Let's make one thing clear. While bios can cause problems if they're inaccurate or even libellous, that doesn't mean they're more important. Every articles should be accurate and vandalism-free -- which is why I hope Stable Versions will roll out very soon.
With all this talk about biographies of living people I thought I'd take another angle. To see where we're failing we have to take a look at how living bios are patrolled for vandalism and other problems. Are they randomly checked on recent changes, are they checking by people that watchlist the article? How many people are involved and can they do the job without spending all their time on it (in other words: is it scaleable?)
I'm asking you guys to brainstorm on things we can do to make the job of keeping bios clean without going through radical steps. (I'm talking about articles that could happily exist without a focus on negative material. You can't focus on something positive with articles on convincted murderers or scammers, but that doesn't affect their encyclopedic qualities.)
Here's my ideas on how to improve living bio patrol which nicely tie in with [[WP:IRE]]. I'm going the technical route, but perhaps someone else can come up with other ideas. In all cases we need to make sure the checks are done by people who know their job. I appreciate newbies, but if they don't know how to source material or what constitutes a reliable source, they won't be able to help effectively.
* Stable Versions * Put User:HumanBot and have it cycle through every living bio so people can check everything since the list check. * Have a special external program do the same. Perhaps give the vandal tools a built in functionality that focuses on bios * Until SV is up, have some bot list articles somewhere that haven't been checked but should've been. (Vandalism that gets through is usually material that doesn't get noticed on RC patrol) *How is WikiProject Biography doing on article patrol?
Mgm