A series of deletions of unsourced biographies of living persons (BLPs) caused an uproar this week, leading to an Arbitration Committee motion supporting the principle of deleting longstanding unsourced BLPs and recommending centralized discussion, which is now taking place at Requests for comment/Biographies of living people. For full coverage, see the Signpost article "BLP deletions cause uproar". The spat also prompted a broader appraisal of the issue by Charles Matthews, who authored a blog post about "limited perspectives".
Nominally unrelated but apparently inspired by the deletion controversy, a petition against IAR abuse was started this week and has garnered over 75 signatures.
Also related to the BLP issue—but unrelated to the deletions—an arbitration case opened this week following the revelation that User:MZMcBride had given a short list of BLPs that appear on no user watchlists to banned editor User:Thekohser. MZMcBride has also been working on "climax", "a project that gathers and analyzes a set of attributes of biographies of living people in an attempt to programmatically find problematic biographies."
The heavy representation of biographies of living people among all biographies is readily apparent from User:Carcharoth's analysis of Wikipedia biographies in the 20th century, also in this week's Signpost.
The Wikinews 2010 Writing Competition has begun, and will run until 18 April. Points can be earned through three classes of contribution: synthesis articles that bring together news from multiple outside sources; original reporting; and photo essays. Contributions that become identified as featured articles on Wikinews garner additional points. A prize pot will go to the winner; the pot currently includes barnstars, ten Canadian dollars, and a postcard.
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Just wanted to mention the Wikinews competition is open to all, you don't have to be a wikinewsie (you don't even have to have edited before). Its not to late to join for anyone interested. Cheers [disclaimer: I'm active on wikinews]. Cheers. Bawolff (talk) 01:54, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding "is readily apparent", obviously, the majority of people born in the twentieth century are still alive (or are dead but we assume that they are alive). The analysis provides no information about the proportion of biographies that are of living people. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 18:01, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]