[WikiEN-l] Rating the English wikipedia

[geni]

On 15 February 2011 04:00, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyway, so I stop there. Even 40 million appears completely
> unsupportable. It looks like it's off again by about another order of
> magnitude.

Oh really?

People have been keeping records for a long time. Western Europe has
very comprehensive records going back 200 years. More patchy records
strech back about 8000 years.

When you consider the number of politicians, military leaders,
aristocracy, industrialists, sportspeople, scientists, writers,
artists, musicians, performers and general hangers on there have been
in that time it's quite a lot of people.

How many is probably impossible to calulate. There are various attack
lines "how many people does it take to make a person notable" or
random sampling of the electoral roll would be one way to make a start
but as far as I'm aware we haven't done so. We can establish a lower
bound since the Thomson-Gale's Biography Resource Center contains over
1,335,000 biographies.




-- 
geni