[WikiEN-l] How does living bio patrol actually work?

Wed Sep 6 23:57:03 UTC 2006

On Sep 6, 2006, at 2:37 PM, David Gerard wrote:

> 1. What is the actual process?
> 2. How are new living bios spotted?
There is a the {{blp}} tag and the {{WPBiography|living=yes}} tag  
that is applied to the talk page. These automatically adds them to  
[[Category:Biography articles of living people]]

> 3. Who watches edits in them, on what sort of schedule?
>
There is no such process in place. We have an initial proposal at
[[Wikipedia:Libel-Protection_Unit]]

and a noticeboard at
[[Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard]]

> And 4. the big one:
>
> Is there anything that can be done to make the living bio patrolling
> volunteers' work easier and more efficient? What magical software
> features would you like? Is there anything that some as-yet-unwritten
> bot software could do to assist?
>
> I'd love to be able to answer "we have a volunteer patrol who look out
> for any rubbish going in living biographies. We're not perfect but I
> think we do pretty well" and be able to give more detail if they ask
> ;-)

One possibility would be to have a bot developer to write a RC bot  
that monitors all articles in the Category:Biography articles of  
living people. Similar to the RC bots that we have in place to combat  
vandalism.

Patrollers then will have a way to monitor edits made to articles on  
BLPs, and catch defaming statements that are un-sourced or poorly  
sourced.

-- Jossi