Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-09-13/Sister projects
Death anomalies - the power of Signpost
In July the Signpost ran a story introducing the Death Anomalies project, which identifies anomalies where different versions of Wikipedia disagree as to whether an individual is living or dead. The Project had only started in June this year, and at the time of the article only DE and EN wikis were extracting reports of anomalies. Since the signpost article the Latin and Swedish Wikipedias have both joined in and hundreds of errors and anomalies have been resolved across Wikipedia. In particular within ten days of the Signpost article being published the number of anomalies on the EN wiki report was slashed from 447 to 190 as a number of signpost readers pitched in. EN wiki 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, but most of the backlog is down to differences in the way different projects treat missing people, people who if they are still alive would now be over 100 years old, anomalies where EN wiki has an article on a living person but another language has an unreferenced article showing the same person as dead, and anomalies that probably need 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 by the Latin wikipedia which has managed to reduce its anomalies to one.
A sad facts about biographies of living people is that eventually one has to update the biography because the subject has died, so all these reports are expected to be ongoing maintenance tasks. But the reassuring thing is that though the bot is processing data from millions of biographies across different languages versions of Wikipediam less than a thousand anomalies have been identified so far.
The process relies on Interwiki links and categories that identify articles as biographies about dead or living people. Some projects such as the Portuguese and Dutch Wikipedias can't currently be included because they don't organise their articles that way, for example the Portuguese Wikipedia has lists of people who died in particular years rather than categories. However I hope in future both to increase the number of languages from which we extract data and also to increase the number of languages requesting reports of anomalies, in particular we have 67 Wikipedia language versions including French, Spanish, Japanese, Polish and Russian for whom reports could be extracted almost immediately.
User:Merlissimo has a bot that updates the reports daily, and is willing to produce reports for other projects.