[WikiEN-l] The percentage of English Wikipedia articles about living people over time.

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 10/16/07, Robert Rohde <rarohde at 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..