How many and why so many; comparisons[]
Right now, there are 6,840 of these. Clearly the mass conversion in 2009 left some untouched. Some of us occasionally grab a few and upgrade them, but there are still contributors who create non-SMW people pages. It's easier at the time, but it makes for more work later. Not much progress can be expected while the forms are misbehaving, because the work-around is a bit daunting for most contributors even if they find it, and it's superficially more difficult than even the similar process used to proliferate articles using the old Template:Person, and the benefits aren't always apparent.
By contrast, Special:SemanticStatistics tells us that "This wiki contains 7,045,215 property values for a total of 574 different properties."... Category:Facts articles- person contains 21,893 pages. Each of them potentially has two or three standard subpages: always /sensor (currently 18,612 of them categorized), usually /descendants (currently 4,903 - a relatively small number because they were not part of the major conversion), and always /tree (currently 16,609) even if the parents aren't known at present - in which case there is usually no tree page yet).
With 10,000 or more place pages and thousands of the no longer encouraged but still slightly useful info pages, we total just over 108,000 articles.
We can look at changes in the above numbers over time.
-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 11:22, January 7, 2012 (UTC)