---------- Forwarded message (Start) ---------- From: Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se Date: Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 10:41 AM Subject: [Wikitech-l] Catching the death of living people To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Does anybody have a bot or script that aligns the categories for year of death across language interwiki links, to make sure the death of a living person is recorded on all languages? I think this is something we need to run once or twice each year. Maybe the interwiki bot could do it?

I would be very cautious about running a program to mark people as dead on this basis. Interwiki links are wonderful things but I wouldn't guarantee they always link the same real life person, especially when you consider how many Italian Americans and German Americans there are. I'm sure there will be Italians who are the main article for their name on the Italian Wikipedia whilst we have an Italian American of the same name as the subject of the EN Wiki article. I appreciate that the people putting the interwiki links up do so conscientiously, but I've also seen BLPs where subsequent editors have changed the subject of the article. Bot assisted editing would be good here, or perhaps a talkpage message.

But kudos for raising the issue, one thing I realised during the recent BLP deletion spree and its aftermath is that either having a wikipedia article dramatically increases your life expectancy, or we are not very good at sourcing the deaths of people who retire and don't die whilst they are in the public spotlight (I suspect a statistical analysis of Wikipedia articles would give solid evidence for the "and they all lived happily ever after" nursery story ending ).