Eugene van der Pijll wrote
One sign that en.Wikipedia is "nearing completion", is that we have articles about subjects before they are in the news, and before people would want to look them up.
You make a good point. We are gradually, and I emphasise gradually, putting together the map of academia we should want. There will still be winners of prizes in the humanities that we don't cover.
A very large number of dead people need articles, too. In fact, arguably, one of the most important systemic biases we have is towards people who are still breathing. There is someone who does stats on biographies by birth date, which are striking.
Charles
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On 10/16/07, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Eugene van der Pijll wrote
One sign that en.Wikipedia is "nearing completion", is that we have articles about subjects before they are in the news, and before people would want to look them up.
You make a good point. We are gradually, and I emphasise gradually, putting together the map of academia we should want. There will still be winners of prizes in the humanities that we don't cover.
A very large number of dead people need articles, too. In fact, arguably, one of the most important systemic biases we have is towards people who are still breathing. There is someone who does stats on biographies by birth date, which are striking.
Does someone have access to http://www.worldwhoswho.com ? Comparing their list to our articles might highlight "important misses".
Looking at their obituaries, we have less than half of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/wiw_ob (I'm aware of the "compilation copyright", but I'm not sure it applied in this case; anyway, I'll remove it again soon, just making a point).
Even though some of these are probably just under slightly different names (feel free to edit the page accordingly), these names are from their "almost 60,000" nobale people list. That would mean we miss more than 30,000 biographies of notable living people. And that's just the ones who-is-who considers important...
And /that's/ only living people! For an idea of what's still ahead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MISSING
We're not finished. We have barely begun :-)
Magnus
Magnus Manske schreef:
Does someone have access to http://www.worldwhoswho.com ? Comparing their list to our articles might highlight "important misses".
Looking at their obituaries, we have less than half of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/wiw_ob
Even though some of these are probably just under slightly different names (feel free to edit the page accordingly), these names are from their "almost 60,000" nobale people list. That would mean we miss more than 30,000 biographies of notable living people. And that's just the ones who-is-who considers important...
Actually, it's not just "some of these" who have slightly differently named articles; I've just created 13 redirects, which accounts for almost half of your missing articles. So that would mean you can halve your estimate to 15,000 missing biographies.
(And don't edit that page to correct names; one should never do that if a page uses an alternate but correct spelling. Create a redirect!)
Many people are missing redirects from their full names. Would it be useful to create these by bot? Look for articles on people (e.g. by category [[Category:???? deaths]]), then parse the first line "'''Names''' (dates)" to get the full name, then create a redirect for the name.
Eugene
On 16/10/2007, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
Actually, it's not just "some of these" who have slightly differently named articles; I've just created 13 redirects, which accounts for almost half of your missing articles. So that would mean you can halve your estimate to 15,000 missing biographies.
I actually wrote a new one, [[Philip Wilkinson (banker)]], which was also misspelled in Magnus' list.
- d.
On 10/16/07, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
And /that's/ only living people! For an idea of what's still ahead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MISSING
We're not finished. We have barely begun :-)
Magnus
Or in other words: "*Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."*
-- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]