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

[Andrew Gray]

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.

I was thinking about this last night. If we have a roughly even
distribution of people, we'd expect something like ~1.5% of our living
biographies to "die off" every year. This shouldn't noticeably affect
the graph, though; it will mean that the proportion in the past was
slightly higher than we indicate, and the growth curve thus slightly
shallower, but the broad results still stand.

On the other hand, simply going by the "2--- deaths" categories won't
help - a lot of these are people who we wrote about from their
obituaries, and so the article was created after their death. Very
close to being a living person, but not quite...

(Obituaries are a surprisingly good tool, in some regards - not just
for content, but as indicators, If someone has an obituary appearing
in multiple national newspapers, it's a good indication they have or
had some degree of significance...)

The recent drop (as opposed to the slowing of the graph) is, I would
argue, just an indicator of the fact that marking as a
living/nonliving person is often done by someone other than the
original author (it's an easy thing to forget), so new articles can
take some time to be incorporated into the category.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk