Esteemed doper Fluffy PickleSniffer just reminded me that today is Sir Paul McCartney’s birthday, so I went over to Wikipedia to find out that he just turned 75. Of course my response was “Will you still need me; will you still feed me, when I’m seventy-five?”
But that’s one long-assed biography, and deservedly so!
Any other biographies that scroll for, like 40 pages (including references)?
Who has the longest? (Queen Elizabeth’s is only half of Sir Paul’s.)
I don’t know if you can call it a biography, but “List of compositions by Franz Schubert” is listed as the fifth longest article at Long pages - Wikipedia
So, how are you judging how many pages the biographies are? I think I’m missing something obvious. If I go to print, my page count comes at 91 for ol’ Sir Paul, and 110 for Churchill.
I looked up J.R.R. Tolkien, one of my faves, and he comes in at 69 by my CTRL+P system - but I’m guessing like I said that I’m missing something obvious, since everyone has different printer settings/margins.
So far as I can tell, it’s Belgian Astronomer Eric Walter Elst, though that is somewhat cheating, as the page is basically a very long list of all the asteroids he’s discovered.
The person with the longest biography (as measured by the number of bytes in the article) in Wikipedia is Mary Hanford Ford. No, I never heard of her before either. She has 334,421 bytes in her article. Barack Obama has only 325,111 bytes in his article. Despite that, on my printer the Obama article would be one more page when printed out. I’m not qualified to judge why the count by pages and bytes is so different. I’m going by this article, which has already been mentioned once by Rick Kitchen:
Here’s Ford’s article:
Note that about half of the article is footnotes.
Another person who has more pages than Ford but less bytes is Archibold Cox.
“Longest pages” in Wikipedia is misleading, since they measure only by byte count in the source code, and the largest part of that is list formatting. In fact, all of the entries in the top 50 page are basically lists that aren’t all that long when printed.
The entry reads almost like a week by week recitation of her activities and has 669 footnotes. It looks like someone tried to stuff their dissertation on her into a wiki page.
Well, I’m doing something wrong then I just doublechecked myself - set for letter size 8.5" x 11" with default margins and full page print, portrait and 100% size. Either it’s the Chrome browser preview, or it’s because I run a larger font on my webpages - though I didn’t realize that affected the print since I never print webpages, but maybe that’s my problem. Anyway, I wasn’t trying to skew data, sorry.
Seems like there is a problem with this question, after an article gets to a certain size it is strongly encouraged that the article be split up into smaller articles. So you’d need to see how many pages are on any sub pages.
Document lengths are commonly measured by word-count apparently giving equal weight to long and short words alike. Many word-processor apps will display the word count, and may even have sufficient smarts to disregard formatting commands and such. Just cut-and-past a wiki text into your fave word processor and see what you can learn.
I’ll leave it to others to figure out whether that should include footnotes, reference lists, photo captions, and such, let alone linked sub-articles.
I just doublechecked myself - set for letter size 8.5" x 11" with default margins and full page print, portrait and 100% size. Either it’s the Chrome browser preview, or it’s because I run a larger font on my webpages - though I didn’t realize that affected the print since I never print webpages, but maybe that’s my problem. Anyway, I wasn’t trying to skew data, sorry.