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