On 10/16/07, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
"Category:Biography articles without listas parameter" has 300,000 members, so presumably there are at least 80,000 articles about people not currently presumed to be living.
Or put another way, we have slightly more than 2 biographies of living people for every 3 non-free images.
Oh wait, there is also a "Category:Biography articles with listas parameter" with 140,000 members. If the with/without "listas" are assumed to be a complete set then there are 445,000 biography articles, which would give roughly equal numbers of living and dead biographies. So ~22% of Wikipedia is biographies.
I was excited for a moment ... I thought you'd found a way to identify the rest of them.. but alas: A quick glance shows that those categories have been applied to enormous numbers of articles which are very clearly not biographies... Mostly by overzealous bot operators who think they can trust the category hierarchy and who do not check their work. :(
I selected ten pages at random from it and got an equal mix of bands and albums. No bios.
Also, it's applied to talk pages which makes counting based on it more computationally expensive.. alas..