On 10/16/07, charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews(a)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