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Note to self: When randomly selecting a series of stories to look up on ff.net, arrange them randomly as well, so if 2/3 of the way through you decide that 200 is plenty big enough of a sample size than 300, you can just stop, as opposed to having to finish looking up the rest.

I am trying to figure out if stories that don't bother listing characters, have basically the same distribution of characters as those that do list characters. There are over 11,000 stories that don't list any characters (about 25% of all of the stories in the db). So I randomly selected 300 of these and am using either the description or a skimming of the story to determine the characters. Then I will compare distributions. Of course my data provider has all of the characters listed numerically with the names in a lookup table. I've been going chronologically--came across a few stories I recognized: Astrogirl's story about the end of the world and the Doctor drinking tea, Calapine's story about Rose perhaps not wanting to find out about more companions, "Watson's Ghost" by Camilla Sandman... and oh my goodness a bunch of 'spork my eyes out' stories too. So, you might be able to guess, I've now so far got several numeric character sets memorized:

1267
1267,1279
1267,1279,590
490,1267
490,590
490,665
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Also, it is kind of frightening how many stories I honestly can't tell which Doctor they're writing about.

ETA: 222 in to my chronologically ordered sample, I've got my first 1267,820 femmeslash story! (That would be Rose/Donna). Woot, thanks NetgirlY2K ;D