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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 10/16/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> 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.

I'm skeptical of the NOTPAPER argument for things like this.

We are constrained.  True, we are not space constrained but neither
are many modern commercial reference works.

We have many types of constraints, manpower, interest, process, and others...

Whenever resources are limited there are some possibile allocatations
of resources which are more ideal (by some metric) than others.

I see no reason why the removal of the space constraint should change
the *ideal* subject matter distribution substantially.