[WikiEN-l] Rating the English wikipedia

[geni]

On 15 February 2011 16:19, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, really. That page claims we only have 3% of notable Poles. Are you
> really, seriously, telling me we only have 3% of ALL notable biographies???
> Because that's what that page is assuming to calculate that 40 million.

It's possible. Our coverage of say British MPs starts to fall apart
pre-20th century.

> It's not impossible to calculate, you look at the counts from an
> encyclopedias of famous people. And they very typically list historical
> people as well as living people.

But they all hit dead tree limitations. Sure you can chose a very
narrow focus book like the alphabet of the saints. So it seem pretty
likely that up until 1992 Southampton FC had a bit over 700 players
about which it would be possible to write something about. But such
books don't really exist for far areas.

Still assuming players play for an average of 2 clubs (remember
players didn't used to move around as much) you are looking at about
28 000 english male football bios up until 1992.

But how many captains of the royal navy are notable? How many knights? Mayors?

So while yes it may be possible for some individual areas as to how
many bios there could be more generally I don't think can be done.


-- 
geni