Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 10/16/07, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
If so, yikes.
I'm curious how much of the article count biographies in general (of either living or dead people) make up as well. I guess you'd have to follow the category tree of the (much less well known) [[Category:Dead_people]] to figure that out and add the two up ... the upper-level people categories seem a bit disorganized.
I'm curious about this too, but ideas that include the words "follow the category tree" are generally complete non-starters if you care about remotely sane results.
I really wanted to break all of Wikipedia down into a dozen or so top level categories so I can make a stacked line graph showing the composition over time... but I've found no way of breaking up the articles using automated category analysis that doesn't produce utterly rubbish results.
I haven't looked specifically at doing that to identify dead people articles... and I will... but I do not have high hopes. My past experience suggests that the results will be nearly useless.
The interesting graph could be based on the distribution in the category series "yyyy deaths".
Re: Rambot -- it's a self-fulfilling prophecy :) if you have articles about places, then clearly you need articles about people who live in those places... right?
I'm sure that this is a sub-subject worthy of a research paper on its own. Some kind of spontaneous symmetry breaking? "What you lack is what you get" becomes "What you're getting you get more of" which becomes "What you've got you get more of"? ;)
My impression would be that Rambot had more to do with the 2002 dip in the graph. There were complaints long after that all these small towns were overwhelming "random article" selection. If the biography articles represent the low-hanging fruit then Rambot was picking them up off the ground.
Ec