User:Mike Linksvayer/Article of the Unknown Notable

Very approximately 100 billion people have lived. As of 2010-12-19 about 6.9 billion people live and 505,420 have biographies on English Wikipedia. That suggests about 1 in 14,000 living persons are 'notable'.

These biographies are presumably biased toward the English speaking and online worlds, but let's assume that living people are more likely to be notable than ancients, so that approximately 1 in 25,000 people who have ever lived were notable during their lives. Further, note that notability is not temporary. So, of the 100,000,000,000 who have ever lived, around 4,000,000 were notable.

Given information loss (loss of oral history, destruction of cities, decay of documents, failure of backups), through the ages, it seems highly optimistic to think that over half of notables are knowable at this time. But let's be optimistic and assume articles will eventually exist for up to three-quarters of these deceased notables.

That leaves a minimum of 1,000,000 once-living notables who we have no hope of identifying.

Here's to you!