The question is how much of an article is acceptable. A stub together
with a bibliographic reference can be written for anyone who appears
in a print reference book--if the position or accomplishment seems
notable. deWP has many articles of this sort, but when they are
translated into enWP, they are generally deleted very quickly.
On 10/16/07, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/16/07, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>
wrote:
Wily D wrote:
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?
I'd guess ours is higher, and I think it *should* be higher, mainly due
to our lack of space constraints. To a first approximation, the further
you go back in history, the more biased the historical record is towards
only documenting the exploits of very famous people; it's only
relatively recently that good information is easily available on a very
broad range of moderately-notable people. So you will get a much lower
percentage of living people if you have 10,000 biographies versus if you
have 250,000---not because the other 240,000 aren't useful biographies
to have, but just because you didn't have any room for them.
-Mark
The sourcing issue rings true-- "reliable sources" for people who aren't
alive now drop off dramatically the further back you go, especially if
you're talking about English-language sources for non-English speaking
individuals. Furthermore, the historical sources that are available start to
be less and less accessible to the average Wikipedian (i.e. not online or
widely held in libraries). Whether or not that source gets cited in an
article, you do need to know *something* about the person in order to write
the article in the first place -- and as Mark says we know much less about
moderately famous people from a long time ago than we do now.
-- phoebe
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