[WikiEN-l] Rating the English wikipedia

[Andrew Gray]

On 15 February 2011 04:00, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:

> I then checked the British biography 'Who's who'. They have about
> 30,000 entries, but that's only about 1 person in 2000 in Great
> Britain, so even less.

This is actually quite an interesting angle to come at the problem from.

Who's Who has 34,210 people in it (the selection process is "notable"
by their standards, "related to the UK", though this is sometimes
stretched, and currently living). Their "legacy archive", of people
who were at some point included since publication began c. 1900, is
larger; it runs to 89,763 names - thus a total of ~124,000 people, of
whom 28% are currently alive.

But that's, of course, an undercount of all people "notable and
related to the UK".

* Firstly, Who's Who has gaps; it has an idiosyncratic and,
historically, quite old-fashioned selection process. My current work
is on the sort of person that stuffy establishment reference works
thrived on, but I find perhaps 20% of them aren't covered.
* Secondly, the gaps involve systemic biases; to consider one we can
easily check for, only 13% of the "current" biographies are women, and
a tiny 4% of the "old" biographies are.
* Thirdly - perhaps the biggest element - notability didn't begin with
the people still breathing in 1900. The Who's Who figures don't
reflect the long tail of historical biographies from the past; a
conservative estimate might be to double or triple the figures.

After making appropriate adjustments for these, we find that the data
suggests there might be 400,000 potentially suitable biographies out
there within the broad geographical remit of Who's Who; expanding that
to the world as a whole would begin to push the high seven figures.

Or, to look at it another way... we currently have around half a
million BLPs from around the world. *Without* correcting for the long
tail of dead people, then our known coverage of BLPs would suggest
there should be around 1,800,000 total "possible" biographies. If we
*do* make a corresponding adjustment, then the expected total comes in
at three to four million biographies. And, of course, we have known
gaps in our BLP coverage, suggesting the total number would come out
higher...

We currently have around 900,000 biographies. So even by a *highly
conservative* estimate, taking for the sake of argument that we have
100% coverage of living biographies and that the number of people
notable before the late nineteenth century was trivial, there'd still
be, at the very least, a million notable past biographies still
waiting to be written...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk