On 10/16/07, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/16/07, cohesion cohesion@sleepyhead.org wrote:
On 10/16/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Enwikipedia_articles_bios_pct_200710...
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Thank goodness it seems to have peaked, definitely interested in the next couple months though... I'm a little surprised the percentage is so high, but I don't think it's bad really. Biographies of many living people are useful. Who's to say what the right percentage is. As long as it's somewhat stable of course :)
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?
Cheers WilyD
Here's a historical tidbit from a lovely book I'm slowly reading by Robert Collison called "Encyclopedias: their history throughout the ages" (1966) -- he claims that Johann Heinrich Zedler's "Grosses vollstandiges Universal-Lexicon", first pub. in 1731, was the first encyclopedia to include biographies of living people. Not sure, in turn, how he figured this out (extensive historical research, I think) but it's nice to know that living bios have at least as long a pedigree in the modern encyclopedia as philosophical articles (e.g. the "Encyclopedie", first published in 1751) and technical/practical articles (e.g. Chambers' "Cyclopedia", first published in 1728).
Incidentally, if any of you are encyclopedia fans and you find an inexpensive copy of Collison's book, buy it -- it's out of print and difficult to find.
-- phoebe