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

[Michael Noda]

On 10/16/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Can someone please explain why Rambot appears to have sparked two
> years of exponential growth of *biographies*? :)
>
> I don't recall seeing any appeals to write bios to offset the rambot geostubs.

I have two hypotheses.

The first is that geostubs tend to cry out for bios, usually
politicians of the mayor/state legislator/city councilor varieties.
This can even imply exponential growth in proportion to the original
geostubs, as the positions turn over but the places stay the same.

The second hypothesis is that Rambot introduced a culture of
comprehensiveness into the editor pool; now that we had an article on
*every* place in the US, we now needed to have articles on *every*
Nobel Prize winner, *every* current member of the national
legislature, every *former* member of the national legislature, and so
on.  I would even go so far as to posit that some of our slowdown has
been because lists of tenured faculty at Ivy League universities are
harder to come by and less compelling than lists of politicians who
appear in your local newspaper every day.