Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Demographics/Archive 1

Quick question
Just to clarify: The countries on the numbered list are finished, the countries in the alphabetically grouped list are not, correct? --Cryptic C62 · Talk 16:34, 19 November 2008 (UTC)


 * No. The countries on the numbered list correspond to the country topic outlines that have been moved to article space.  See Lists of basic topics.  They are an integral part of Wikipedia's contents navigation system.  The ones in article space (the rest are drafts in the Wikipedia namespace) need immediate support and the articles they link to have higher development priority.  A lot of people will be accessing the demographics articles from these outlines.  The Transhumanist  03:23, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Population pyramid
Template:Population pyramid has been nominated for deletion.

76.66.197.2 (talk) 06:00, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

"Rate" question
We're having a bit of a problem understanding how annual rates translate into lifetime ones, and I don't know where else to ask. In Divorce, Australia experiences 2.x divorces per thousand per year. This "translates" (we are told by the reference) into 1/3 marriages failing. But we cannot really verify this per se. We need a "rule of thumb" or something to be able to scope these statistics out, and not rely on authority quite so much. (Sometimes the "authority" is not all that authoritative). All actuarial-type articles would have this same problem - x per thousand die of heart disease, therefore xx% will die of heart disease in the entire population. Can anyone help here or direct me to a proper venue for an answer? Thanks. Student7 (talk) 13:28, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Population Pyramids
Not sure if this would be useful, but I think it would make sense to have a standard for the various population pyramids that are on Wikipedia, and SVGs are easiest to modify for new statistics. I've made my own variation on the design, which is currently blocky and blurry, but I'm looking for opinions or some help, or both.

If you want to help, but aren't sure how, feel free to ask, but hopefully it should just be a matter of downloading Inkscape and messing with the lengths!  Nik Naks  talk - gallery - commons 12:06, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Baby boom challenged by CBC
See article talk page for news article claiming this article is wrong. -- KenWalker | Talk 23:45, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Articles for deletion/Populated place
Articles for deletion/Populated place -- Bogdan Nagachop (talk) 11:04, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Mass changes to Demographics sections
An IP user (75.36.142.226) seems to be going around editing the demographics sections of a huge bunch of articles on California cities. I lack the sources, expertise, and time to audit their many changes for accuracy, so I thought I'd bring it up here. --Cyber cobra (talk) 05:35, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:HighBeam
HighBeam describes a limited opportunity for Wikipedia editors to have access to HighBeam Research. —Wavelength (talk) 17:36, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

I Would Like to Join
this WikiProject but I want to do things at my own pace. I'm primarily interested in the historical and current demographics of the United States, Israel, and the worldwide Jewish population. Would that be okay? Futurist110 (talk) 06:50, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Edits by 71.205.174.204
An anonymous user, 71.205.174.204, has recently been editing a lot of U.S. location articles, standardizing language, removing 2000 census data when the article contains 2010 data, and making other changes. Most of the changes are positive, but in some cases they're removing sourced material with little explanation. There also seems to be a pattern of removing content regarding the historical population of white people, as in. I mention this not to suggest any particular action be taken, but to note the user's activity in case it's in conflict with this WikiProject's guidelines. Ibadibam (talk) 20:55, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Standardisation of 'Demographics of' Articles
As was pointed out years ago, and it's still the case, the 'Demographics of...' articles are a mess. I propose that we ought to do something about this. A standardised template article would be ideal, and one where we all agree on its content even better. I also propose that we ought to include on each page a comparison with the rest of the region (eg. Continent) and with the World. This would make the data much more engaging and useful to people without a detailed specific knowledge. What does everyone think? Perhaps we could make a template? EdwardRussell (talk) 20:58, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Human overpopulation in Vital articles
maybe check @ Wikipedia_talk:Vital_articles#Add_Human_overpopulation_.28possibly_as_subcategory_of_.22Overpopulation.22_as_is_done_in_most_Wikipedias.29

Any other Demography articles to add?

Gregkaye (talk) 22:28, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal
Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Expert attention
This is a notice about Category:Demographics articles needing expert attention, which might be of interest to your WikiProject. It will take a while before the category is populated. Iceblock (talk) 16:39, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

WikiProject X is live!


Hello everyone!

You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.

Harej (talk) 16:57, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Pride!
 You are invited to participate in Wiki Loves Pride!


 * What? Wiki Loves Pride, a campaign to document and photograph LGBT culture and history, including pride events
 * When? June 2015
 * How can you help?
 * 1.) Create or improve LGBT-related articles and showcase the results of your work here
 * 2.) Upload photographs or other media related to LGBT culture and history, including pride events, and add images to relevant Wikipedia articles; feel free to create a subpage with a gallery of your images (see examples from last year)
 * 3.) Contribute to an LGBT-related task force at another Wikimedia project (Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikivoyage, etc.)

Or, view or update the current list of Tasks. This campaign is supported by the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group, an officially recognized affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation. Visit the group's page at Meta-Wiki for more information, or follow Wikimedia LGBT+ on Facebook. Remember, Wiki Loves Pride is about creating and improving LGBT-related content at Wikimedia projects, and content should have a neutral point of view. One does not need to identify as LGBT or any other gender or sexual minority to participate. This campaign is about adding accurate, reliable information to Wikipedia, plain and simple, and all are welcome!

If you have any questions, please leave a message on the campaign's main talk page.

Thanks, and happy editing!

User:Another Believer and User:OR drohowa

Discussion about ‎vital statistics tables in country demography articles
WikiProject Demographics doesn't seem very active any more, but editors who monitor this page might be interested in a discussion I've started at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geography. Cordless Larry (talk) 10:12, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

The use of "affluent" to describe places
An RfC on this subject has been opened here. Beyond My Ken (talk) 05:06, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

Reliability of World Population Review
I've started a discussion about this source of demographic statistics at Reliable sources/Noticeboard. Expert input is welcome. Cordless Larry (talk) 08:12, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

Please see discussion
Template_talk:Infobox_country. Interstellarity (talk) 17:19, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

Project revival
(Edited) If you read the start of this Wiki Project page you will find that and myself are trying to revive it. Just because it is going to take a while does not mean it will not be done. Please be patient. Nerd271 (talk) 17:24, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Again, if you read the Project page you will find that Paleontologist99 signed his name. Just because he hasn't responded to my suggestion yet does not mean he is not interested. People have to real life businesses to take care off, you know. Nerd271 (talk) 17:33, 16 March 2020 (UTC)


 * (ec) Sorry, but as far as I can see that is not true.  User:Paleontologist99 has not posted to this page, and the only intreraction between you two about this seems to be at User_talk:Nerd271, where it is just your suggestion. Paleontologist99 has not replied to your comment there. So it seems to be only you.
 * But even if Paleontologist99 is actually interested, two editors doesn't make a project. Good luck in recruiting more editors ... but until they have signed up, please refrain from setting the project banner to populate a bunch of non-existent assessment categories.  Creating those categories takes work, but there's no point in doing that work unless there really is a viable project, and it's disruptive to just flood Special:WantedCategories with this stuff.
 * Please remember that a WikiProject is NOT just a set of pages. Per WP:WikiProject Council/Guide, A WikiProject is fundamentally a social construct: its success depends on its ability to function as a cohesive group of editors working towards a common goal.  When you have that group, then will be the time to start creating assessment pages. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 17:42, 16 March 2020 (UTC)


 * I said the Project page itself, not this talk page. This one! He signed his name right after mine. Moreover, if you read our conversation here in full, it is actually a plan for next month. It is now only the middle of March. Nerd271 (talk) 17:47, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * @Nerd271: what conversation where? (links are a lot more helpful than vague waves such "this Wiki Project page", when you actually mean not thsi age where we are holding this discussion) At User_talk:Nerd271, Paleotologist99  has not signed up for any plan of yours.
 * And again, at best there are only two of you so far. That's not a group.
 * Please leave off Template:WikiProject Demographics until you actually have that group. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 17:53, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Again, please go here and find his name. (I gave the link above but you missed it.) He voluntarily signed up under the section 'Project volunteers'. I made that suggestion on that section of my talk page only because I knew for certain there was a chance was interested. He told me he was interested in something I was also interested in, 'cultural generations'. Nerd271 (talk) 18:03, 16 March 2020 (UTC)


 * @Nerd271: So now you have finally posted a link showing that the other editor has posted their name.  But even if Paleotologist99  intends to do more than just post their name on a list, at best there are only two of you so far.
 * What you need now is people, not assessment pages. There will be plenty of time for the technical stuff if and when you get the people.
 * I really do wish you well on this, but please remember that this is not 2006 any more. There are no longer hordes of enthusiastic editors flooding to turn every new WikiProject into a hive of activity.  In 2020, most WikiProjects are somewhere on a spectrum between barely alive and as dead as a very dead thing. It will be great if Demographics turns out to be an exception, but don't bank on beating the odds.  Those odds are heavily stacked against you, and my estimation of those odds is lengthened a lot by the fact that your efforts so far have been about tweaking a template rather than building a team of collaborators. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 18:07, 16 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your encouragement. I actually posted it twice, if you go through the whole conversation thread. Apparently, I was not clear enough on your talk page. I was inviting you to come over to this talk page. When I said front page, I was talking about the one associated with this one, i.e. WikiProject Demographics. Sorry for the confusion. I thought that was clear given the context. Nerd271 (talk) 18:14, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * @Nerd271: This is getting absurd.  The conversation above permalink) shows that my initial reply was to two vague waves ... and the my second reply was to a post where I missed  the link because you had obscured it.
 * The markup you used is pointless and unhelpful. Instead of writing, just write  . Obfuscating links behind vague and uninformative words such as "here"/"there"/"this page"/"that page" just makes it harder to make sense of the sentence and to spot that there is a link.
 * See the advice of W3C at https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#link-text: "Clearly identify the target of each link. [Priority 2] Good link text should not be overly general; don't use 'click here'. Not only is this phrase device-dependent (it implies a pointing device) it says nothing."
 * Anyway, before I start thissing I must go this my that from there to there. So I bid you this and that. -- Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 18:41, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

But can't you hover your cursor and see where the link goes to? I can understand you just fine by doing that. I do not need to see the code. Anyway, I thought the context was clear. But it was not for you. Sorry about that. Nerd271 (talk) 18:46, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * What sort of obfuscation game is it involves writing extra markup to waste other people's time by making them hover the cursor to see where a link goes — if they even if they see that it's a link (which I didn't)?
 * Just the leave name of page visible. Less work for you, more use for the reader.
 * Go read https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#link-text. It's short and clear. --  Brown HairedGirl  (talk) • (contribs) 20:17, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

How about this, can focus on Millennials, Generation Z, and Generation Alpha while I focus on Greatest Generation, Silent Generation, and Baby boomers. Both of us can do Generation X. Paleontologist99 (talk) 02:15, 21 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Sounds like a plan. With summer coming up, hopefully both you and I will have more time. See if you can borrow some history books from the nearest library if you do not have any with you already. Nerd271 (talk) 02:41, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

RfC of interest
An RfC on whether it is appropriate to use the disputed 2011 census in the lede of Religion in Albania may be of interest to project participants. . Khirurg (talk) 04:09, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Category:Demographics of the Western Balkans has been nominated for discussion
Category:Demographics of the Western Balkans has been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Place Clichy (talk) 14:44, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Eritrean population factor of two mystery
The UN DESA Population Division, in its 2019 population estimates, disagrees with the CIA Factbook by nearly a factor of two regarding the population of Eritrea. Since there is one editor who seems to WP:OWN the "true population" of 6 million at Eritrea, here's the direct link to, in which I've included two graphs of UN DESA Population Division data. (The source files quite nicely declare themselves to be CC BY (without the share-alike condition - SA), so they could be redistributed in absolutely identical format on any server in case anyone wants to publish them on a blog or whatever.)

The big mystery is why several sources, even including the famous spy agency Factbook, say that Eritrea's population is now (2021) about 6.1 million, while UN DESA says that it's about 3.5 million. You can see at Talk:Demographics of Eritrea my hypothesis, but what we would need for the article itself is external sources discussing the missing 2.6 million people. Mainstream media, in discussing Eritrea, seem to cite 6.1 million, but I presume that that is done out of laziness. (Briefly, my hypothesis is that in 2019, UN DESA revised its 1990 estimate, just before Eritrea became independent, down by 1 million; there were big net emigrations in the 1990s and the 2010s dropping the population by a bit below a million (probably because nobody wanted to stay in a totalitarian state); and population growth of the missing two millions would have to be subtracted from the 6 million too.)

It would be useful if several people, especially those interested in demography, could keep an eye on the issue, especially given that one editor seems to insist (on the Eritrea article) that we have to use a long list of bare urls rather than archived, dated references, and we are not allowed to refer to the 2019 UN DESA estimates. Boud (talk) 00:09, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Sourcing for Total Fertility Rate on Demographics of the Arab world
When presenting a table comparing countries such as [|here] on the Demographics of the Arab world page, what is the best method of resolving the fact that there are different estimates for Total Fertility Rate by different agencies (World Bank, CIA World Factbook, individual government agencies in each country, UN etc.) Is it to have multiple columns? Is there a generally preferred source for this statistic? OsFish (talk) 06:37, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Society for Biodemography and Social Biology listed at Requested moves
A requested move discussion has been initiated for Society for Biodemography and Social Biology to be moved to American Eugenics Society. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 22:16, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
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