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Update on the Death Anomalies collaboration

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By WereSpielChequers
WereSpielChequers is an editor on the English Wikipedia and occasionally elsewhere. He has been actively involved in various Biography related projects this year and collaborated with Bot writer Merlissimo to launch the Death Anomalies project.

Just over a month ago, The Signpost published a story on the Death Anomalies project, which identifies anomalies where different language Wikipedias disagree as to whether an individual is dead or alive. The Project was started in June, with initially just the German and English language Wikipedias extracting reports of anomalies. Since then, the Latin, Swedish, and Slovenian Wikipedias have joined in, and hundreds of errors have been resolved. When The Signpost covered the project, readers pitched in and the number of anomalies on enwiki was slashed from 447 to 190 in just over a week. EN wiki still has more than a 100 anomalies on Wikipedia:Database reports/Living people on EN wiki who are dead on other wikis, with new reports coming in daily. However, most of the backlog is down to differences in the way different projects treat missing people who (if alive) would be more than 100 years old, cross-wiki anomalies stemming from unreferenced articles showing a person as dead, and issues that probably require a native foreign-language speaker to resolve.

In July, only two projects were extracting data from the table, though it queried data from around 70. Subsequently these have been joined by the Swedish Wikipedia which rapidly reduced 94 anomalies to 16, and the Latin wikipedia, which has managed to reduce its anomalies to one. Earlier this month the Slovene Wikipedia became the fifth participating project, and went in a week from requesting a report to having cleared their backlog.

Biographies of living people (BLPs) inevitably need to be updated when the subject dies, so all these reports are expected to be ongoing maintenance tasks. Although the bot is processing data from millions of biographies across different Wikipedias, fewer than a thousand anomalies have been identified so far, relying on Interwiki links and categories that identify biographies as dead or living. Some projects are ineligible for the program because they don't organise their articles in such a way; for example, the Portuguese Wikipedia have lists of people who died in particular years (rather than categories).

In the future, the number of languages from which data is extracted and number of languages requesting reports will hopefully increase; we have 66 Wikipedia language versions including French, Spanish, Japanese, Polish and Russian for whom reports could be extracted almost immediately. Merlissimo (whom Jimbo Wales praised as a "rock star" for his work on the project) has a bot that updates the reports daily, and is willing to produce reports for other projects.

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  • Am I the only one who has a problem with the title? "Biography bloopers", to me, is a very informal phrase that implies humor and lightheartedness when the opposite is the case. I'm sure I'm not the only one who associates the term "blooper" with an amusing error that happens in film-making. Determining whether an individual is dead or not is anything but amusing -- it is of the most serious of tasks on this site, and should be treated as such. The title does not effectively express the solemnity of the tasks or subject matter; in my opinion, WereSpielChequers the author clearly was trying to force a humorous title where one does not belong. "Update on the Death Anomalies collaboration" would be a perfectly fine title on its own. Xenon54 (talk) 21:14, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • If you don't like the title, then change it.--Rockfang (talk) 21:27, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Although WereSpielChequers is the principal author of the article, it has been edited by many others, and that part of the title was not added by him. Regards, HaeB (talk) 21:55, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I was unaware that Signpost worked like that. I was under the impression that one person wrote each article, unless multiple people are credited (which is sometimes the case). It's quite a misleading byline, although I should have known better and checked the history. Xenon54 (talk) 22:00, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Well, normally we avoid making significant changes after publication. The subtitle has already been copied to other places where it can't be changed (e.g. [1]), so one has to decide whether removing this concern is worth the inconsistencies. Regards, HaeB (talk) 22:48, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I disliked the Bloopers title, not the tone I wanted and I'm glad it is now closer to my original suggestion. But as this was in the nature of a press release from me to the Signpost I have been trying to restrict my subsequent editing of it to factual corrections and accept anything stylistic as the "ruthless editing" which the Signpost is entitled to do. ϢereSpielChequers 00:47, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If you didn't like it, why didn't you change it before publication? Tony (talk) 03:23, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe he assumed that if he simply got something into a readable form, another Wikipedian would help him to express his idea with helpful edits -- which is the original intent of Wikipedia:Ignore all rules -- rather than simply commenting snarkily in response to his confessed dissatisfaction over his original wording. -- llywrch (talk) 20:41, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I actually don't like bloopers either... :( ResMar 01:00, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
My original title was Death anomalies - the power of Signpost, I wasn't dissatisfied with my original, afterall the core of this story was thanking the readers of Signpost for resolving most of the outstanding anomalies. But I do recognise I've got a COI with an article on a project I started, so I've tried to stand back and let the Signpost crew do what they will with my submission. I think if I write another article and some changes happen that I'm not too keen on I'll ask the other Signpost contributor to add their name to the byline - that way no-one will assume that I'm responsible for part of an article that I didn't write or agree with. ϢereSpielChequers 23:43, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Number of languages

Merlissimo has added another 8 languages this week, so that makes nearly 80 projects which are compared for anomalies, though currently only 5 are extracting reports. There are bound to be more anomalies emerging as more projects extract data or have data extracted from them, I also suspect that more anomalies will emerge as projects improve their categorisation - some projects have a lot of under-categorised articles. ϢereSpielChequers 12:19, 16 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]



       

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