On 15 February 2011 04:00, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
I then checked the British biography 'Who's who'. They have about 30,000 entries, but that's only about 1 person in 2000 in Great Britain, so even less.
This is actually quite an interesting angle to come at the problem from.
Who's Who has 34,210 people in it (the selection process is "notable" by their standards, "related to the UK", though this is sometimes stretched, and currently living). Their "legacy archive", of people who were at some point included since publication began c. 1900, is larger; it runs to 89,763 names - thus a total of ~124,000 people, of whom 28% are currently alive.
But that's, of course, an undercount of all people "notable and related to the UK".
* Firstly, Who's Who has gaps; it has an idiosyncratic and, historically, quite old-fashioned selection process. My current work is on the sort of person that stuffy establishment reference works thrived on, but I find perhaps 20% of them aren't covered. * Secondly, the gaps involve systemic biases; to consider one we can easily check for, only 13% of the "current" biographies are women, and a tiny 4% of the "old" biographies are. * Thirdly - perhaps the biggest element - notability didn't begin with the people still breathing in 1900. The Who's Who figures don't reflect the long tail of historical biographies from the past; a conservative estimate might be to double or triple the figures.
After making appropriate adjustments for these, we find that the data suggests there might be 400,000 potentially suitable biographies out there within the broad geographical remit of Who's Who; expanding that to the world as a whole would begin to push the high seven figures.
Or, to look at it another way... we currently have around half a million BLPs from around the world. *Without* correcting for the long tail of dead people, then our known coverage of BLPs would suggest there should be around 1,800,000 total "possible" biographies. If we *do* make a corresponding adjustment, then the expected total comes in at three to four million biographies. And, of course, we have known gaps in our BLP coverage, suggesting the total number would come out higher...
We currently have around 900,000 biographies. So even by a *highly conservative* estimate, taking for the sake of argument that we have 100% coverage of living biographies and that the number of people notable before the late nineteenth century was trivial, there'd still be, at the very least, a million notable past biographies still waiting to be written...