Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 10/16/07, phoebe ayers
<phoebe.wiki(a)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