The issue of unsourced biographies of living people (BLPs) came to a head this week after Rdm2376 (formerly named Kevin) began deleting such BLPs with a deletion rationale of: Unwatched and unsourced biography that has not been edited for at least 6 months. This was drawn to the attention of editors when Paul Erik started a thread at ANI, later moved to its own subpage. The immediate response was supportive—Scott MacDonald (formerly named Doc glasgow) and others also performed discretionary deletions—but strongly opposing views on the deletions quickly emerged. Rdm2376 was blocked by Geni after he continued the deletions; he was subsequently unblocked by Coffee and re-blocked by DESiegel, who then unblocked him in deference to a filed Request for Arbitration (see below).
I haven't reviewed the specifics of your recent article deletions, so I can't vouch for each and every one of them of course, but I wanted to fully endorse the principles that, as I understand it, you have used in your deletions: unsourced BLPs that have been around for several years are an easy and obvious first target, and your deletions, while unconventional and a bit exciting for some, were carefully considered and I consider this a valid application of WP:BOLD. You have my support. —Jimbo Wales (talk) 21:58, 21 January 2010 (UTC)
Jimbo Wales was notified of developments. In response, he wrote to Scott MacDonald that he supported what Scott was doing; Scott MacDonald was deleting BLPs which had been unreferenced for three years or longer.
During the discussion at ANI, two proposals were offered and were moved from ANI to the more appropriate talk pages of relevant policies, Proposed deletion (PROD) and Criteria for speedy deletion (CSD).
Bigtimepeace proposed an amendment to the PROD policy: that "prods of unreferenced BLPs cannot be removed until the article is adequately referenced." Further, he proposed that once this amendment was enacted, 5,000 unreferenced BLPs—selected from Category:All unreferenced BLPs, which, at the time of Rdm2376's deletions, contained roughly 50,000 pages—would be proposed for deletion each week. Roughly 73% of editors supported this idea. Opposers cited, among other things, dissatisfaction with amending—and in some opinions, completely undermining the purpose of—the PROD policy instead of devising an entirely new process; some did not object to the proposal itself so much as to deletions of articles only because they were unsourced, which did not necessarily imply violation of the biographies of living persons policy; others maintained that any deletion is unacceptable until sources have been actively sought and found non-existent. Discussion ensued, and another proposal was offered by Rd232. Under this proposal, all new BLPs would be tagged with a template and would be placed in the Article Incubator if they remained unreferenced after seven days. Fewer editors commented on this proposal, but response was largely positive. These discussions were cut short due to their archival with a directive to continue discussion at an RfC on BLPs. Shortly before this archival, Casliber linked to a suggestion he had made at the Village Pump; he proposed that a bot would semi-protect all BLPs—including sourced ones—and would automatically protect new ones. Response was evenly split and discussion ended quickly.
Multixfer suggested that a new criterion providing for summary deletion BLPs which have been unsourced for over a year be added to the CSD policy. Response was mixed, though more negative than the PROD proposal; opposing reasons were largely the same. This discussion was also truncated in favor of the RfC.
TheDJ proposed a change to the Flagged Revisions idea, which he believed would resolve the BLP problem. He suggested that en.wiki adopt the model used by the German Wikipedia: de.wiki uses Flagged Revisions on all its articles. TheDJ suggested this as it would allow flagged revisions to be activated on en.wiki immediately, as technical concerns for specific en.wiki execution are delaying its activation. This proposal saw little response.
Fram created Wikipedia:Deletion of unreferenced BLPs based on the discussion above about employing PROD to delete unreferenced BLPs. The proposed process is as follows:
1. An article is nominated when the {{dub}} tag is added.
2. If any person adds one or more relevant reliable sources to the article and then removes the {{dub}} tag, the BLP deletion is aborted and may not be renominated. The article may still be nominated for a regular deletion discussion of course.
3. The article is first checked and then manually deleted by an administrator 7 days after nomination. It may be incubated.
Discussion on the talk page is ongoing, and as of publication it has neither been marked as a policy nor received significant levels of formal support or opposition.
Wikipedia:Unreferenced biographies of living people was created and proposed by Scott MacDonald. This proposal incorporates the suggestion referenced above by employing a PROD system. New unreferenced BLPs would be tagged with {{Prod blp}} immediately; the page will exist for seven days during which time the tag may be removed only if adequate sourcing is provided. After seven days without sourcing the article would be deleted. Existing articles would be treated slightly differently; a bot would be used to provide a list to Wikiprojects of unsourced BLPs within their purview, and so allow interested editors to find and fix problem BLPs. Aside from this, all BLPs unreferenced for two years or more would be tagged for deletion, and a month would be provided to fix them, after which time they will be deleted. After these articles are addressed, all BLPs unreferenced for 18 months would be tagged and given the same month to be fixed; subsequent taggings would occur in similar iterations based on time tagged as being unreferenced. All articles deleted under this proposal would be undeleted and userfied upon request. This proposal also makes a specific note about deletions of non-attack page BLPs outside of already-established procedures: Notwithstanding ArbCom's recent motion, if this policy is adopted, it shall explicitly be considered against policy and disruptive if any BLP is speedy deleted merely for being unsourced. (See below for explanation of the motion referenced.) Discussion on the talk page is ongoing, and as of publication it has not been marked as a policy nor has it received significant levels of formal support or opposition.
The Committee has determined that:
- The deletions carried out by Rdm2376, Scott MacDonald, and various other administrators are a reasonable exercise of administrative discretion to enforce the policy on biographies of living people.
- The administrators who carried out these actions are commended for their efforts to enforce policy and uphold the quality of the encyclopedia, but are urged to conduct future activities in a less chaotic manner.
- The administrators who interfered with these actions are reminded that the enforcement of the policy on biographies of living people takes precedence over mere procedural concerns.
The Committee hereby proclaims an amnesty for all editors who may have overstepped the bounds of policy in this matter. Everyone is asked to continue working together to improve and uphold the goals of our project. The Committee recommends, in particular, that a request for comments be opened to centralize discussion on the most efficient way to proceed with the effective enforcement of the policy on biographies of living people.
Motion passed (9/4/3/0)
In response to Rdm2376's deletions, Juliancolton brought a request for arbitration to the Arbitration Committee. Seventy-six statements were posted, and the Arbitrators elected to respond by motion. The motion was largely supportive of this execution of the BLP policy, finding it an acceptable use of administrator tools to enforce our BLP policy and the foundation mandate on BLPs. A page has been created to reference this motion.
Later, another case was brought by MBisanz. In response to the PROD discussion referenced above, an edit war occurred on the proposed deletion policy page over whether consensus favored the proposal; Malinaccier fully protected the page to stop the edit warring. Coffee edited through this protection to include language which supported the change under discussion on the talk page. Sandstein told Coffee he must revert, as making the edit through full protection was against the protection policy. Coffee cited the ArbCom's recent motion as justification for the edit (which was later reverted by OverlordQ). Sandstein disagreed that the motion validated such a change to policy, and blocked him for 24 hours. Sandstein brought the block to AN for review; while some supported Coffee's actions, most agreed that Sandstein was too involved to have made the block. After MBisanz brought the matter to ArbCom, Coffee was unblocked to participate. Arbitrators are split on how to proceed on this case; they stand (3/3/0/4), and most Arbitrators voting to decline or hold off on action suggest deference to the RfC.
The RfC is actively ongoing; it is likely that any resolution will form from there. A summary of the discussion as of midday 24 January was drafted by Risker.
How are Wikipedia biography articles distributed in the 20th century? The following graph shows the number of births and deaths of people with Wikipedia articles for each year of the 20th century (1899 until 2010, actually) based on the birth year and death year categories.
What the data seem to show is that the number of births remains relatively steady (with a slow increase) until about 1935, and then (presumably) the effect of recentism and the large number of biographies of living people starts to kick in, and the number of people with Wikipedia articles born in the years after that point increases, with a spike in 1947 (from the post-war baby boom, perhaps?). Then it levels off and starts to rise dramatically from about 1970 onwards (this would be people who are about 40 years old), reaching a peak with people born in 1982 (28 years old). The figures collapse completely around 1990 when the age drops low enough that the subjects of the biographies are children, forming a tailing off that never completely disappears and only reaches zero in 2010 (no-one automatically notable has been born yet).
For deaths, there is a slow but steady increase from 1899 to about 1990, with two peaks that are clearly due to the two World Wars (the peaks are in 1918 and 1944). There is a massive increase in deaths between 1990 and 2009, with the peak in the last three years with all those years being over 4,500. The actual peak is 4825 deaths in 2008. The births peak in 1982 was 8577 for comparison. The deaths graph drops off dramatically at the end, because "only" 82 people with Wikipedia articles have died this year so far (though rather disconcertingly I see that has gone up to 98 in the space of a single day - the figures I have were taken on 11/01/2010). Or to put that another way: over the past three years, an average of 12 to 13 people with Wikipedia articles have died each day.
Trying to measure how fast people are "born" (i.e. appear on Wikipedia) is not so easy to calculate, as people have to become "notable" first, and they do that at different rates (some are notable when they are born, others take a bit longer, maybe not becoming notable until after they have died). As to the peak of births in 1982 and the decline after that, it is difficult to explain why that year, precisely, is the peak; probably several factors are at work there.
Reader comments
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.
In a panel alongside the founder of Skype and a representative of the Mozilla Foundation, Jimmy Wales discussed Wikipedia as market disruptor. The Guardian's digital content blog covered the discussion in "Skype, Wikipedia, Firefox – is the internet about disrupting markets?" "Wikipedia is a very, very bad business", said Wales. "Everything is free. It is really hard to compete with us."
Sam Vaknin, writing for the Global Politician, argues that Encyclopaedia Britannica must reposition itself within the information market to survive: "it is too detailed, costly, and thorough to cater to the wants of the occasional peruser, yet it is not sufficiently authoritative to serve as a bibliographic source in a textbook or doctoral thesis" and should therefore "re-brand itself as an archive of the history of ideas rather than a mere work of reference". Vaknin argues that Britannica should work with Wikipedia or implement crowd-sourcing, perhaps employing a Citizendium model. It should be noted that in 2006, Vaknin wrote an opinion piece where he detailed six of our "deadly sins" and direly predicted that it was only "a question of time before the (sic) Wikipedia self-destructs and implodes".
Dire criticism of their business model and market disruption by Wikipedia aside, according to a March 2009 statement by Britannica president Jorge Cauz, the venerable encyclopedia has been profitable for five years running, with most revenue now coming from online sales.
Reader comments
Since (almost!) everyone reads novels, one would expect WikiProject Novels to be one of the more successful projects on the encyclopedia but, surprisingly, the history of the project has been relatively low-key. Started in October 2002 (making it one of the earliest WikiProjects), it never really took off until early 2006 when Kevinalewis, the current lead coordinator, became active member #3 with the plaintive is this project active?. Since then, the project has moved forward fitfully to its current level of 147 members, 29 featured articles, 4 featured lists, and 75 good articles. While this is a respectable record, it is far less than one would expect from an area in which there are upward of 40,000 articles categorized as novels (according to the toolserver).
This week, the Signpost interviews Kevinalewis, the project lead-coordinator, and Alan16, a project coordinator, to explore the pitfalls in this everyman's area, and to identify what you can do to strengthen this neglected continent of Wikipedia.
Let's get right into it. Everybody has a favorite novel (and almost everyone wants to write one!). Yet, the number of listed wikipedians on this project is a dismal 147 with active members probably numbering in the low double digits. Why does this project have a hard time getting members and in keeping them engaged?
That's interesting. From what you're saying, it would appear that the scope of the project is too large to hold the interest of individual editors. But shouldn't the task forces, and I see that there are quite a few, help concentrate the minds of editors? Does that make sense and are there plans to expand the reach of these task forces?
I should think that articles on novels are rarely contentious given that the articles revolve largely around the plot and reviews. But, of course, some novels may have been contentious or controversial in the past (Lady Chatterley's Lover and Madame Bovary come to mind!). Have there been any novel articles that have escalated into major disputes in your knowledge?
What help can the project give an editor who creates an article on a novel? For example, I've just created the article on the novel Losing Nelson by Barry Unsworth. Could you direct me to various project resources that I can use in building my article?
I notice that the project has a collaboration department. How well does this work? Are there any success stories you'd like to share with the community?
Could you give our readers some tips on what they can do to get involved with the project? Things like receiving updates, areas where you could use some help, that sort of thing.
Thank you Kevinalewis and Alan16 for taking the time to talk to the Signpost. Readers, if there is a novel that you have more than a passing acquaintance with, please visit WikiProject Novels and see what you can do to send the novel's article on the way to featured status!
Next week, the WikiProject Report will dig into a prehistoric project. Until then, feel free to peruse the archives, newly updated with lost articles from a previous revival.
Reader comments
One editor was granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Floquenbeam (nom).
One editor was promoted to bureaucrat this week: Useight (nom).
Four articles were promoted to featured status this week: 1937 Social Credit backbenchers' revolt (nom), Drosera regia (nom), The Battle of Alexander at Issus (nom) and Noronhomys (nom).
Six lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of DART Light Rail stations (nom), List of World Series champions (nom), Major League Baseball Most Valuable Player Award (nom), List of Asian American Medal of Honor recipients (nom), Grammy Legend Award (nom) and List of National Historic Landmarks in Indiana (nom).
No topics were promoted to featured status this week.
No portals were promoted to featured status this week.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as Today's featured article this week: History of the Montreal Canadiens, Raptor Red, City and South London Railway, Operation Tractable, Sid Barnes, Hawksbill turtle and Attachment theory.
Three articles were delisted this week: Serial Experiments Lain (nom), V for Vendetta (film) (nom) and Jonathan Wild (nom).
No lists were delisted this week.
No topics were delisted this week.
No portals were delisted this week.
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page as picture of the day this week: Anemone stinkhorns, Nineteenth century photo of snake charmers, 1856 lithograph of the Selimiye Barracks, 1900 poster for "Gaiety Dancers", Black Phoebe, NGC 5866 and Scanning electron microscope image of a rust mite.
One featured sound was promoted this week:
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| It's a Long Way to Tipperary, written by Jack Judge in 1912 and performed here by Albert Farrington in 1915. | (nom) |
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Two pictures were promoted to featured status this week.
The Arbitration Committee opened one case this week and closed none, leaving three open.
On January 23, the second generation rewrite of the article assessment bot WP 1.0 bot was launched. The upgrade was necessary because the current bot now takes several days to update the many on-wiki database pages for each WikiProject. In addition, the previous bot was not customizable for individual WikiProjects and did not allow for dynamic data queries, such as finding pages which had been rated by two different WikiProjects. The new bot solves these problems in two main ways. First, the bot's record of rating information has been shifted from on-wiki pages to a separate web database. This new interface allows for dynamic queries based on a variety of parameters. Secondly, article summary tables for WikiProjects now display alternate classes such as category, portal, and disambiguation, and customization of classes for individual WikiProjects is possible through Template:ReleaseVersionParameters.
WikiProjects do not need to take any action for their summary tables to be updated for the new bot. However, any questions or bugs should be reported to Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index.
Three new bot tasks were approved this past week.
