The question is how much of an article is acceptable. A stub together with a bibliographic reference can be written for anyone who appears in a print reference book--if the position or accomplishment seems notable. deWP has many articles of this sort, but when they are translated into enWP, they are generally deleted very quickly.
On 10/16/07, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/16/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
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
The sourcing issue rings true-- "reliable sources" for people who aren't alive now drop off dramatically the further back you go, especially if you're talking about English-language sources for non-English speaking individuals. Furthermore, the historical sources that are available start to be less and less accessible to the average Wikipedian (i.e. not online or widely held in libraries). Whether or not that source gets cited in an article, you do need to know *something* about the person in order to write the article in the first place -- and as Mark says we know much less about moderately famous people from a long time ago than we do now.
-- phoebe _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l