Talk:Marquis Who’s Who

How many biographies in the en.wikipedia?
i wrote:
 * As of 2005, the Marquis Who's Who contained about 1.2 million biographies, while the English language wikipedia contained a hundred thousand or so biographies.

Basis of the estimate. A few minutes ago, i.e. a few minutes before 14:56, 29 December 2005 (UTC), i used the "random article" link to select 20 random articles.

Four (4) of these 20, i.e. 20%, were biographies. (There was also a page with a list of biographies, but i ignored this - i wanted to get a conservative lower limit, cf Lancet Iraq survey).

A poisson error on 4 is sqrt(4) = 2, which is 10%

So statistically we have roughly  20% plus/minus 10%  of 890,000 articles on en.wikipedia are biographies if we use a gaussian approximation. So we can say to 95% probability that less than 20% + 2* 10% = 40% of the en.wikipedia articles are biographies, but 0% is not excluded. Of course, a proper analysis or testing a larger number of times would get better statistics.

If we're happy with 68% confidence (that's why i put "or so"), then it's 10%-30% of 890,000 articles = 90,000 to 267,000. So IMHO a hundred thousand or so is a reasonable estimate.

Anyone else is welcome to make a more accurate estimate.

Extrapolation to all languages suggests about 3 times this number for the total, minus the number of multilingual biographies about the same famous people (choice of who is a notable person is probably more likely to vary between languages than articles about physics, psychology, whatever, so the overlapping fraction might be small). Anyway, enough ranting on this topic.

Boud 14:56, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

The article should not contain reference to Wikipedia at all. Wikipedia articles are supposed to avoid self-reference unless it is absolutely necessary (as in, for example the article on Wikipedia). NoIdeaNick 18:28, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Merger?
Ah, so the difference between the two articles is just a different type of apostrophe.

What's the policy on which type of apostrophe is correct? Kestenbaum 20:52, 4 August 2006 (UTC)