[WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies - another problem looming forWikipedia?

Sun Dec 18 22:53:40 UTC 2005

On 18/12/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> We can catch another batch by searching anything with a bio-stub tag
> and categorising them, then rechecking. Anything else we have no real
> way of finding, since there's nothing to define an article's content
> without actually reading it.

It's a bit silly isn't it, that the stub sorting project is doing
better at categorising
stubs than the rest of the project is at categorising articles?  I'm
not sure exactly how many stubs vs articles there are totally, but
that sort of metholodogy,
where they try to generally categorise what sort of topic something is
in, for everything, rather than randomly adding categories like
"Category:People who
met JFK" and suchforth, seems to be working really well.

So I wonder if we could find a way to use this sort of methodology, of sorting
things into more specific categories when needed, for regular
articles.  Obviously
this would be done as well as the existing bottom-up approach.

But it would be a really useful feature to be able to tell
progamatically whether
an article (any article) is about a place, or a person or a group or a concept,
or whatever.  And the current model has no way of doing that - even
recursively looking inside [[Category:People]] doesn't work because
then you end up finding  [[Category:John Lennon]] and then get to
things like [[251 Menlove Avenue]], which is evidently not a person.

--
Abi