Freebase is a large source of useful, structured data around lot of different categories. When you search for person in google, the result on left side is shown by Google's knowledge graph which is powered by Freebase.

For people search you can checkout, - http://www.freebase.com/people

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  • which is the actual solution for this?
    – Leandro Bardelli
    Commented Mar 10, 2018 at 19:48
  • Freebase has been discontinued as of May 2, 2016. It is succeeded by Wikidata.
    – gwr
    Commented Apr 20, 2022 at 14:20
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Looks like there was a research project called Pantheon that compiled such a dataset, which is available here: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/28201

Sort/filter by PageViewsEnglish if you want names particularly recognizable to English speakers. Among other things, it seems like a good source if you want to populate something with random "real" names while still making it very obvious that the data is fake.

Note for anyone using Excel or Access: the TSV file they offer is encoded in UTF-8, but Excel and Access 2010 don't seem to automatically recognize that, so in order to have accented characters display correctly you have to manually specify UTF-8 as the Encoding for the file when doing the "import from text file" process in either program. In my experience, Access seemed to have an easier time importing their TSV, and from there you can easily export an Excel file if that's all you want.

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Here you go! https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/here-is-a-list-of-famous-people/26898 -and- https://artofmemory.com/files/forum/947/initials.txt?_ga=2.42526565.1147344043.1569555157-1984831696.1569555157

You own me nothing except add my name to the 'famous' list. Frankie Kam 1993 Famous DOS Flight Simulator modder

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