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

Sun Dec 18 22:58:46 UTC 2005

On 18/12/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18/12/05, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >   Do we have a foolproof way of iterating over all biographies of living
> > people? If not, is it time we introduced a flag, or even just a category
> > "Living person", to do so?
>
> Hum.
>
> For all bios with categories, then if it's in [[Category:xxxx births]]
> where xxxx is greater than 1890, but not in any [[Category:yyyy
> deaths]], they're either alive or need updated.
>
> 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.

To point out the problems with the latter; the deleted form of the
Seigenthaler article wasn't categorised by anything, wasn't tagged as
a stub, and wasn't phrased in the standard fashion for a biography
("[name] (year-year) [is/was]")... so there's no obvious automated way
of picking it up.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk