[WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist

[Carcharoth]

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Charles
Matthews<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Bryan Derksen wrote:
>> David Gerard wrote:
>>
>>> 2009/7/30 Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>:
>>>
>>>
>>>> <sob>
>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_births_by_year
>>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_deaths_by_year
>>>> That is ridiculous category use.
>>>>
>>> Hey, someone thought it was useful ...
>>>
>>
>> Once upon a time I went through a whole bunch of "famous animal"
>> articles and added birth and death year categories. Someone followed
>> along behind me and dutifully removed them all as I went. I guess this
>> is how that particular dispute wound up being settled.
>>
> So those categories need to be animated, rather than populated?

Disneyfied? :-)

I think what some people want is more a way to take a category such as
"Famous animals" and its subcategories, and run a dynamic query that
returns a list of all the members of those categories sorted by dates
of birth and death. A dynamic version of a list. I know I'd love it if
that could be done for all biographical articles, so there was some
super-list (and very big one at that), which could be sorted by name,
dates of birth and death, and other biographical data.

That would be more a biographical database than a list, but the
potential is there for Wikipedia to be a massive biographical
database, but extracting clean data is difficult sometimes, because of
how the system is currently set up.

The classic piece of data that we don't track, and which I usually
drag up in these debates, is the number of articles on men and the
number of articles on women. Now, you might say that you can't query
an ordinary biographical dictionary to find out these things, but
Wikipedia *should* be able to do more than other resources.

It seems a simple question, doesn't it? How many biographical articles
do we have on women, and how many on men? But it is one of those
questions that defies analysis because the data isn't there. We can
give approximate answers about historical periods, and about
nationality (as far as that is meaningful). But gender? No, we don't
document that for some reason.

Which is strange, because "famous women in history" and "Biographies
of Notable Women" are big topics if you search for sources on those
topics. I'd like to know, for example, how many featured biographies
we have on women from history (and possible contemporary biographies
as well)? I might do just that and make another userspace list.

While searching for lists of famous women, I found this:

http://www.dailylit.com/books/wikipedia-tours-famous-women-throughout-history

"Welcome to our _Wikipedia Tour: Famous Women Throughout History_.
Each day we’ll send you a link to a new article about a famous woman
on Wikipedia. The introduction to each day’s article is included in
the installment so you can choose to read just the introduction or the
full article."

Wow. I never knew things like that were out there.