On 10/16/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
The number increases as we get nearer to present day, but the proportion of living people that are notable is far higher than the proportion of dead people that are notable (that we know of).
Here comes the notability paradox again. "Notable" supposedly means "worthy of being noted", but in practice the meaning may be closer to "worthy of notations which still exist, preferably on the internet, preferably without an access fee, and preferably in English", which generally excludes the distant back issues of most periodical publications, and all of the defunct ones, or books which were burned prior to mass reproduction, or personal journals which fell into the drink, or anything that could have been written if only the would-be author was literate or even part of a time and culture where a written language existed.
We have to accept the unpleasant reality that there are a lot of dead people, ones whom we will never hear of, ever, whose lives — by virtue of being remarkably more interesting than their contemporaries — were certainly "worthy of note", but for whom the notes failed to preserve themselves, (or in some cases, even materialize), for whatever reason.
Not much we can do about that except keep looking.
Meanwhile, "verifiability" is the one objective and practical criterion for inclusion, and information about living people is exponentially easier to verify.
—C.W.