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

[Delirium]

Wily D wrote:
> Indeed, that's the right question to ask: What percentage should it
> be?  What's the percentage in other encyclopaedias?
>
> Presumably, in a complete Wikipedia, the percentage would be much
> lower (I believe the current estimates are that ~5% of all humans are
> currently alive, and I'd guess our existing biographies are more about
> alive people than that).  But how does it compare to other
> encyclopaedias?
>   

I'd guess ours is higher, and I think it *should* be higher, mainly due 
to our lack of space constraints. To a first approximation, the further 
you go back in history, the more biased the historical record is towards 
only documenting the exploits of very famous people; it's only 
relatively recently that good information is easily available on a very 
broad range of moderately-notable people. So you will get a much lower 
percentage of living people if you have 10,000 biographies versus if you 
have 250,000---not because the other 240,000 aren't useful biographies 
to have, but just because you didn't have any room for them.

-Mark