Every person with a Wikipedia article in a frequency graph by birth year

Part of my intuition wants to buy into the idea that the age of exploration, and the sudden European expansion into the colonial/imperial territories of that period profoundly redirected the attention of people away from their peers, and instead toward the nature of the world at large (and maybe even humanity's place in the universe), and reduced the intensity of the run-away social chain reaction that produces interesting personalities that steal attention from each other.

If this analysis was only performed on English wikipedia, then there might be a degree of bias regarding European history. In any event, one would never expect the graph to bottom out, but possibly the reason the trough doesn't dip any lower than it does, could be that the rest of world history remains static, and picks up the slack, continuing to generate notable personalities in areas not disrupted by exploration.

Similarly, my intuition leans toward thinking that the long, steady, even duration of the trough might be an artifact of the nature of communication during the period, which also likely introduces a degree of delay between cause and effect. Long slow letter writing suddenly has to traverse an ocean or two, to maintain communication across populations spanning multiple continents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Exploration

How about all the plagues? Those would have killed off plenty of people.

That's part of it:

  "When exact birth year was not tagged, the 
  individual was prorated over the appropriate time period."

Which makes sense as you still get a relatively accurate portrait of the scheme. I wonder how large a roll the loss of records have played in erasing a large chunk of our history.

I am surprised; I would have expected the over-weighting of recent births to be far larger. The graph shows 1920s births and 1970s births as about equally likely to be notable. That doesn't fit with my experience that every minor 30-something writer or actor has their own page.

I doubt wikipedia on that, because its only supposed to show already documented artifacts for it cannot add as a new document.

Of Internet , i cannot disprove either.

Start with freebase.

But you're going to have a serious problem with missing data. Date of parent's death will only be there (in structured form) if the parent is themselves notable enough to have a wikipedia article. Otherwise, it'll only be in the text.

So I think you'll only get a meaningful result if you manually clean the data. Choose a 'neutral' source of notable people (e.g. Who's Who). Hire somebody via odesk or mechanical turk to find and record age of father's death. Compare with averages across the entire population.

Basic manual research is now cheap; take advantage of it!

An interesting intersection of those is that the bar for notability is really low for ancient history, if any information is available. Minor people about whom some documentation has survived are interesting to historians, simply because the number of ancient Greeks who we know by name and about whom any information has survived is small, so essentially all of them are of interest to historians. Same with texts: every ancient surviving poem is at least somewhat notable and has some study of it (even surviving poem fragments), which is definitely not the case with every surviving poem from 1995.

I think even better metric would be number of translations to other languages for each person's page (maybe in combination with PageRank), I noticed it correlates with "notability" (not just for people) pretty good and I even have been meaning to do it myself for some time :)

Hrm, at first I upvoted this, but then I saw it was normalized by total births anyway.

The notability requirement is not there to keep out the plebs, it's there to keep the information on Wikipedia accurate. In effet, it sets a lower bound on the reliability of primary sources, improving the quality of the project as a whole.

Wikimedia Foundation has limited resources

We are still limited by the number of pages that be curated in an encyclopedic way.

Everyone can have a page on Facebook or some other site with different goals to wikipedia.

How would you verify everyone in that case? Notability in the eyes of Wikipedia is a bit like PageRank - defined partly by external sources.

You can download the Wikipedia database and do it locally.

It's the first link under Sources

May 2, 2014 English Wikipedia Archive http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20140502/enwiki-20140502-p...

Because the y axis represents notable births as a fraction of all births.