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

[Anthony]

On 10/17/07, Michael Noda <michael.noda at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
Do we even have any evidence that Rambot in fact did affect the growth
of biographies.  It affected the *percentage* of biographies, but that
could be because it affected the growth of biographies *or* that it
affected the growth of non-biographies.  Trivially, it certainly
caused a massive spike in non-biographies by introducing lots of
non-biographies.  And presumably in the immediate aftermath it caused
a reduction in the number of non-biographies, because suddenly all US
cities no longer needed creation.  There might be more to it then
that, but a graph of the *percentage* of biographies doesn't provide
the information to answer it.