On 19/10/2007, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Looking through the stubs I've created in the last year or two, I have made 7 about living people: Daniel Wyllie, Lech Kowalski, Franck Sorbier, Vadim Perelman, Eric Harshbarger, Adam Elliot and John Long (climber). Two of those are in the magic category, and 5 aren't. If that ratio held up across Wikipedia, the proportion of articles about living people would be about 40%, not 12%.
In my experience the ratio is higher - 90%, perhaps. The category is generally a lot better known now than it was; I'm surprised you're getting such low results. Out of interest, did all your articles have [[Category:19xx births]]?
Hmm.
Sometime last year - I thought it was in the mailing list, but I can't find it, so it might be in IRC - we needed to produce numbers on how many living bios we had, and checked both the numbers in that category *and* something else. The "something else" numbers were 10-20% higher, I recall.
I *think* this latter was using the {{WP Biography}} talkpage template, but it might have been an aggregation of birth/death categories.
So, if we look for all articles matching something like ["Category:19xx births" NOT "Category:xxxx deaths"], translate that into SQL, see what you get.
Different category structure, but an older one, and one that might get some we've missed...