On 10/17/07, Michael Noda michael.noda@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/16/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@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.