Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-09-13/Sister projects
Death anomalies in Wikipedia biographies: follow-up
In July, The Signpost published a story introducing the Death Anomalies project, which attempts to identify anomalies where different versions of Wikipedia disagree as to whether an individual is dead or alive. The Project was started in June of this year, and at the time the story was published, only the German and English language versions of Wikipedia were actively extracting reports of anomalies. Since then, the Latin, Swedish, and Slovenian Wikipedias have joined in, and hundreds of errors and anomalies have been resolved. When the project was announced on The Signpost, a number of readers pitched in; the number of anomalies on the English Wikipedia report was slashed from 447 to 190 in a little over a week. The English Wikipedia still has over a 100 anomalies on Wikipedia:Database reports/Living people on EN wiki who are dead on other wikis with new ones coming in every day. However, most of the backlog is down to differences in the way different projects treat missing people, people who (if alive) would be over 100 years old, cross-wiki anomalies stemming from unreferenced article showing a person as dead, and issues that probably require a Russian or Japanese speaker to resolve.
In July, only two projects were extracting data from the table, though around 70 were contributing data. 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. So far this month the Slovene Wikipedia has become the fifth participating project.
In regards to biographies of living people (BLPs), one has to eventually update the biography because the subject has died, so all these reports are expected to be ongoing maintenance tasks. Although the bot is processing data from millions of biographies across different languages versions of Wikipedia, less than a thousand anomalies have been identified so far. The process relies on Interwiki links and categories that identify biographies as either 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 has a bot that updates the reports daily, and is willing to produce reports for other projects.
User responses
The Swedish Wikipedia is fertile ground for any project of this kind. After some years of rapid growth in the number articles, attention swinged to quality and structure in 2008. Biographic articles were exhaustively categorized by gender in the fall of 2008, revealing that there are four male biographies for each female one, and by years of birth and death in 2009. This is also when the category for living people was created and a WikiProject for living people was started. The "death anomalies" report was set up as a subpage to this WikiProject, named "possibly deceased" people. Of course there are contributors who write new articles, but there is also an active community of users who categorize and verify the information. The Swedish Wikipedia has also benefitted from Check Wikipedia, a daily report of wiki-syntax errors, and would welcome similar projects. --LA2 (talk) 20:06, 7 September 2010 (UTC)
Although the Latin wikipedia (la.wikipedia) uses a language with a long history, a large portion of its articles cover modern topics, including (of course) biographies of living people. In figures: Of the about 44000 articles available in the Latin wikipedia today, about 4300 (or roughly ten percent) are biographies of living people. The death anomalies table adds an extra level of reliability to biographies of living people on the many wikipedias in different languages, including the English, German, Swedish and Latin wikipedias. It is great to see that more and more tools are available that permit semantic checks and analyses of information in the wikipedias – the future is not just isolated wikitext articles, but a flexible repository of semantic information! The death anomalies table shows a glimpse of what might be possible in the future, when we will have at our disposal not only (wiki)text but also rich, usefully structured information and data. A big thanks to all the volunteers (including the rock star) who make this possible! --UV (talk) 21:24, 7 September 2010 (UTC)
Slovenian Wikipedia has a relatively large proportion of biographies, of which there are over 8.000 in the "Living people" category (almost 10 % of total article count). Many of those articles have been added semi-automatically and we have a small community of active contributors. Consequently, there are a lot of articles that aren't regularly maintained, which is why this tool will certainly prove extremely useful for easing the burden of keeping the content up-to-date. This means less work when the focus shifts from adding content to improving the quality one day, and improved reliability of the work until then. Thanks to all the developers in the name of Slovenian Wikipedia community. — Yerpo Eh? 08:19, 12 September 2010 (UTC)
German Wikipedia has more than 340.000 articles about persons containing also machine readable data which can be used by external projects. The local report covers all people (not only living people) and is forwarded to 150 WikiProjects filtered by their subject area. The script is running on the toolserver and uses the sun grid engine for efficient resource handling. About 1,9 million interwiki relations are checked every day for creating reports on five wikipedias. Merlissimo
Discuss this story
WereSpielChequersthe 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]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]