Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 10/16/07, Delirium delirium@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