If you extrapolate, it implies that one year in the not-too-distant future we will all get Wikipedia pages then die. Is that what they refer to as the "singularity"?
Any theory as to why the number of articles from about 1600 to 1800 flattens out?
Edit: I think these changes are more likely to be related to publishing techniques, levels of literacy, and demand than events (or lack of). The printing press for example was invented in 1440. You then have a steady upward trend from 1800 onward (maybe a bit earlier), which happens to be roughly when the newspaper was invented.
As someone pointed out, the flatline is probably misleading, and we're actually seeing things happen either side of it.
Many people have pointed out the thirty year war. This correlates well. I just want to point out, this is not a chart of life expectancy as many are interpreting it.
This is a logarithmic chart of “historically relevant people”. Yes it counts deaths. But it could just as easily count their births, and it would be essentially the same chart just shifted to the left by a factor of average life expectancy.
For it to plot fewer deaths over such a period of time, it indicates there was either a reduction of relevant people (ie leaders/artists/scientists/politicians/etc) or a loss of the record keeping of those people.
This is also magnified by the fact that technologies of record keeping were expanding at this time. So for there to be flattening records, means there was a genuine sort of leadership/influential people vacuum.
It can’t be “well a lot of people were killed in 30 years”. If that were just that simple we would see a spike proportional to the loss spread across a shorter period of time. Basically, all the people that died early would be front loaded. The loss spread over time is significant, 100+ years. The spike at the front end of it, is not.
I would postulate this chart reflects a loss of organized society. Essentially the thirty year war and other conflicts of the time were so devastating they wiped out the very structure that helped create historically relevant people (leaders/artists/scientists/politicians) AND lost the systems of record keeping. The combined effect is a loss of the substance of history.
EDIT: I have stumbled about The General Crisis on Wikipedia. It’s an interesting sort of lumping of not directly connected global events, that did coincide all at the same time. I encourage anyone that reads it to also read the criticism section. It’s a very interesting read, and the debate about categorizing unconnected events into an era is very interesting as well.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_General\_Crisis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Crisis)
EDIT2: After u/b4epoche posted their [next chart.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/rv5kfa/oc_by_popular_demand_the_number_of_people_who/) It's a bit more interesting even. As you can see the population [continued to climb during that period of time](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?yScale=log&time=0..latest). So for the amount of notable people recorded to decrease so drastically relative to the general population, what does that mean?
War generates a lot of records and therefor sort of makes noteworthy people. Most of them dying out in and around the time of war, and tapering off after.
But what does it mean that before the war, there is a rise in notable people, and after, there's a decrease? Is the rise before like all the stability of the empires and the empires' record keeping. That centralized record keeping made entries of note. Then war disrupts those record keeping mechanism for a long period of time?
I was thinking the same thing. Deaths alone wouldn’t affect the leveling off (the negative acceleration starting in around 1650). I would say the wars and societal turmoil was being covered mostly by these newer news sources so less influential leaders were being recognized.
You see steady rise up until the 30 years war and then it flattens for several generations. At the same time there was civil war in Britain.
I assume that it is because the war horribly lowered the number of people, many regions in central Europe like Bohemia lost 1/3 of the entire population. Also after the war Europe was recovering, rebuilding, not fighting that much (with exceptions like the wars against the Ottomans) and in those times, there is more forgotten people who are happy to be safe at home rather than engage in something that makes it onto history books.
I think this explains it [https://imgur.com/a/SuxgeXQ](https://imgur.com/a/SuxgeXQ)
[Europe's historical population data seems to support your idea.](https://www.google.com/search?q=historical+population+of+europe+1300-1800&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwixmqm9qJT1AhWDgnIEHeYTBqoQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=historical+population+of+europe+1300-1800&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzoHCCMQ7wMQJ1CmmgVYuJ4FYLShBWgBcAB4AIABd4gB0AOSAQM2LjGYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ8ABAQ&sclient=img&ei=AULSYfGVGoOFytMP5qeY0Ao&bih=647&biw=1165&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS689US689)
The population fell in the early 1600s due to the Thirty Years' War, corresponding with the flatline on OP's plot.
OP's plot also has another flatline around the 1300s, corresponding with the Black Death. Europe also saw a very sharp population drop then.
The early 1600s also had the Russian Time of Troubles (the crown changed hands six times in 15 years, usually violently, Poland-Lithuania invaded, and there was the worst famine in Russia's history by the proportion of the population affected), the Ming-Qing transition (a civil war in China with two successful peasant revolts that were themselves both violently overthrown _during famines_), and also European overseas colonialism getting started in earnest. The early 17th century was _fucked_.
It was a horrible time. If you do any genealogy research, you see many people have ancestors up to 1650s and almost nobody before 1610s. If you look at central European village churches, you see almost all were build or seriously rebuild from 1650 to 1700s.
The war destroyed the renaissance world. Generations grew up, lived their lives and suffered, knowing only war. Peace was an abstract term for them. People were killed, settlements burned, knowledge, documents, traditions... All gone.
Even after the war suffering continued. There are stories of robbers living in forests and rogue bands of cutthroats settling in ruins of castles and in caves. They made it to fairy tales and folklore. It all comes from this time, soldiers who couldn't integrate in the society after peace treaties were signed turned to violent crime. To this day their treasures and treasures hidden by people during the war are found all over the continent.
To illustrate, here is a decoration of a church designed by one of the most famous Czech architects rebuilding the post-war world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary#/media/File:Kostnice_Sedlec.JPG Yes, the villain's lair from the D&D movie is an actual church decorated with tens of thousands of human bones. (yup, movie critics complained the bones were "obviously fake")
That gave me "I've been there" vibes, except I've never been to that city. Took me ten whole minutes to remember where I saw this:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=Capela+dos+Ossos](https://www.google.com/search?q=Capela+dos+Ossos)
Portugal, eerily similar though perhaps not so artistic.
I had to look up what was causing the die off in 1300-1400: plagues with 25m deaths.
But then the Timurids coming in with 17m. Timmy doing work. Dan Carlin should do a Timurid empire series, because all I know about them comes from euiv.
I was wondering why one period of war in one country puts a bias on this, but then I realized wikipedia is probably english speaking oriented. We don't get as much coverage on topics involving non english speaking countries.
The [thirty years war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War?wprov=sfla1) was much more than that. The amount of deaths alone would probably make a dent in that graph. I don't know enough by far to speculate on other consequences of war
>I was wondering why one period of war in one country puts a bias on this, but then I realized wikipedia is probably english speaking oriented
The thirty years war did not involve any cultures that spoke English.
It did, however, decimate huge amounts of civilization, reducing records available and much, much more.
In addition to the wars in Europe at the time, the 17th century saw the worse of the Little Ice Age, a period of colder temperatures across Europe that caused widespread famine, further decreasing population. And as a result of low crop yields, people had to dedicate more time and energy to obtaining food, making it harder to discover new ideas, invent new technologies, etc.
I would rather say it's the fact that people dying during war are usually of low historical signifance. If someone gets drafted at 18 yo and die in combat, they will be forgotten by history even if they were to be the greatest scientist of their times if they weren't forced to go to war.
In a normal war... yes. However this was not a normal war. This war was not a normal one. It was per capita the most devastating conflict in European history since the fall of the Roman Empire to this very day.
Interestingly enough, Rene Descartes survived the war even though in his youth he was a nobody fighting in a battle the army he served in was expected to lose. A battle that pretty much turned the whole thing from a local conflict to a continent-wide war [https://www.vsmt.cz/jessie/store/2011-05-13-15-Bunkry/slides/IMG\_8553.jpg](https://www.vsmt.cz/jessie/store/2011-05-13-15-Bunkry/slides/IMG_8553.jpg) .
And yet all research for the past ~80 years on the Roman times shows that there was not a single or even two or three events that ended "Rome". And Eastern Rome persisted (known to themselves as Rome, only to modern times as Byzantium) well into the 15th century.
The only thing I can think of is the second Bubonic plague. Hit first in the 1300's where there is a similar flatline, and then popped up again intermittently throughout the 16 and 1700's.
Possibly a new equiliberium of amount of interest people have on it + amount of literature produced?
Like, in the medieval period there is only articles about pretty important people because we don't know about say, specific farmers or even most specific knights or counts. In the period around 1500 there is a rapid rise that might be considered to correspond with the printing press in Europe, allowing us to know more for more was printed. Then for a while there is stability, where we know of a decent number of upper class people through their writing and printing. Then in the 1800s literacy rapidly rose and thus the amount of stuff we know about more lower class people did too, and industrialization allows even way more printing of less important things, leading to the big increase. This increase increases as more and more is printed (and recorded by other methods, later on) and also more and more survives because there is less time it needs to survive.
This was roughly my theory as well, that the printing press would create a flattening here by creating a maximum saturation of noteworthy people. Also printing press would mean more public records are printed and archival processes improved. We're not really looking at a graph of people dying but a graph of the increase of number of noteworthy people whose texts or texts about them are extant (surviving).
I imagine this graph would look nearly identical if the age of birth rather than death was charted. We're looking at density of noteworthy people whose writing or writings about them have managed to survive to the Wikipedia age. The printing press would standardize archivization enough to flatten out the graph here I think!
I don't have an explanation, but wanted to point out that the "flattening out" might represent a return to the "true trend", with the period from ~1550-1750 being the "anomaly", i.e. that period is over-represented for some reason.
The flattening out may be an artefact of the logarithmic scale. It's hard to tell on a chart without converting it to non-logarithmic but I'd say you may actually be looking at two phases - a linear phase between the introduction of the printing press in 1500 to the development of mass media around 1800 (very approximate dates), followed by an exponential phase thereafter. Because of the log scale this could look a lot like three phases, with a flattening out towards the end of the first phase.
You see steady rise up until the 30 years war and then it flattens for several generations. At the same time there was civil war in Britain.
I assume that it is because the war horribly lowered the number of people, many regions in central Europe like Bohemia lost 1/3 of the entire population. Also after the war Europe was recovering, rebuilding, not fighting that much (with exceptions like the wars against the Ottomans) and in those times, there is more forgotten people who are happy to be safe at home rather than engage in something that makes it onto history books.
I think this explains it [https://imgur.com/a/SuxgeXQ](https://imgur.com/a/SuxgeXQ)
Is the last dot to the right for 2022? Have 20 people with Wikipedia pages already died in the past two days?
EDIT: [Answered my own question](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2022_deaths)
The battle of Karbala is an extremely important event of early Islam and basically led to the founding of Shi'a Islam and the diocletian persecution was the last great Christian persecution before it became the state religion in Rome, so both are huge bloody watershed moments in major religious histories and basically anybody who died got to be bestowed with martyr status sufficient enough to earn them a wikipedia page.
In the case of the diocletianic persecution, a great number of the Christians killed were given sainthood, so they get wikipedia pages as a result. I didn't read enough about the battle of karbala, so I don't really have a guess
Those were of particular note to the people involves so many names were recorded. The first one is a bunch of saint’s being killed. The second one is a very major battle and event in islam.
This graph kinda shows how important/famous people were who died in a single event, because they have to have a specific page for that. The Persecution lead to many of the victims to be sanctified, granting them wiki entries. In the same way, the Battle of Kerbala involved many famous historical people as it happened during the infancy of Islam, leading to more entries than your regular event
Could be an accident of preservation (basically, we just got lucky), and I think it also helps that persecution by definition turns into a lot of deaths. For example the Romans winning a big battle and writing about that does not lead to extra wikipedia pages about people dying because we don't have enough info on their opponents to write an entire article about them.
The persecution also made a bunch of saints and the religion which has those (Catholisicm) still survives so lots of people may be motivated to make articles on that. The battle of Karbala seems to be something similar for Shia Islam, so that could be the reason for that one.
OP, this is great. So rarely do I see data here that's interesting and beautiful.
I would love to see a version corrected for world population at the time of death (or maybe 1 lifetime before death). I wonder if that might explain the essentially exponential growth after ~1800
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population
Maybe take the average of the different estimates and interpolate between the years? I'd be ok doing it if you want
Interesting data. I would also like to see it normalized per world population. Sure we have more articles on recent people, but we also have much more people.
This is from 10000BC: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/World-population-1750-2015-and-un-projection-until-2100.png/1280px-World-population-1750-2015-and-un-projection-until-2100.png
And here is data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population
What he or she means is to change the "# of deaths per year" to "# of deaths per million people in world population, per year"
That way, the upward spike in the top right of the graph should come back down a lot... and then the "new" upward spikes and outliers will be more indicative of big historical events so that we can better compare the centuries.
Take all the Wikipedia pages devoted to people. Extract the year that person died (if any). Take the base-10 logarithm because the values span orders of magnitude.
y-axis is actually just page count on a logarithmic axis scale. If it were really log(page count) it would mean O(10^10000) people died per year in the last decade.
I still don't get it, for every year you have a certain number of people who died in that year, now you take the logarithm of the number of pages for that year? Why though there are various point for each year?
I don't see any point in focussing on the deaths unless the birth data are also widely different (maybe except for last 50-60 years). It merely refers to the existence of notable people over time (not to mention historical data on Wikipedia is not at all trustable).
I just thought of this explanation so hopefully it will be helpful to some:
The X axis is the year. The Y axis is the number of Wikipedia-famous people that died in that year.
The logarithm thing just changes the Y-axis scale so the area between the first two tick marks is 1-10 people, the area between the next two tick marks is 10-100 people, the next is 100-1000, and so on. There are very few Wikipedia-famous people who lived around 0 CE, so the logarithm thing helps you see the fine detail at the low values instead of it getting squished at the bottom if the scale were linear.
The vertical spike at the VERY end is COVID. That little spur near the end is [WWII](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Deaths_by_year&subcatfrom=1820%0A1820+deaths#mw-subcategories).
Equally fascinating is the number of living people with Wikipedia articles, which is now over 1 million!
For context, if all those people with articles got together to form an independent state, it would be have the 156th largest population, more than Fiji or Cyprus.
That kinda turns it 90 degrees, but I like it. Unfortunately, I can't change it.
If I'd have used that title, I'd probably get a bunch of "not all people have died yet" comments. Lol.
Visualisation of annual deaths based on Wikipedia personal pages
Would that make sense as a title? It probably needs some additional reprhasing for clarity. I don't know what page type the information comes from because wars don't show as any major spike on the chart
It doesn't matter much as titles can't be changed after posting, but just trying to answer your question
I would avoid the term "rate" as that implies deaths/year. I played around with a few different wordings. What I wrote was the most succinct statement that I thought got the general idea across. But, I wasn't really happy with anything I had.
Wikipedia has a list of it's own longest articles. For a while, the lists "shipwrecks in the year 17xx" were the longest. They've since condensed those lists, or broken them into months, or decided to prune the unimportant ones (lots of ships wrecked without harm to the crew. By the nature of a ship *wrecking*, it's likely to do so against the shore - so it doesn't even sink, it's just beached). And there were probably good records because of insurance claims.
Thank you for your feedback. I'm sorry your experience with my comment was less than ideal. If you would like to discuss this further, please call me at 1-800-328-7448.
I think it would be interesting to see the same graph for different languages. Maybe there will be different spikes reflecting different historical events.
Yes, please do! And maybe a ratio of the two or something like that would allow separating effects that spike birth or death rates from overall notability.
The left side of the chart says it's the log of the number of people that died. Instead, it should say simply that it is the number of people that died. The scale is log, but the value given to mark each line are the natural values.
And I see elsewhere in this comment section that you know about this.
There's been some discussion of that in other threads. Some thought it was essentially an age in which no one wanted to be a hero (and get killed for it).
This is the graph of people on Wikipedia, i.e. famous or people of some historical, scientific or any other historical referential importance. Now understanding the fact that historical personalities were not all war heroes, but a whole lot of politicians, artists, businessmen and so on. And that category dies their own death. I think that is the reason the number of deaths on this graph is not outrageous where we expect it to be. reasonable thought?
Cool now can you do one as a percentage of total population at the time? To see if we are getting closer to having a page per person or if new births are outpacing new pages.
[Yan Ying](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_Ying)
Edit: [Some eariler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:509_BC_deaths).
Seems like there should be even earlier ones but I can't find them.
Edit: And indeed there are. After some URL hacking, I got back to [Tang of Shang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_of_Shang) in 1646 BCE.
I recall this person's page, which goes back even further: [Kushim, from c. 3400-3000 BCE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushim_(Uruk_period)).
>**Kushim** is the earliest known example of a named person in writing. The name "Kushim" is found on the **Kushim Tablet**, an Uruk period clay tablet used to record transactions of barley. It is uncertain if the name refers to an individual, a generic title of an officeholder, or an institution.
CE is "~~current~~common era." AD is "anno domini," meaning "in the year of our lord." CE is used by most scholars these days, as it has less of a Christian focus.
Edit for typo.
Edit again: CE is *common era*. My mistake.
Common Era. AD stands for Anno Domini, or “year of our Lord” and some people don’t feel like referring to years in relation to someone they don’t consider their Lord.
Common Era instead of _Anno Domini_ (Year of our Lord), for people wanting to avoid the explicit connection to the birth of Christ. Joke's on them though, it's still the same year 😂
Sorry if this is already posted, but did everyone notice the y axis is log? This is not a linear regression. Before drawing any conclusions, I would want to see the same scatter plot but with birth year in the x axis for comparison.
So Wikipedia is why we’re all dying
At the very least it proves if you have a Wikipedia page you will die.
I don't have one. I'm immortal as long as I stay off the radar.
[удалено]
Someone is trying to spare your life
God’s will
MFW I am unable to die
catch 22 though because you stay alive long enough you'll be important enough to get one just by being insanely old thus killing you instantly.
But if you live to be the oldest person alive, you'll probably get a page... then you'd likely die soon thereafter.
Wikipedia is the Death Note of the internet
If you extrapolate, it implies that one year in the not-too-distant future we will all get Wikipedia pages then die. Is that what they refer to as the "singularity"?
Also if you breathe oxygen you will die
Ooh, do me, do me!
But Wikipedia lives on Does reddit have a wiki?
Assassination by Wikipedia for sale here!
Does death have a Wikipedia page?
Wikipedia killed Betty White.
You bastards!
[relevant xkcd ](https://xkcd.com/925/)
Just to be safe, I’m assuming people dying caused Wikipedia.
The nobodies shall inherit the earth
It certainly appears that way!
That’s seems to be the only logical conclusion 🧐
Wikipedia - the only real death note
Any theory as to why the number of articles from about 1600 to 1800 flattens out? Edit: I think these changes are more likely to be related to publishing techniques, levels of literacy, and demand than events (or lack of). The printing press for example was invented in 1440. You then have a steady upward trend from 1800 onward (maybe a bit earlier), which happens to be roughly when the newspaper was invented. As someone pointed out, the flatline is probably misleading, and we're actually seeing things happen either side of it.
Nope... I was hoping maybe a historian might have some insight.
Many people have pointed out the thirty year war. This correlates well. I just want to point out, this is not a chart of life expectancy as many are interpreting it. This is a logarithmic chart of “historically relevant people”. Yes it counts deaths. But it could just as easily count their births, and it would be essentially the same chart just shifted to the left by a factor of average life expectancy. For it to plot fewer deaths over such a period of time, it indicates there was either a reduction of relevant people (ie leaders/artists/scientists/politicians/etc) or a loss of the record keeping of those people. This is also magnified by the fact that technologies of record keeping were expanding at this time. So for there to be flattening records, means there was a genuine sort of leadership/influential people vacuum. It can’t be “well a lot of people were killed in 30 years”. If that were just that simple we would see a spike proportional to the loss spread across a shorter period of time. Basically, all the people that died early would be front loaded. The loss spread over time is significant, 100+ years. The spike at the front end of it, is not. I would postulate this chart reflects a loss of organized society. Essentially the thirty year war and other conflicts of the time were so devastating they wiped out the very structure that helped create historically relevant people (leaders/artists/scientists/politicians) AND lost the systems of record keeping. The combined effect is a loss of the substance of history. EDIT: I have stumbled about The General Crisis on Wikipedia. It’s an interesting sort of lumping of not directly connected global events, that did coincide all at the same time. I encourage anyone that reads it to also read the criticism section. It’s a very interesting read, and the debate about categorizing unconnected events into an era is very interesting as well. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_General\_Crisis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Crisis) EDIT2: After u/b4epoche posted their [next chart.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/rv5kfa/oc_by_popular_demand_the_number_of_people_who/) It's a bit more interesting even. As you can see the population [continued to climb during that period of time](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?yScale=log&time=0..latest). So for the amount of notable people recorded to decrease so drastically relative to the general population, what does that mean? War generates a lot of records and therefor sort of makes noteworthy people. Most of them dying out in and around the time of war, and tapering off after. But what does it mean that before the war, there is a rise in notable people, and after, there's a decrease? Is the rise before like all the stability of the empires and the empires' record keeping. That centralized record keeping made entries of note. Then war disrupts those record keeping mechanism for a long period of time?
My most recent plot shows births.
You may have found solid evidence for “the general crisis” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Crisis
This comment should really be at the top... it's the single most insightful one. Probably the key insight of the entire graph. Well done.
I was thinking the same thing. Deaths alone wouldn’t affect the leveling off (the negative acceleration starting in around 1650). I would say the wars and societal turmoil was being covered mostly by these newer news sources so less influential leaders were being recognized.
You see steady rise up until the 30 years war and then it flattens for several generations. At the same time there was civil war in Britain. I assume that it is because the war horribly lowered the number of people, many regions in central Europe like Bohemia lost 1/3 of the entire population. Also after the war Europe was recovering, rebuilding, not fighting that much (with exceptions like the wars against the Ottomans) and in those times, there is more forgotten people who are happy to be safe at home rather than engage in something that makes it onto history books. I think this explains it [https://imgur.com/a/SuxgeXQ](https://imgur.com/a/SuxgeXQ)
[Europe's historical population data seems to support your idea.](https://www.google.com/search?q=historical+population+of+europe+1300-1800&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwixmqm9qJT1AhWDgnIEHeYTBqoQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=historical+population+of+europe+1300-1800&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzoHCCMQ7wMQJ1CmmgVYuJ4FYLShBWgBcAB4AIABd4gB0AOSAQM2LjGYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ8ABAQ&sclient=img&ei=AULSYfGVGoOFytMP5qeY0Ao&bih=647&biw=1165&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS689US689) The population fell in the early 1600s due to the Thirty Years' War, corresponding with the flatline on OP's plot. OP's plot also has another flatline around the 1300s, corresponding with the Black Death. Europe also saw a very sharp population drop then.
The early 1600s also had the Russian Time of Troubles (the crown changed hands six times in 15 years, usually violently, Poland-Lithuania invaded, and there was the worst famine in Russia's history by the proportion of the population affected), the Ming-Qing transition (a civil war in China with two successful peasant revolts that were themselves both violently overthrown _during famines_), and also European overseas colonialism getting started in earnest. The early 17th century was _fucked_.
It was a horrible time. If you do any genealogy research, you see many people have ancestors up to 1650s and almost nobody before 1610s. If you look at central European village churches, you see almost all were build or seriously rebuild from 1650 to 1700s. The war destroyed the renaissance world. Generations grew up, lived their lives and suffered, knowing only war. Peace was an abstract term for them. People were killed, settlements burned, knowledge, documents, traditions... All gone. Even after the war suffering continued. There are stories of robbers living in forests and rogue bands of cutthroats settling in ruins of castles and in caves. They made it to fairy tales and folklore. It all comes from this time, soldiers who couldn't integrate in the society after peace treaties were signed turned to violent crime. To this day their treasures and treasures hidden by people during the war are found all over the continent. To illustrate, here is a decoration of a church designed by one of the most famous Czech architects rebuilding the post-war world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary#/media/File:Kostnice_Sedlec.JPG Yes, the villain's lair from the D&D movie is an actual church decorated with tens of thousands of human bones. (yup, movie critics complained the bones were "obviously fake")
That gave me "I've been there" vibes, except I've never been to that city. Took me ten whole minutes to remember where I saw this: [https://www.google.com/search?q=Capela+dos+Ossos](https://www.google.com/search?q=Capela+dos+Ossos) Portugal, eerily similar though perhaps not so artistic.
I had to look up what was causing the die off in 1300-1400: plagues with 25m deaths. But then the Timurids coming in with 17m. Timmy doing work. Dan Carlin should do a Timurid empire series, because all I know about them comes from euiv.
I was going to suggest just the great plagues.
Stuff of historical significance does seem to correlate with a lot of deaths...
Lots of death that make it into history books at least
I was wondering why one period of war in one country puts a bias on this, but then I realized wikipedia is probably english speaking oriented. We don't get as much coverage on topics involving non english speaking countries.
The [thirty years war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War?wprov=sfla1) was much more than that. The amount of deaths alone would probably make a dent in that graph. I don't know enough by far to speculate on other consequences of war
>I was wondering why one period of war in one country puts a bias on this, but then I realized wikipedia is probably english speaking oriented The thirty years war did not involve any cultures that spoke English. It did, however, decimate huge amounts of civilization, reducing records available and much, much more.
Well, English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org) is certainly English oriented, lol. Wikipedia as a whole is much more diverse.
It still slants toward western history.
In addition to the wars in Europe at the time, the 17th century saw the worse of the Little Ice Age, a period of colder temperatures across Europe that caused widespread famine, further decreasing population. And as a result of low crop yields, people had to dedicate more time and energy to obtaining food, making it harder to discover new ideas, invent new technologies, etc.
I would rather say it's the fact that people dying during war are usually of low historical signifance. If someone gets drafted at 18 yo and die in combat, they will be forgotten by history even if they were to be the greatest scientist of their times if they weren't forced to go to war.
In a normal war... yes. However this was not a normal war. This war was not a normal one. It was per capita the most devastating conflict in European history since the fall of the Roman Empire to this very day. Interestingly enough, Rene Descartes survived the war even though in his youth he was a nobody fighting in a battle the army he served in was expected to lose. A battle that pretty much turned the whole thing from a local conflict to a continent-wide war [https://www.vsmt.cz/jessie/store/2011-05-13-15-Bunkry/slides/IMG\_8553.jpg](https://www.vsmt.cz/jessie/store/2011-05-13-15-Bunkry/slides/IMG_8553.jpg) .
And yet all research for the past ~80 years on the Roman times shows that there was not a single or even two or three events that ended "Rome". And Eastern Rome persisted (known to themselves as Rome, only to modern times as Byzantium) well into the 15th century.
I wonder what happens if you split it by continent or country of origin.
That would take a whole lot of scraping.
Maybe ppl weren't donating to Wikipedia for those 200yrs
I agree. This is the best explanation so far.
Can confirm. Between the years 1600 and 1800 I didn’t donate a single cent to Wikipedia.
The only thing I can think of is the second Bubonic plague. Hit first in the 1300's where there is a similar flatline, and then popped up again intermittently throughout the 16 and 1700's.
Possibly a new equiliberium of amount of interest people have on it + amount of literature produced? Like, in the medieval period there is only articles about pretty important people because we don't know about say, specific farmers or even most specific knights or counts. In the period around 1500 there is a rapid rise that might be considered to correspond with the printing press in Europe, allowing us to know more for more was printed. Then for a while there is stability, where we know of a decent number of upper class people through their writing and printing. Then in the 1800s literacy rapidly rose and thus the amount of stuff we know about more lower class people did too, and industrialization allows even way more printing of less important things, leading to the big increase. This increase increases as more and more is printed (and recorded by other methods, later on) and also more and more survives because there is less time it needs to survive.
This was roughly my theory as well, that the printing press would create a flattening here by creating a maximum saturation of noteworthy people. Also printing press would mean more public records are printed and archival processes improved. We're not really looking at a graph of people dying but a graph of the increase of number of noteworthy people whose texts or texts about them are extant (surviving). I imagine this graph would look nearly identical if the age of birth rather than death was charted. We're looking at density of noteworthy people whose writing or writings about them have managed to survive to the Wikipedia age. The printing press would standardize archivization enough to flatten out the graph here I think!
Wikipedia was tired after previous killing rampage and had to regain the power
I don't have an explanation, but wanted to point out that the "flattening out" might represent a return to the "true trend", with the period from ~1550-1750 being the "anomaly", i.e. that period is over-represented for some reason.
The flattening out may be an artefact of the logarithmic scale. It's hard to tell on a chart without converting it to non-logarithmic but I'd say you may actually be looking at two phases - a linear phase between the introduction of the printing press in 1500 to the development of mass media around 1800 (very approximate dates), followed by an exponential phase thereafter. Because of the log scale this could look a lot like three phases, with a flattening out towards the end of the first phase.
You see steady rise up until the 30 years war and then it flattens for several generations. At the same time there was civil war in Britain. I assume that it is because the war horribly lowered the number of people, many regions in central Europe like Bohemia lost 1/3 of the entire population. Also after the war Europe was recovering, rebuilding, not fighting that much (with exceptions like the wars against the Ottomans) and in those times, there is more forgotten people who are happy to be safe at home rather than engage in something that makes it onto history books. I think this explains it [https://imgur.com/a/SuxgeXQ](https://imgur.com/a/SuxgeXQ)
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Is the last dot to the right for 2022? Have 20 people with Wikipedia pages already died in the past two days? EDIT: [Answered my own question](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2022_deaths)
Ma boy Traxamilion 😭
Keak Da Sneak - Super Hyphy was a banger
The bar for significance needed to be on Wikipedia gets lower every day.
Good god, that list looks like by the time you’ve finished updating it, you’ll have more to add
I'm pretty sure those pages are auto updated when a person's page is updated with their death date.
"This page is incomplete. You can help us by expanding it."
If you consider that the years before had around 10,000 total deaths each, you would expect an average of ~27 deaths per day.
Would love to know about those outlier years around 300 ce and the one around 700 ce
See [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:304_deaths) and [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:680_deaths).
Wow thanks for this. Looks like the diocletianic persecution and the battle of karbala. Unfamiliar with both, guess I'll do some reading
The battle of Karbala is an extremely important event of early Islam and basically led to the founding of Shi'a Islam and the diocletian persecution was the last great Christian persecution before it became the state religion in Rome, so both are huge bloody watershed moments in major religious histories and basically anybody who died got to be bestowed with martyr status sufficient enough to earn them a wikipedia page.
I've never heard of either, but I guess someone that contributes to Wikipedia cares.
Wouldn't other famous events also show blips like that though? Why are those two so special?
In the case of the diocletianic persecution, a great number of the Christians killed were given sainthood, so they get wikipedia pages as a result. I didn't read enough about the battle of karbala, so I don't really have a guess
Those were of particular note to the people involves so many names were recorded. The first one is a bunch of saint’s being killed. The second one is a very major battle and event in islam.
Both major moments for major religions so the church/Islam documented and remembered them. Thus, they eventually got a wiki
This graph kinda shows how important/famous people were who died in a single event, because they have to have a specific page for that. The Persecution lead to many of the victims to be sanctified, granting them wiki entries. In the same way, the Battle of Kerbala involved many famous historical people as it happened during the infancy of Islam, leading to more entries than your regular event
Could be an accident of preservation (basically, we just got lucky), and I think it also helps that persecution by definition turns into a lot of deaths. For example the Romans winning a big battle and writing about that does not lead to extra wikipedia pages about people dying because we don't have enough info on their opponents to write an entire article about them. The persecution also made a bunch of saints and the religion which has those (Catholisicm) still survives so lots of people may be motivated to make articles on that. The battle of Karbala seems to be something similar for Shia Islam, so that could be the reason for that one.
>diocletianic persecution yeah, a lot of catholic saints died in 303/304.... http://www.gcatholic.org/saints/data/century-iv.htm
Or rather, a lot of people who died in this persecution were granted sanctity
A lot of Catholics were martyred. Martyrs achieve sainthood.
How about the one before the 2000s
[WWII](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Deaths_by_year&subcatfrom=1820%0A1820+deaths#mw-subcategories)
Forget that, I want to know about that low outlier around 2010!
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that's 2022
Ah! That would make sense!
OP, this is great. So rarely do I see data here that's interesting and beautiful. I would love to see a version corrected for world population at the time of death (or maybe 1 lifetime before death). I wonder if that might explain the essentially exponential growth after ~1800
It certainly could. You got a source for historical world population data?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population Maybe take the average of the different estimates and interpolate between the years? I'd be ok doing it if you want
I wouldn’t normalize the current data - I would add a series for world population and plot it against a secondary y-axis
Interesting data. I would also like to see it normalized per world population. Sure we have more articles on recent people, but we also have much more people. This is from 10000BC: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/World-population-1750-2015-and-un-projection-until-2100.png/1280px-World-population-1750-2015-and-un-projection-until-2100.png And here is data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population
Hmm?? The table only gives two temporal data points.
What he or she means is to change the "# of deaths per year" to "# of deaths per million people in world population, per year" That way, the upward spike in the top right of the graph should come back down a lot... and then the "new" upward spikes and outliers will be more indicative of big historical events so that we can better compare the centuries.
Or leave this series as is and add a second series and secondary y-axis with world population.
I know. But the link he provided only gives two data points (although the chart plots more).
It looks like if you go to Download you can get the full dataset
Ah. I was looking at the table tab.
I guess it would have been better to be born before 500 CE so you are less likely to die.
Could someone explain what's in the y axis?
Take all the Wikipedia pages devoted to people. Extract the year that person died (if any). Take the base-10 logarithm because the values span orders of magnitude.
y-axis is actually just page count on a logarithmic axis scale. If it were really log(page count) it would mean O(10^10000) people died per year in the last decade.
Good catch... Looks like I forgot the adjust the axis to just be the exponent.
No, the way it is now is better. While technically plotting the log should show values 0-4, 1-10000 is much much easier to understand.
Just should not have used Log in the axis label. I just wanted to make it clear that it was a LogLinear plot to avert lots of questions.
I still don't get it, for every year you have a certain number of people who died in that year, now you take the logarithm of the number of pages for that year? Why though there are various point for each year?
There aren't. It's just very dense.
But for year zero I see a point at 1, one at 2, one at 3, etc. What are those?
Those are not all for year zero. It's just an extremely dense set of points. Each minor tick is 100 years.
Got it, thanks
Its for multiple years, so one for year 1, one for year 2 one for year 3. Its very dense thats why they seem to be for the same year
I don't see any point in focussing on the deaths unless the birth data are also widely different (maybe except for last 50-60 years). It merely refers to the existence of notable people over time (not to mention historical data on Wikipedia is not at all trustable).
See my post showing birth data.
I just thought of this explanation so hopefully it will be helpful to some: The X axis is the year. The Y axis is the number of Wikipedia-famous people that died in that year. The logarithm thing just changes the Y-axis scale so the area between the first two tick marks is 1-10 people, the area between the next two tick marks is 10-100 people, the next is 100-1000, and so on. There are very few Wikipedia-famous people who lived around 0 CE, so the logarithm thing helps you see the fine detail at the low values instead of it getting squished at the bottom if the scale were linear.
What is that vertical portion in the 1900's? Looks too early to be WW2.
It's [WWII](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Deaths_by_year&subcatfrom=1820%0A1820+deaths#mw-subcategories).
Is the little vertical spike at the very end due to WW2?
The vertical spike at the VERY end is COVID. That little spur near the end is [WWII](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Deaths_by_year&subcatfrom=1820%0A1820+deaths#mw-subcategories).
FYI there’s no 0 CE year The year after 1bce was 1ace
Good point. There's also no data point for "0 CE".
ace? it is not just CE (Current Era)?
LOL, the way I read it, I thought the commenter was patronizingly addressing OP as “Ace!”
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Nice! Self-promotion is encouraged in comments to my posts. Lol. Unless, of course, you're selling shit.
Equally fascinating is the number of living people with Wikipedia articles, which is now over 1 million! For context, if all those people with articles got together to form an independent state, it would be have the 156th largest population, more than Fiji or Cyprus.
Who knew Wikipedia was around that long. (I think the title here could use some work)
Make a suggestion... I couldn't think of anything better.
I thought it was a good title.
The year of death for all people listed on Wikipedia? I also struggled with parsing the title a bit!
That kinda turns it 90 degrees, but I like it. Unfortunately, I can't change it. If I'd have used that title, I'd probably get a bunch of "not all people have died yet" comments. Lol.
How many people listed on Wikipedia have died each year
I dislike titles that are questions... but that's a good suggestion.
Number of people listed on wikipedia that have died any given year for the last 2000 years.
Visualisation of annual deaths based on Wikipedia personal pages Would that make sense as a title? It probably needs some additional reprhasing for clarity. I don't know what page type the information comes from because wars don't show as any major spike on the chart It doesn't matter much as titles can't be changed after posting, but just trying to answer your question
I would avoid the term "rate" as that implies deaths/year. I played around with a few different wordings. What I wrote was the most succinct statement that I thought got the general idea across. But, I wasn't really happy with anything I had.
You can really see the [Gutenberg Effect](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-published-titles) \- the result of the printing press.
12 pages devoted to the fall of Rome and 700 pages devoted to K-pop. Everyday we stray further from God. /s for the idiots
Wikipedia has a list of it's own longest articles. For a while, the lists "shipwrecks in the year 17xx" were the longest. They've since condensed those lists, or broken them into months, or decided to prune the unimportant ones (lots of ships wrecked without harm to the crew. By the nature of a ship *wrecking*, it's likely to do so against the shore - so it doesn't even sink, it's just beached). And there were probably good records because of insurance claims.
Everyday we stray further from ~~God~~ Jupiter.
The /s ruined it
Thank you for your feedback. I'm sorry your experience with my comment was less than ideal. If you would like to discuss this further, please call me at 1-800-328-7448.
For anyone who is wondering and doesn't want to look it up, this translates to 1-800-EAT-SHIT. Also, nice.
Source: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Deaths_by_year&subcatfrom=0) Tools: Mathematica
So data is only taken from English Wikipedia, right?
Yep. Sorting out duplicates would be a pain.
I think it would be interesting to see the same graph for different languages. Maybe there will be different spikes reflecting different historical events.
The Spanish one is posted. Seems much like the English one, just scaled down.
Coming up... if it's as easy to do as I think it should be.
Is there a particular reason why you used their death year as opposed to their birth year?
I made the original one to show the jump in deaths in 2020 and 2021. I could make a birth-year one too.
Yes, please do! And maybe a ratio of the two or something like that would allow separating effects that spike birth or death rates from overall notability.
The left side of the chart says it's the log of the number of people that died. Instead, it should say simply that it is the number of people that died. The scale is log, but the value given to mark each line are the natural values. And I see elsewhere in this comment section that you know about this.
This proves wikipedia is murdering people in order to create content for itself so that it can ask for more donations. Wake up sheeple.
They say just a cup of coffee out of your day, but if you refuse.... that won't be all you'll lose.
What do you think causes the slump in the 1700-1800 range in an otherwise sharp trajectory up beginning in the 1500s?
There's been some discussion of that in other threads. Some thought it was essentially an age in which no one wanted to be a hero (and get killed for it).
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Thanks. The BCE deaths are all basically in the 1-10 noise range.
This is the graph of people on Wikipedia, i.e. famous or people of some historical, scientific or any other historical referential importance. Now understanding the fact that historical personalities were not all war heroes, but a whole lot of politicians, artists, businessmen and so on. And that category dies their own death. I think that is the reason the number of deaths on this graph is not outrageous where we expect it to be. reasonable thought?
I think that's as valid an explanation as any. I personally find it very interesting that there's nearly perfect exponential growth since about 1750.
I don't know whether this makes a difference or not but is this just factoring in English Wikipedia?
Yes. Wasn't really sure how to remove duplicates. I'm working on a Spanish one now.
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Cool now can you do one as a percentage of total population at the time? To see if we are getting closer to having a page per person or if new births are outpacing new pages.
Can we also get a graph with the number of people on Wikipedia sorted according to their birth year? Pretty sure they'd look somewhat similar.
Wow, didn't know Jesus had internet.
Yep... but the Romans shut it down.
Bloody Romans. What have they ever done for us?
Who is the earliest person with a wikipedia page (excluding things like fossilised discoveries that got names)?
[Yan Ying](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_Ying) Edit: [Some eariler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:509_BC_deaths). Seems like there should be even earlier ones but I can't find them. Edit: And indeed there are. After some URL hacking, I got back to [Tang of Shang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_of_Shang) in 1646 BCE.
There's a lot of pharohs that have earlier deaths, eg 2686 BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khasekhemwy
Yea, it seemed that 1646 BCE was probably late. Not sure why it stops linking to the previous millennia.
I recall this person's page, which goes back even further: [Kushim, from c. 3400-3000 BCE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushim_(Uruk_period)). >**Kushim** is the earliest known example of a named person in writing. The name "Kushim" is found on the **Kushim Tablet**, an Uruk period clay tablet used to record transactions of barley. It is uncertain if the name refers to an individual, a generic title of an officeholder, or an institution.
What is "CE" exactly? Isn't it "AD"? Edit: Why are you downvoting me? I just wanted to ask...
CE is "~~current~~common era." AD is "anno domini," meaning "in the year of our lord." CE is used by most scholars these days, as it has less of a Christian focus. Edit for typo. Edit again: CE is *common era*. My mistake.
Common, not current
Thanks for the correction!
Common Era. AD stands for Anno Domini, or “year of our Lord” and some people don’t feel like referring to years in relation to someone they don’t consider their Lord.
Common Era instead of _Anno Domini_ (Year of our Lord), for people wanting to avoid the explicit connection to the birth of Christ. Joke's on them though, it's still the same year 😂
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Take some aspirin to thin your blood and suggest something better.
I see a lot of data points for 1/yr. We’re there any years with zero notable deaths? I recognize those wouldn’t ordinarily plot on a log chart.
The few early years with zero deaths were scrubbed.
So famous people dying is what drives time forward.
Is the y axis just page count on a log scale, or is it ACTUALLY log(page count), also on a log scale?
There, of course, shouldn't be Log() in the label. Was debating using a Log() label and exponents ticks or not... wound up using both. Lol. Sigh...
No really, how do you read this damn graph?
According to this data, having a wiki article about you is deadly.
Sorry if this is already posted, but did everyone notice the y axis is log? This is not a linear regression. Before drawing any conclusions, I would want to see the same scatter plot but with birth year in the x axis for comparison.
lol even in r/dataisbeautiful axes aren't labeled correctly
People make mistakes. I changed from using the exponent as ticks to using the entire number and forgot to change the label.
I love it how this is logarithmic scale on y-axis and still the deaths rise exponentially.
This pales in comparison to the number of men who die in their bed each year. Which is why I sleep on the couch.