[WikiEN-l] Lists and redlinks and link maintenance

Tue Aug 4 00:16:39 UTC 2009

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Steve Bennett<stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 7:44 AM, Carcharoth<carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> One of the annoying things is that sometimes you can have a grouping
>> of possible titles and possble redirects (e.g. A. Other, Any Other, A.
>> M. Other, Any Middle Other, Any Other (disambiguator), and so on), and
>> sometimes redlinks for more than one possibility have been created,
>> but until the actual article has been created, it is not possible to
>> create the other redlinks as redirects because there are bots that
>> will delete these as "broken redirects". I've never managed to figure
>> out a satisfactory solution to this.
>
> At the risk of contradicting myself in another thread, is it not best
> to just create a stub and be done with it? "A M Other was a biochemist
> who won the [[Benjamin Franklin Medal]] in 1942. {{science-bio-stub}}
> [[Category:Benjamin Franklin Medal winners]]". It's marginal for a
> stub, but probably just legal.
>
> Then you can make all the redirects.

That is one argument. Another argument is that it is better for an
article to be started by someone who has the time and energy to expand
it. That is more likely to happen, some people say, if something is a
redlink than if it is a blue link.

We even have some way of assessing this.

Remember I mentioned "Royal Medal" earlier in this thread?

On the talk page was a list of redinks I was following as they got
created. We know (apart from a few that were found as having been
created before I made that list, because I missed the articles or the
spelling was slightly wrong) that nearly all 71 of those articles were
redlinks on 8 February 2007.

I checked back at various points after that, and made the following two notes:

*21 November 2007 - 17 of about 71 had been created or found after
about 9 months

*14 October 2008 - 36 of about 71 had been created or found after
about 20 months

That left 35 to be created.

At some point in December 2008, when the list was being worked on for
featured candidate status, the editor preparing the list created 24
one-liner articles, as you propose (that means about 11 were created
before he made that pass through to turn the remaining redlinks blue).

[I must note here that the same editor has also created lots of
substantial articles, certainly more than I have done, so don't get me
wrong here - I'm just interested in seeing what actually happens when
you create one-liner articles and leave them to grow.]

Here are links to those 24 article, to see how much progress has been
made with those one-liners in the period since then (around 7 months).
If you are reading this post a few months or years later, I apologise
for not putting in a permalink to the versions at the time of writing
(August 2009). Hopefully, if anyone is reading this in a few years
time, all the links below will be to featured articles! :-)

Good progress:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cameron

Stub:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Harold_Read
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Hill

Sub-stub:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Lamb_Cullen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_James_Denton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winifred_Watkins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sivaramakrishna_Chandrasekhar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Eglinton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Freeman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_L._Johnson

One-liner plus template:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Edward_Kent

One-liner:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Brambell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Charles_Husband
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hutchinson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Roberts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Learmonth_Gowans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderic_Alfred_Gregory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Ellis_Cosslett
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Riley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Joseph_Bradley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Mansfield
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Hill_Perkins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Miledi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Charlton_Bradley

Only three of those 24 articles, in my opinion, have moved much beyond
being a single line article or a few lines at most, even though
impeccably referenced. You might say "go and help expand those
articles" (and I might well do that). But there is a subtle difference
between the motivation to write a new article and to expand an
existing one. There absolutely *shouldn't* be that differerence, but
human nature being what it is, that is a factor, I fear.

There is also the reduced visibility. How many people see a blue link
and think "oh, someone's written an article on that person", but don't
click through to find out it is a one-liner?

Getting back to the links from redirects, some of those articles
should have redirects. Let's see if they exist and if any incoming
redlinks can be turned blue by creating the redirects.

Of those 24 or so, I found 4 that have redirects that either need
turning blue, or have been turned blue thus filling in redlinks on
other articles.

1) For "James Learmonth Gowans", there is a redlink for "James L.
Gowan" on this template:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Wolf_Prize_in_Medicine

2) For "Daniel Joseph Bradley" there is a redlink for "Daniel J.
Bradley" on this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indiana_State_University_people

Now, given that Daniel Joseph Bradley is "a British physicist who won
the Royal Medal in 1983", you need to check first whether he was also
President of Indiana State University.

And it turns out that the US university president:

http://web.indstate.edu/president/

...is not the Irish opto-electronics professor (Daniel Joseph Bradley,
the one we are after) mentioned here:

http://www.ria.ie/members/members_list.asp?pagesize=20

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=165872&sectioncode=26

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=neKm1X6YPY0C&pg=PA212&lpg=PA212&dq=Daniel+Bradley+royal+medal+laser&source=bl&ots=l2T5xgmSP_&sig=VH0ngh9LRE0C2bn9u047hsyN6uM&hl=en&ei=rwd3SrGmKoasjAfPseSnBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7#v=onepage&q=Daniel%20Bradley%20royal%20medal%20laser&f=false

And his son is mentioned here:

http://www.imperial.ac.uk/college.asp?P=5260

So the redlink at "List of Indiana State University people" needs to
be disambiguated.

3) Another example is "John Frank Davidson" (not on that list of 24,
but on the longer list of 35), where "John F. Davidson" is a redlink
from "List of Superintendents of the United States Naval Academy".
Obviously not the "British chemical engineer", but the point there is
that redirects, while useful, have to be treated with care. It is all
too easy to create a redirect and then forget to go back and see how
many redlinks (if any) you have turned blue other than the one you
might have been clicking to check, possibly turning some links blue
incorrectly.

4) The final example is the one where I first became aware of the need
to take a fair amount of care with redirects. It is a good example of
how different name configurations can be used on different pages.

(a) "Keith Usherwood Ingold" (16 November 2008) is linked from:

"Royal Medal" (06 April 2006)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Royal_Medal&diff=47225666&oldid=46495786

"Davy Medal" (20 December 2005)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Davy_Medal&diff=32066817&oldid=32066745

"Christopher Kelk Ingold" (18 December 2008)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Christopher_Kelk_Ingold&diff=258722677&oldid=258719054

(b) "Keith U. Ingold" (18 December 2008) is linked from:

"Henry Marshall Tory Medal" (09 June 2005)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Henry_Marshall_Tory_Medal&diff=prev&oldid=15418007

(c) "Keith Ingold" (18 December 2008) is linked from:

"Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council" (5 September 2005)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Natural_Sciences_and_Engineering_Research_Council&diff=22625055&oldid=16429253

"Isaak-Walton-Killam Award" (23 June 2007)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Isaak-Walton-Killam_Award&diff=prev&oldid=140092233

The dates I've given above are the dates of creation of the article
and the redirects, along with when the links first appeared in the
articles. This makes it possible to work out what links were red when.
It pretty simple, actually. Five of the six links were redlinks, with
two of them turned blue when the article was created, and three of
them turned blue when the redirects were created (I had wanted to
create the redirects earlier, but they kept getting deleted). One link
was added (to "Christopher Kelk Ingold") after the article was
created.

This might all seem a bit pointless, but look at the article again:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Usherwood_Ingold

None of three bits of information that can be gleaned from the
redirects are in the article: Canada Gold Medal for Science and
Engineering (1998); Isaak-Walton-Killam Award (1992); Henry Marshall
Tory Medal (1985). If the right references are found, this can be used
to expand the article.

The article also lists two other awards:

Petroleum Chemistry Award (1968)
Linus Pauling Award (1988)

Neither of these are linked, but we could easily have lists done for
them. You have to be very careful with these awards named after famous
people, as sometimes there are almost literally hundreds of minor
awards named after them (e.g. Joseph Lister awards and Benjamin
Franklin awards), but in this case the second one at least is easy:

http://chem.pdx.edu/~wamserc/Pauling2009/awardhistory.html

A nice simple resource to make up a list, and there we have "1988 Keith Ingold".

The "Petroleum Chemistry Award" one is a bit trickier. Turns out to be
the one presented by the ACS (American Chemical Society) - please
excuse the long link:

http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=1319&content_id=CTP_004526&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=467d620c-6ba7-4e1d-924a-b40896e55087

However, unlike the Linus Pauling Award (we seem to have articles for
most of them), some of the receipients of the ACS Petroleum Chemistry
Award seem a bit obscure.

I seem to have let my keyboard run away with me there. Sorry! :-)

Carcharoth