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{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Signpost-article-start|{{{1|Death anomalies in Wikipedia biographies: follow-up}}}|By [[User:WereSpielChequers|WereSpielChequers]]|7 September 2010}}
{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Signpost-article-start|{{{1|Biography bloopers: dead or alive?}}|By [[User:WereSpielChequers|WereSpielChequers]]|7 September 2010}}


In July, ''The Signpost'' [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-26/News and notes|published a story]] introducing the [[meta:Death anomalies table|Death Anomalies project]], which attempts to identify anomalies where different language 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.
Just over a month ago, '''The Signpost'' [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-26/News and notes|published a story]] on the [[meta:Death anomalies table|Death Anomalies project]], which identifies anomalies between different language Wikipedias disagree as to whether an individual is dead or alive. The P\project was started in June, and at the time only the German and English language Wikipedias were extracting reports of anomalies. Since then, the Latin, Swedish, and Slovenian Wikipedias have joined in, and hundreds of errors have been resolved. When we covered the project, readers pitched in and the number of anomalies on enwiki was slashed from 447 to 190 in just over a week. Enwiki 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 article 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 [http://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Projekt_levande_personer/Eventuellt_avlidna&action=history which rapidly reduced 94 anomalies to 16], and the Latin wikipedia, which has managed to [http://la.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vicipaedia:Mortui_dicti&action=history reduce its anomalies to one]. So far this month the [[:sl:Wikipedija:Biografije živečih oseb/Domnevno umrli|Slovene Wikipedia]] has become the fifth participating project.
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 [http://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Projekt_levande_personer/Eventuellt_avlidna&action=history which rapidly reduced 94 anomalies to 16], and the Latin wikipedia, which has managed to [http://la.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vicipaedia:Mortui_dicti&action=history reduce its anomalies to one]. So far this month the [[:sl:Wikipedija:Biografije živečih oseb/Domnevno umrli|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).
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. [[User:Merlissimo|Merlissimo]] has a bot that updates the reports daily, and is willing to produce reports for other projects.
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. [[User:Merlissimo|Merlissimo]] has a bot that updates the reports daily, and is willing to produce reports for other projects.


=== User responses ===
=== User responses ===
{{quote|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 [[:sv:Kategori:Personer efter kön|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 [[:sv:Kategori:Levande personer|category for living people]] was created and a [[:sv:Wikipedia:Projekt levande personer|WikiProject for living people]] was started. The "death anomalies" report was set up as a subpage to this WikiProject, named "[[:sv:Wikipedia:Projekt levande personer/Eventuellt avlidna|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 [http://toolserver.org/~sk/cw/index.htm Check Wikipedia], a daily report of wiki-syntax errors, and would welcome similar projects. --[[User:LA2|LA2]] ([[User talk:LA2|talk]]) 20:06, 7 September 2010 (UTC)}}
{{cquote|The '''Swedish Wikipedia''' is fertile ground for a project of this kind. After some years of rapid growth in the number articles, attention swung to quality and structure in 2008. Biographic articles were [[:sv:Kategori:Personer efter kön|exhaustively categorized by gender]] in the [northern autumn] 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 [[:sv:Kategori:Levande personer|category for living people]] and a [[:sv:Wikipedia:Projekt levande personer|WikiProject for living people]] were started. The "death anomalies" report was set up as a subpage to this WikiProject, named "[[:sv:Wikipedia:Projekt levande personer/Eventuellt avlidna|possibly deceased]]" people.... The Swedish Wikipedia has also benefited from [http://toolserver.org/~sk/cw/index.htm Check Wikipedia], a daily report of wiki-syntax errors, and would welcome similar projects. --[[User:LA2|LA2]]}}


{{quote|Although the Latin wikipedia ([[:la:|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.
{{cquote|Although the '''Latin Wikipedia''' ([[:la:|la.wikipedia]]) uses a language with a long history, a large portion of its articles cover modern topics, including (of course) BLPs.... [Of] about 44,000 articles available in the Latin wikipedia today, about 4300 (roughly ten percent) are BLPs. The death anomalies table adds an extra level of reliability to BLPs on the [English, German, Swedish and Latin Wikipedias]. It is great to see more and more tools are available that permit semantic checks and analyses of information ... 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 [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-26/Sister projects#Feedback|rock star]]) who make this possible! [[User:UV|UV]]}}


⚫
{{cquote|The '''Slovenian Wikipedia''' has a relatively large proportion of biographies, of which there are more than 8,000 in BLPs (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, [many articles] 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. — [[User:Yerpo|Yerpo]] <sup>[[User talk:Yerpo|Eh?]]</sup> 08:19, 12 September 2010 (UTC)}}
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 [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-26/Sister projects#Feedback|rock star]]) who make this possible! --[[User:UV|UV]] ([[User talk:UV|talk]]) 21:24, 7 September 2010 (UTC)}}


⚫
{{quote|The '''German Wikipedia''' has more than 340,000 articles about people that include [[:de:Hilfe:Personendaten|machine-readable data]] usable by external projects. The local report covers all people (not only living people) and is forwarded to 150 WikiProjects filtered by subject area. The script runs on the toolserver and uses the [[tswiki:Batch job scheduling|sun grid engine]] for efficient resource handling. About 1.9 million interwiki relations are checked every day for creating reports on five Wikipedias. [[User:Merlissimo/Sig|Merl]][[User talk:Merlissimo/Sig|issimo]]}}
⚫
{{quote|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. — [[User:Yerpo|Yerpo]] <sup>[[User talk:Yerpo|Eh?]]</sup> 08:19, 12 September 2010 (UTC)}}

{{quote|German Wikipedia has more than 340.000 articles about persons containing also [[:de:Hilfe:Personendaten|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 [[tswiki:Batch job scheduling|sun grid engine]] for efficient resource handling. About 1,9 million interwiki relations are checked every day for creating reports on five wikipedias. [[User:Merlissimo/Sig|Merl]][[User talk:Merlissimo/Sig|issimo]]}}


<noinclude>{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Signpost-article-comments-end||2010-09-06|2010-09-20}}</noinclude>
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Revision as of 10:36, 13 September 2010

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By WereSpielChequers

Just over a month ago, 'The Signpost published a story on the Death Anomalies project, which identifies anomalies between different language Wikipedias disagree as to whether an individual is dead or alive. The P\project was started in June, and at the time only the German and English language Wikipedias were extracting reports of anomalies. Since then, the Latin, Swedish, and Slovenian Wikipedias have joined in, and hundreds of errors have been resolved. When we covered the project, readers pitched in and the number of anomalies on enwiki was slashed from 447 to 190 in just over a week. Enwiki 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 article 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. So far this month the Slovene Wikipedia has become the fifth participating project.

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 has a bot that updates the reports daily, and is willing to produce reports for other projects.

User responses



The German Wikipedia has more than 340,000 articles about people that include machine-readable data usable by external projects. The local report covers all people (not only living people) and is forwarded to 150 WikiProjects filtered by subject area. The script runs 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

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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]

The Signpost: doing it for free since 2005.
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