Wily D wrote:
Indeed, that's the right question to ask: What percentage should it be? What's the percentage in other encyclopaedias?
Presumably, in a complete Wikipedia, the percentage would be much lower (I believe the current estimates are that ~5% of all humans are currently alive, and I'd guess our existing biographies are more about alive people than that). But how does it compare to other encyclopaedias?
I'd guess ours is higher, and I think it *should* be higher, mainly due to our lack of space constraints. To a first approximation, the further you go back in history, the more biased the historical record is towards only documenting the exploits of very famous people; it's only relatively recently that good information is easily available on a very broad range of moderately-notable people. So you will get a much lower percentage of living people if you have 10,000 biographies versus if you have 250,000---not because the other 240,000 aren't useful biographies to have, but just because you didn't have any room for them.
-Mark