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

[Thomas Dalton]

On 17/10/2007, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> On 10/16/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/16/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 16/10/2007, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Enwikipedia_articles_bios_pct_200710.svg
> > >
> > > So what did you do for numbers before [[Category:Living people]] was
> > > created in late 2005?
> >
> > Rejoice for the the impossible super-intelligence of hindsight: If an
> > article is *currently* a living person bio it *always was*.
>
> The converse, however, is not true.  [[Category:2007 deaths]] has over
> 2000 entries.  [[Category:2006 deaths]] has over 3000 entries.
> Combined that only makes up for a quarter of a percent of all
> articles, but that's probably enough to put the drop at the end of the
> curve into question.

Very good point. This would be an interesting statistic: What %age of
articles on recently deceased people were started before they died?
Anyone with a suitable bot care to calculate it? (Go through the 200*
deaths categories, parse the article for the date of death [shouldn't
be too hard in most cases], compare with the history page, repeat.)