QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Wed 12th May 2010, 8:54am)
Yet another example of the profound idiocy of "crowdsourcing" encyclopedia articles.
You have the WP bio of
Hans Bethe, legendary atomic scientist, Nobel winner.
8 notes, 3 references, total length 27034 bytes.
And you have the WP bio of a
fictional scientist on a sitcom,
Sheldon Cooper of
The Big Bang Theory.
75 references, total length 43670 bytes.
And no doubt, many of the Wiki-assholes reading this will go "that's perfectly acceptable".
Very good. I had a thread somewhere which plotted the number of articles per year of birth. Going back from 2009, it starts very low (very few famous infants) then climbs rapidly to a peak. Then it starts falling away as few Wikipedians really understand that anyone existed who was born before 1970. I think the peak year of birth for a biographical subject was 1981 or something like that.
I was challenged on this, but I repeated the experiment using a reputable encyclopedia, and the 'decay rate' was much slower. I.e. proper encyclopedias give far more weight to people born in the distant past (e.g. Elizabethans) than Wikipedia.
It would be interesting to do a similar experiment on the ratio between 'fictional' biographies and 'real' ones. I think we know the answer, though.