Talk:Demographics

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The section on cohorts is interesting, but seems to refer to the US population, and may not apply to, say, Australia or South Africa. This should be clearly stated in the text, or the text rewritten from a more global perspective. /Filur 1 Aug. 2004.

That is a good point. Come to think of it, there are several qualifications that should be mentioned in using demographics. I will add a "criticisms and qualifications" section. mydogategodshat 18:08, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Perhaps the section that is US biased should be removed from this article and be put on the USA demographics page. It is definitely out of place here. Stonemaccas 18 Sep 2006.

Contents

[edit] Languages

If I'm writing an article about a country/region of the world, is it better to describe languages in the section about culture or demographics and why? I see it is not listed among demographic variables. --Eleassar777 10:53, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Good article nomination

This article was nominated for Good article status, but I don't think it fully meets the criteria yet. The first section title, 'Demographics is an applied art', seems somewhat strange to me, there is a large list under 'Demographic variables' which ought to be turned into prose, and a {{globalise}} tag under 'Generational cohorts' indicates problems there. Worldtraveller 10:39, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] On Demographics vs. Demography

If the term demographics is often erroneously used in place of demography, why do Wikipedia editors and contributors keep generating these "Demographics of . . . [country name]" articles? There are so many of these, and I am too unskilled to try to address this, that somebody needs to take charge and produce a renaming and a redirecting of links throughout the site.

Demographics is a media and advertising term. It is not a term that describes either a scientific field (demography or, more broadly, population studies) or the "population" (colloquially the "demography") of a given society or region.

Every one of those "demographics of . . ." articles should be changed either to "Demography of . . . " or "Population of . . . ", except for articles on the "demographics of media audiences" or something akin to that in which the jargon of that business can be recognized.

This is a plea for somebody to take charge and fix this minor but burgeoning abomination.Mack2 18:01, 7 July 2006 (UTC)


→ It's becoming an increasingly common usage of the noun. What should be done depends on whether Wikipedia should be defending historic usage or documenting current trends. See The Economist for multiple examples.[1] I think advertisers etc may have successfully marketed the term to a broader community. - 86.139.189.138

Editing hundreds of articles based on one's own interpretation of a somewhat ambiguous term seems to go against the spirit of wiki. Especially when the dictionary definition allows for the interpretation the original authors chose to take. If you were actually rewriting the articles for content, it would not be enough to simply state "that's not how I see it" or "scientists in the field say..." and simply start editorializing. Going by the dictionary definitions, the term "demographics" is a perfectly accceptable term for the selected population statistics included in the broad country study articles. In my opinion, the "Demographics of ____" heading should remain as it is within the broader country/region articles, and perhaps the heading "Demography of ____" can be used for the larger, more ambitious, population studies of the each individual states/regions. Alternatively, any debate could probably be avoided altogether by simply changing the heading to "Population Characteristics" like Encarta has done. 66.57.252.226 06:56, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

I also came here to see what wiki had to say on the meaning of 'demographics', because it was being used in geography articles as a heading. My common usage understanding of the word is that it means statistical information about something, or the study thereof. My own 1990 dictionary says demographics: data resulting from the science of demography, and demography: the scientific study of human populations, especially with relation to their size, structure and distribution. So on that basis, the articles would be correctly titled 'demographics of...', and quote lots of statistics. It would appear to me that, according to my quite large dictionary, the article is wrong in its definition of these two terms. At the least, it should explain that there is a possible different understanding of the terms.
My own interest was how broad the term demographics is, and whether when discussing a population it would include information about the land area, climate, how wet it is, all that sort of stuff which undoubtedly affects and influences the people living there, even though it might not be the sort of information collected by modern advertising executives. I suspect that a difference in understanding of the terms has crept in because such people are only interested in a subset of the total information. Sandpiper (talk) 13:29, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
I completely agree with you dictionary. However the key phrase is "the scientific study of human populations". Once human population is no longer an essential part of the study (as in climate, landmass etc. which will be the same regardless of population) it is no demography; I do agree that if climate has an effect on the population (e.g. in the arctic region people tend to protect themselves against cold) it is interesting from demography; but without such reference not. Arnoutf (talk) 18:48, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Non-families

I notice that a lot of Wikipedia articles use some sort of template putting households into four categories: "had children under the age of 18 living with them", "were married couples living together", "had a female householder with no husband present", and "non-families". These categories do not add up to 100%;, for examples see Downers Grove, Willowick, Ohio, etc etc. Any ideas about where this came from, and how it can be addressed? It seems like a category generated as part of a marketing strategy. Novickas 17:10, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Generational Cohorts

Are those born during the brief 1977-83 period generation-less?


That's exactly what I was thinking what's the deal?? I'll quote below

"Generation X cohort (born from 1965 to 1976) Memorable events: Challenger explosion, Iran-Contra, social malaise, Reaganomics, AIDS, safe sex, fall of Berlin Wall, single parent families

Key characteristics: quest for emotional security, independent, informality, entrepreneurial Generation Y cohort also called N Generation (born from 1983 to 2007) "

Seems to be years 1977 through 1982 are wandering generation lost. :)

I was recently at a business conference and they where talking about the generations and they referred to the N Generation as the milenials, or the milenial generation, those who haven't known a time before the computer