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2013 Report - difference in av. pubs compared to % of baptisms
by likeabird 31 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Sapphy
I'd love to see the number of total baptisms in the past 100 years minus death rate, and compare it to the figure of current active publishers.
I wonder how many 'missing' there would be? Over a million?
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88JM
100 years is a little ambitious I suspect - I don't think yearbooks go back that far! And (accurate) death rates probably aren't available for all countries that far back either.
50 years might be do-able - I guess I'm over half way there.
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mariu
88JM, perhaps you could post your spreadsheets as public documents on Google Docs? This should work well to keep them in the same location but update as necessary.
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88JM
88JM, perhaps you could post your spreadsheets as public documents on Google Docs? This should work well to keep them in the same location but update as necessary.
Yes, making the document more open and available was on my to-do list as it was suggested on that thread. I think jwfacts also put it on his site somewhere.
Scanning and OCR'ing the tables isn't that difficult, but it's the country changes that mess it up - countries changing their names and/or merging, splitting in two are a bit of a headache. I'm not looking forward to the working back through the troublesome 80s :(
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likeabird
it's the country changes that mess it up - countries changing their names and/or merging, splitting in two are a bit of a headache.
I don't think you need to worry about that. Where a name changes, just include the data for where the country was under that name and leave the other years blank. It's probably much simpler that way. We will be able to piece together the rest.
A classic example will be Burma which became Myanmar, possibly switching names back more than once. You could just place the two sets of data next to each other in the list. No need to merge the data.
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88JM
likeabird - Burma to Myanmar is a pretty simple name change, but sometimes you get countries that split away from another country but one country still keeps the old name, e.g. recently Sudan and South Sudan. You can't really just carry on the numbers for "Sudan" as it's not really the same "country" exactly as it represents a smaller number of people. (I probably made this mistake actually, thinking about it...)
What I'd tend to do would be to have three rows in that case: Sudan, South Sudan and "Sudan + South Sudan" for when they actually were one country
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besty
@88jm - I think the 80/20 rule will see you through
when i looked at the languages WTS were boasting about printing, seemed that the first 20 languages covered over 75% of their publishers...
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88JM
Sorry - I'm a perfectionist
What will (hopefully) happen is that the document gets used as a resource, and I don't want to be accused of misleading anyone.
Start missing out stuff and fudging the figures and you become no better than the Borg.
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likeabird
88JM - you're right, I didn't think about that case scenario. You're suggestion sounds good though
Besty - that's interesting and probably true. Do you have a link to that list?