Talk:Demographics of the world

Orphaned references in Demographics of the world
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Demographics of the world's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "about": From Population density: About.com From Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: About the Endowment Carnegie Endowment website 

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 05:51, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

"The World's relatively low literacy rate"
How could the world have a "relitively" low literacy rate. There's nothing for it to be "relitive" to. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.125.53.9 (talk) 23:45, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Relatively low compared to what one would expect and what most "1st world countries" attain. 80 some-odd percent is fairly low, though I suppose it couldn't hurt to reword it. Ncboy2010 (talk) 02:31, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Distribution
The percentage figures were wrong in the chart, I had to check. Two ideas :
 * Check before publishing and give your sources (which year ?)
 * Let an automated box calculate %'s based on figures. Thanks everyone --82.227.17.30 (talk) 11:16, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Table Sorting
Under "Religion", the "Number of followers (in millions)" column of the table does not sort properly and should be fixed.

Warsilver (talk • contribs) 21:00, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Cities section
The table on the cities section doesn't specify the year for which the data was gathered (a few have cites from 2008/2009) and the totals are definitely dated. I wonder if the Cities section actually adds much value to this article. It could instead be a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_largest_cities which seems better curated and more systematic in it's definitions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.59.176.202 (talk) 23:16, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Sao Paulo is not on the list even though it is larger than the bottom 5 on this apparently arbitrary list.179.156.49.221 (talk) 22:23, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

Jakarta is not included, despite being (according to its page) the world's second largest urban area, surpassed only by Tokyo.104.5.219.29 (talk) 16:29, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

There is NO discussion or breakdown of world population by RACE, a glaring omission that needs to be addressed.
It's pretty much that simple-population is broken down by nation, by religion, and by other criteria, but race is not one of them, and that's just ridiculous, especially since data are available on that subject. Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bookguitarguy (talk • contribs) 03:38, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
 * I just noticed the same thing. Since this page shows up as the top Google result for "how many white people in the world" and "how many black people in the world", it's particularly odd. Tricky question, even not considering self-identification, but no reason for Wikipedia to just give up. InedibleHulk (talk) 18:31, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

I also got here by googling “how many white people live in Europe and USA?” and “how many black peoples live in Africa?” There’s a link to ethnic groups list but that’s all. Largezo (talk) 09:06, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

3 years later and there is still a hole where Race is supposed to be. Are we pretending race isn't a thing ... ? or is it because Wikipedia (and its editors) don't want that sort of information available? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.80.228.253 (talk) 03:38, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Agreed—this is bizarre. Wikipedia includes the racial and ethnic breakdown of countries, cities, etc.—why isn't this included? Elle Kpyros (talk) 17:08, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

The purposeful omission of racial demographics of the globe, especially when this information is discussed in creepily fine detail for specific countries like the United States, is absurd to the point of laughter. 2607:FEA8:84A0:E740:34A6:CAE6:1A66:E3AB (talk) 22:49, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Race section missing
The section should be added, it's an important number and should be clearly visible — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.172.187.81 (talk) 00:35, 27 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Race isn't actually a thing, knowledge of genetics and inheritance has demonstrated that. Nevertheless, something called race has defined by various states over the years but there is no agreement as to which races actually exist. South Africa had four races, the USA dozens, both managed to use their definition of "black" people to arbitrarily deny that race specifcally their human rights and/or their rights under the constitution. Certain European countries had their own definitions for race and exterminated millions of people on that basis. Also clearly many people are as convinced of the existence of race as they are of angels or ghosts. Can race not be kept as a separate social and historical topic where its problems can be discussed and the abuses carried out in its name recorded? 164.160.37.123 (talk) 05:22, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

I came here, from a Google search, for the specific question of how many Caucasian MALES are on the planet
What a deceptive lie Wiki is running on this one. Tricks don't hide anything.Starhistory22 (talk) 21:50, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Take it up with Google? LordQwert (talk) 18:24, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

== Request for assistance history portal link portal statistics link portal Demographics : Tool to automatically make human population evolution statistics appear in the pages giving historic overviews e.g. when clicking a particular century ==

This would very helpful to bring insights. There are already (semi-)automated tools to generate pages summarizing the notable events of a particular centuries, decades and year. Just try it: the next article you read and you see a year, decade or century mentioned, put it between square brackets and enjoy being lead to a page with an overview of the most noteable events. Also the portal WikiProject_Statistics has quite some "navigational boxes" that do quite a bit of automation. The quest for developing such a tool was brought up in the portal talk article on "History" Portal_talk:History and I've linked to the WikiProject_Statistics.

Enjoy your day, like me and thank you for collaborating :)--SvenAERTS (talk) 14:32, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

The "World Population" box at the intro, how to make it appear on other wikipages e.g. history overview pages?
At the intro, there is this box entitled "World Population" showing the centuries and population. How can this be called upon and made appear in the (semi-) automatically generated overview pages on centuries, decades and years? Automatically generating demography statistics is a request posted on the history portal, the statistics portal and demographics portal. Thy --SvenAERTS (talk) 14:37, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Link in navbar
It seems like there should be a way to get to this page from the Demograpics by continent navbar as sort of the summation of all the continents. I made a comment on the Talk page at Template_talk:Continent_topic but I'm not sure the best solution and certainly don't want to mess anything up. Just throwing it out there in case someone has an idea of how this could/should be done best. Phil (talk) 22:51, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

wrong pie chart percentages
I just want to signal that the pie chart (and companion table) percentages of world population by continent don't sum to 100%, and Antarctica (white) is over-represented. Deltasun (talk) 09:08, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

Similarly, the section "2021 population distribution" does not have the correct information according to the source: https://www.worldometers.info/geography/7-continents/. The numbers are significantly different. Sxg169 (talk) 16:43, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Impressive article
I searched for review articles with global scope which could be sources for new topics here. I was not looking for anything in particular and only wanted to see what existed. Mostly I learned that I do not know how to find global statistics or determine what exists.

I am impressed this article is developed to include so many categories and has tables and charts.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  14:33, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Four sections on population rate change
Most of the sections in this article are snapshots in time of the way the world is now.

Four of the sections are about global population change - "Population growth rate", "Birth count", "Birth rate", and "Death rate". These seem different to me, because they are about future trends more than present conditions.

I see why these sections are included, but I could also see these in a separate article just about changes. The related closer fit which I would expect for this article, but which is currently absent, would be a description of family sizes, or household sizes, or community sizes.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  14:33, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Potential sources
I searched around for other kinds of global demographics. This is what I found. I had no particular expectations.
 * sport
 * drug use

I was looking for global consumer behavior but only found commodities. Commodity consumption describes behavior of the rich and not the typical person. This weird book compares the cost of raw ore and computer parts by weight.

This paper uses night photographs of the earth from satellites to detect hours of electric light usage globally, then uses the time of lights being on as a measure of economic development.

 Blue Rasberry  (talk)  14:34, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

How does anyone use world demographics?
As I look at the sources this article cites I wonder what practical use this research could have. I understand why someone would national demographics or demographic information about a certain group of people. Perhaps this information is mostly for having difficult conversations like the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals? It is challenging for me to imagine general use cases for global information, because if someone wanted to change the world somehow, almost certainly they would do so by region or culture. I have not thought this through and do not know what standards or trends there are for these kinds of papers.

I see many of these papers are from the United Nations, the CIA World Factbook, BBC, and other encyclopedias. Perhaps any of those sources wrote the philosophy of why they wanted to encourage global conversation, and what they expected to accomplish. There could be a "society" section talking about why anyone compiles this kind of data if we had a source explanation.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  14:35, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Major cities across six continents section, populations are all incorrect
I think this should be looked at because the population of Tokyo is not 30 million, also it seems to list the population for New York State and not New York City, the rest of the figures seem to be out dated.

WHERE's RACE?
What kind of politically correct ridiculousness is this? I searched the entire article for the word "race." Not one single time is race mentioned in this -- a Wikipedia article titled DEMOGRAPHICS OF THE WORLD. Omission is a form of lying and deception. Facts are facts. Everyone is entitled to them. Nobody should be subject to a revision or omission of them. If we allow only revised and altered "facts," who gets to decide what to say? You may agree with the person framing the facts today, but what about when the time comes and the person framing the facts is someone you disagree with? Frankly, it is offensive to me that there are narcissist-level people out there -- mainly academic elites -- who think they know what is best for others. By and large, what those kind of people know about life and the real world you could stick in your eye. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.242.249.96 (talk) 07:24, 28 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is an international encyclopedia. Many countries have their own definition or self-reporting of race but there is no international agreement on which groups to include or how to place people in them, and many countries don't have statistics to do it even if there was agreement on definitions. List of continents and continental subregions by population doesn't mention race either but may give a rough idea on "Asians" (Asia), "blacks" (Africa) and "whites" (most of the rest). You have an American IP address and may want a "Caucasian" group but I think few countries use that. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:36, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

See footnote I - birth rate by countries - #10 - Puerto Rico
Under Birth Rate by Countries, 4th chart, right side, #10 is Puerto Rico. However, Puerto Rico is not a country. It is a territory of the United States. Puerto Ricans are US citizens/Americans. 2600:4040:A30F:1700:5455:338B:13D0:237A (talk) 05:28, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

A judgement about India and China's population may be avoided in last sentence para 2
In last sentence of para 2, article mentions that India and China have large population, as wealthy countries have reduced birth rates while they have been high for poorer countries till recently, this contradicts with previous para which says that proportional distribution of population in different parts of the world has remained almost similar through thousands of years. A 1000 year back, Europe was not particularly richer than Asia, yet, population in Europe was lower. Also, there are poorer countries than India and China with lower population sizes. If the poverty argument is made, it should be shared as one of the components. 117.232.80.115 (talk) 07:35, 29 December 2023 (UTC)