Jeff Merkey takes care not to post to en:wp or its mailing lists, but he just posted this to foundation-l after analysing an en:wp data dump.
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jeffrey V. Merkey jmerkey@wolfmountaingroup.com Date: 01-Apr-2007 06:23 Subject: [Foundation-l] Extensive Link Errors related to Proper Names - Needs Fixing To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
I have been compiling a machine compiled lexicon created from link and disambiguation pages from the XML dumps. Oddly, the associations contained in [[ARTICLE_NAME | NAME]] form a comprehesive "real time" thesauraus of common associations used by current English Speakers in Wikipedia, and perhaps comprise the worlds largest and most comprehesive Thesaurus on the planet emedded within the mesh of these links within the dumps.
While going through the dumps and constructing associative link maps of all these expressions, I have noticed a serious issue with embdded linking with proper names. It appears there may be a robot running somewhere that is associating Proper Names listed in articles about relationships between people by linking blindly to any entry in Wikipedia that matches a name in an article.
Some of the content may create controversy to post examples here, so I will complete the thesaurus compilation, and folks should go through the encyclopedia. Articles about movies stars and other "gossipy" type articles seem to have the highest errors linking proper names to unrelated people without proper disambiguation pages. It could be interpreted as violations of WP:BLP and some of the error linkages could be troublesome for the foundation.
Whomever is running bots that link between articles should look at proper name links based on categories and check into this. I found a large number of these types of errors. They are subtle, but will most probably show up when browsing through articles unless you can analyze the link targets and relationships in the dumps.
Jeff
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