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

[Delirium]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 10/16/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> I'm skeptical of the NOTPAPER argument for things like this.
>
> We are constrained.  True, we are not space constrained but neither
> are many modern commercial reference works.
>
> We have many types of constraints, manpower, interest, process, and others...
>
> Whenever resources are limited there are some possibile allocatations
> of resources which are more ideal (by some metric) than others.
>
> I see no reason why the removal of the space constraint should change
> the *ideal* subject matter distribution substantially.
>   

My point *was* precisely that the ideal distribution of living/nonliving 
biographies should change quite substantially depending on the size of 
the work, because the ideal living/nonliving distribution varies by 
level of notability. If you write a small encyclopedia of say 1,000 
biographies, you're covering only the top-tier of famous people, of whom 
many are no longer living. If you write a comprehensive one of say 
250,000 biographies (or a million, or two million), you're covering many 
more people who are notable only in niches, or only moderately 
notable---not just kings and famous generals and philosophers---of whom 
a much larger percentage (of those about whom any information survives, 
anyway) are alive.

Consider an area like philosophy: If you were to pick the top 100 most 
influential philosophers of all time, many (most?) would be dead. But if 
you were to pick the top 5,000, a much larger percentage would be 
currently alive. We want to cover the top 5,000 (or more!), not just the 
top 100, because we're a broad-coverage encyclopedia. And thus we'll 
have a larger percentage of our philosopher bios be on living people 
than if we were to delete all but the top 100 most important. This 
doesn't, of course, harm our coverage of those top 100 in any way, which 
is why I think focusing on percentages is worse than useless.

-Mark