On 18/12/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe we can have User:Humanbot programmed to cycle biographies and have people read them as a check?
Excellent use for this sort of thing. There's a lot of articles that are obviously biographies - I happen to be looking at [[Reginald of Durham]] just now - but which aren't categorised by birth/death simply because they're not known. However, it's equally obvious that he is, in fact, dead...
Hmm. Moving back to a more general theme...
[[Category:Living people]] [[Category:Dead people]] [[Category:People not known to be dead]] (might do with a better title) [[Category:Fictional people]]
Assume for a second we have the manpower to go and slap one of these on every biography we can find - so anything with death or life cats, anything categorised "as a person", anything with a stub notice that makes it look like an individual. Great.
1) Will the category system fall over horribly? Two of those cats will certainly have tens of thousands of entries, and no subcategorisation.
2) What would this achieve? We've got some good basic metadata, but... among other things, it doesn't address the problem of someone inserting violently libellous material *elsewhere*, which can be just as bad - say, in an article on that person's company, or political party, or hometown, or whatever. Or tangential libel in *another* biographical article, where someone may not notice it as dubious if parsed as a reference to someone else...
3) But coming back to the start... how about Seigenthaler articles? No categorisation, no stub tag, not visible as a bio by anything short of a human reader stumbling across the damn thing and checking it. Are we going to have eyeballs check every article, in case they're a missed biography? The man-hours are really mounting up...
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk