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

[phoebe ayers]

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



The sourcing issue rings true-- "reliable sources"  for people who aren't
alive now drop off dramatically the further back you go, especially if
you're talking about English-language sources for non-English speaking
individuals. Furthermore, the historical sources that are available start to
be less and less accessible to the average Wikipedian (i.e. not online or
widely held in libraries). Whether or not that source gets cited in an
article, you do need to know *something* about the person in order to write
the article in the first place -- and as Mark says we know much less about
moderately famous people from a long time ago than we do now.

-- phoebe