Do Long Obituaries Have Wikipedia Articles
A quick summary of Do Long Obituaries Have Wikipedia Articles
Do Long Obituaries Have Wikipedia Articles
April 11th
The Process
- In order to check if longer obituaries have corresponsding wikipedia articles, I took the 100 longest obituaries in chacter length and divided them into two categories: long obiuaries that have a wikiPageId and long obituaries that do not have wikiPageId. The distribution is shown below:
- Then I took the long obituaries that do not have a wikiPageId associated with them and contructed a list of names for obituaries (if they had both a last and first name) and had a list of 32 results.
From the 32 names that didn't have a WikiPageId, 30 of them had Wikipedia pages
- So after obtaining a list of names for the people that didn't have wikiPageIds, I used the wikipedia page function to get search for pages titled the constructed name of each person in the list of 32 results
- I found pages for all but 2 people which were Bette Davis and Elizabeth II
Checking if Correct
- Then I used Gerald Ford as an example and printed the contents of his obituary and the contents of the wikipedia article I found by feeding his name as a page title and found that the page was indeed dedicated to him. Therefore he should have had a wikiPageId but did not for some reason.
- My hypothesis when comparing the proportion of obituaries that were matched vs unmatched to wikipedia articles was correct! There should be a higher proportion of wiki-matched obituaries than there appears to be.
- This is definetly something that could be explored further.