On 04.06.2016 12:40, Andrew Gray wrote:

Hi Markus,

Fun! Here's the same query with one additional caveat: it only counts people known to have been born since 1900.

http://tinyurl.com/jgzxvlq

This removes anyone who is definitely dead (but doesn't have a birth date), but also cuts out anyone who is alive but where we don't know either a birth or death date. So it's a more conservative estimate.

Good point. The imprecision of some dates may be an issue with this approach, since people born in the 20th century could have any date within this range stored (Wikibase is not consistent internally regarding the handling of these values). Maybe going from 1900 to 1899 could avoid all "born in 20th century" cases.

(It's a pity WD can't say "dates unknown, but definitely alive"...)

You could do this: birth date "some value" (a.k.a. "unknown" [1]), death date "no value". Of course, for this to work, all living people should have "death date" set to "no value" ...

As long as the absence of a death date is considered an indication of someone being alive, the only option would be to add death date "unknown" to those who are certainly not alive, and to consider all others to be alive.

Both of these approaches are workable, but both require that the approaches are applied consistently across Wikidata.

Orders are still much the same, but numbers return drop substantially

• from 21k to 15k for Finland, but only 27k to 25k for Sweden. It

seems Finland has more people, but Sweden has better-documented ones :-)

Nice observation. Or maybe the Finish just get very old ;-). Or maybe there are more people with unknown birthdate there (the imprecision I was mentioning above who are really alive but filtered by your approach). Either way this could be something to look at.

Cheers

Markus

[1] A regrettable misnaming, since it has an epistemological component that is not part of the technical usage.

A.

On 4 June 2016 at 00:04, Markus Kroetzsch markus.kroetzsch@tu-dresden.de wrote:

...

Hi,

Here is a little fun query to show the relative prominence of several countries' populations on Wikidata [1]:

http://tinyurl.com/zlq9bfv

Doing this for all countries (not just for EU countries) times out, but you can get individual numbers for each country using BIND, as for the US:

http://tinyurl.com/huouz39

(576 Wikidata people per million in habitants) or for China (6 Wikidata people per million in habitants). May serve to show some regional biases but also some natural effects.

Interestingly, it seems we already have almost 0.4% of the current population of Finland on Wikidata.

Cheers,

Markus

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Indexing/SPARQL_Query_Examples#Wikid...

-- Markus Kroetzsch Faculty of Computer Science Technische Universität Dresden +49 351 463 38486 http://korrekt.org/

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