On 15 February 2011 04:00, Ian Woollard <ian.wooll...@gmail.com> wrote: > Anyway, so I stop there. Even 40 million appears completely > unsupportable. It looks like it's off again by about another order of > magnitude.
Oh really? People have been keeping records for a long time. Western Europe has very comprehensive records going back 200 years. More patchy records strech back about 8000 years. When you consider the number of politicians, military leaders, aristocracy, industrialists, sportspeople, scientists, writers, artists, musicians, performers and general hangers on there have been in that time it's quite a lot of people. How many is probably impossible to calulate. There are various attack lines "how many people does it take to make a person notable" or random sampling of the electoral roll would be one way to make a start but as far as I'm aware we haven't done so. We can establish a lower bound since the Thomson-Gale's Biography Resource Center contains over 1,335,000 biographies. -- geni _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l