On 10/16/07, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
So to make sure I understand properly, this is saying that currently, roughly 11% of all articles in the English Wikipedia are biographies of living people?
Yes: 11% of non-redirect articles pages are tagged with Category:Living people.
Since not all redirect pages are articles (90k disambigs, etc) but all the Living people pages should be articles the actual concentration is somewhat greater than 11%.
If so, yikes.
I'm curious how much of the article count biographies in general (of either living or dead people) make up as well. I guess you'd have to follow the category tree of the (much less well known) [[Category:Dead_people]] to figure that out and add the two up ... the upper-level people categories seem a bit disorganized.
I'm curious about this too, but ideas that include the words "follow the category tree" are generally complete non-starters if you care about remotely sane results.
I really wanted to break all of Wikipedia down into a dozen or so top level categories so I can make a stacked line graph showing the composition over time... but I've found no way of breaking up the articles using automated category analysis that doesn't produce utterly rubbish results.
I haven't looked specifically at doing that to identify dead people articles... and I will... but I do not have high hopes. My past experience suggests that the results will be nearly useless.
Re: Rambot -- it's a self-fulfilling prophecy :) if you have articles about places, then clearly you need articles about people who live in those places... right?
I'm sure that this is a sub-subject worthy of a research paper on its own. Some kind of spontaneous symmetry breaking? "What you lack is what you get" becomes "What you're getting you get more of" which becomes "What you've got you get more of"? ;)