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Decades, Centuries and Millennia on Wikipedia
Long-term Thinking

Decades, Centuries and Millennia on Wikipedia

by Austin Brown
Feb 14, 02013

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is reported to have said,

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

Our subjective experience of time and events can even be reflected beyond the scale of decades, as blogger Lucretius, Ver 21c has methodically demonstrated. He compared the length of Wikipedia articles that summarize decades, centuries and millennia, and graphed the analysis to show which periods seem to contain relatively more noteworthy happenings (or, perhaps, simply how much we currently know about them):

lnw-decades

He points out:

Interestingly, the larger the time unit, the less weighted Wikipedia is to the past in terms of article count: 5% of the decade articles, 13% of the century articles, and 35% of the millennium articles pertain to the future.

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