Comparing PublicIdentity.org with Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an excellent resource for finding people.

Advantages

• The data has been manually verified.
• The infobox usually has all the relevant links.
• Lots of people use it, so it (hopefully) is up to date.

Disadvantages

• You need to be “Notable”. This limits Wikipedia to only the most well-known people.
• The identity is owned by Wikipedia. Wikipedia editors can change or block your updates.
• Other people can make updates (which can be an advantage)
• Not every article has an infobox.
• There are multiple types of infoboxes.

Sizing

As of 2024-04-23, the English Wikipedia has 6.8 million articles (from Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia).

This page also has a graph that shows the English Wikipedia is about 10% of the total, but much of that is auto-generated translations, and there will be duplicates even if it isn’t. Wild guess: English is 25% of the total, so maybe 30 million articles.

Future research needed: How many pages have infoboxes. And which types of infoboxes?

Notes

I plan to use Wikipedia to seed the PIDO identity database.

Useful links:

• Infobox
• Infobox Help - guidelines and step-by-step instructions on created and editing an Infobox.
• List of infoboxes - there are (unfortunately) a lot of different flavors of infoboxes.
• Style Manual for Infoboxes