I believe my following characterisation is accurate, if it is not please correct me.
The tool is given a category containing biographies (and nothing else?) such as [[Category:1984 births]]. The tool then, through some pattern recognition, produces a completed {{Persondata}} template (a metadata template containing vital stats about a person, see the example below - it is not something you or I read, something for computers to read) for every article in that category.
So, for example, the article [[A. R. Rawlinson]] (listed in the above category) contains the following lead sentence:
"'''Lieutenant-General A.R. "Dick" Rawlinson''' ([[1894]]-[[1984]]) served in [[military intelligence]], before commencing on a [[screenwriting]] career."
Magnus' tool will convert discrete facts in this prose data (name, DoB, DoD) into fields for the Persondata template. It produces this for the above example:
{Persondata |NAME=Rawlinson, A.R. |ALTERNATIVE NAMES= |SHORT DESCRIPTION=served in [[military intelligence]], before commencing on a [[screenwriting]] career |DATE OF BIRTH=1894 |PLACE OF BIRTH= |DATE OF DEATH=1984 |PLACE OF DEATH= }}
The user using the tool then copies this completed template and pastes it into the A. R. Rawlinson article.
On 12/07/06, poore5@adelphia.net poore5@adelphia.net wrote:
---- Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
poore5@adelphia.net wrote:
Hello Magnus,
Could you explain a little more about how you plan to use the tool?
I have some concerns about using it on Biographies of living people on Wikipedia-en. We have too much unverified information added to these article. I strongly believe that each article needs to be examined closely to verify the content meets our Wikipedia:BLP guidelines before it is added to a template.
Well, it can't run fully automatically, there has to be a user making the changes. I could prevent the tool from showing a template for people with no death date (=probably living;-) if there's great concern about that. Otherwise, the tool doesn't generate new data; it merely tries to extract the data already in the article and put it into a form that is more machine-readable.
Magnus
I thought you said something about doing whole categories. I got the impression that the tool would convert a whole group of articles, over course one after another.
Who would use the tool? Does a human need to verify each fact (not sure of a better word) before it goes into the template?
If not I'm concerned about some false information slipping through.
Otherwise it sounds great. : - )
Take care, Sydney aka FloNight _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l