On 14/02/2011, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 14 February 2011 20:48, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
Perhaps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus/Wikipedia_interwiki_and_specialize...
Oh riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. So back in 2006, Piotrus claims that there should be 400 million articles.
It turns out he based this essentially only on biographies. In Poland.
Quick sanity check: that's about one bio article for every twentieth person alive on the entire planet. And these would be encyclopedically *notable* people would they?
We can easily see that that's not going to happen, even allowing for the fact that lots of people have died already, most people just aren't that notable, and the current population completely swamps historical populations.
OK, so how did this happen? So I checked back through the history of the article. The first claim was that it essentially needs 400 million biographies of people. It turns out that the 400 million was based on dividing 30 into 1000 to get 0.3% and then dividing that into the biographies in the English Wikipedia. But... 30 in 1000 is 3%. So he's already out by a factor of 10. That's bad enough. So now we're down to 40 million.
His next error is assuming that the English Wikipedia is off by a factor of 33 on its biographies *worldwide*, as opposed to having a blind patch on Poland.
So let's look at this. The biographical encyclopedia that he mentions has 25,000 entries. Poland has 38 million people. So less than 1 person in a thousand is notable in Poland according to this encyclopedia.
I then checked the British biography 'Who's who'. They have about 30,000 entries, but that's only about 1 person in 2000 in Great Britain, so even less.
But again, roughly 1 person in 1000.
The world population is currently about 7 billion.
So if it's as high as 1 in a 1000 then that's about 7 million articles, and to be honest in reality it's probably a *lot* less, a lot of people globally do things like subsistence level farming, and are thus far less likely to be notable. So even that is excessively favourable.
I would guess we're looking at a few million biographies needed, worldwide at the very most. And sure, there's probably other biographical encyclopedias out there, and they may list a few more that Who's who misses, but that kind of thing depends on notability as to whether they'd survive AFDs in a general encyclopedia.
Anyway, so I stop there. Even 40 million appears completely unsupportable. It looks like it's off again by about another order of magnitude.
So, to sum up, this article's claim of 400 million is just based on simple and obvious arithmetic logical errors, and seems to be two orders of magnitude too high.
- d.