A month or two ago, someone wrote to OTRS asking if we had any way of displaying a list of people who'd just been listed as "dead" by Wikipedia. It strikes me that this is quite an interesting idea - on the one hand, there's some interest from reusers about a ticker of "recent obituaries", and on the other hand, it's useful for *us* so we can keep an eye on subtle vandalism and ensure we have cast-iron confirmation of any reported death... it being, of course, quite embarrasing to report someone's dead when they aren't.
So, I started thinking. How can we do this? By my rough calculations, we should have about a dozen "new deaths" a day, among the entire universe of our articles, so it certainly isn't an unmanageable list to work with.
Leaving aside the matter of edits to the article text - which'd take quite a bit of parsing - there are three methods I can see whereby we could get the material for this:
a) [[Deaths in YEAR]] - entries are manually added to the list b) {{Recent death}} - this is added to the articles of *some* dead people c) [[Category:Living people]] - dead people have the cat removed
(Thanks to Jim Redmond for helping me work these out)
a) is perhaps the least timely; a rough experiment suggests that for any given day, you're only going to get a few of the people who died that day listed, and that even a week on, several will be redlinks. It's the easiest one to automate, though - we can just fire off the RSS feed of the page history - and seems to require solid confirmation from an external source.
b) is patchy - not everyone adds the template, and sometimes it's added and then removed. It should be fairly reliable, though, since it de-facto implies an experienced user is working on the article; it's not the sort of thing most casual vandals will add!
c) is probably the most comprehensive one - everyone gets it removed eventually - and also the quickest to update. However, it will have the highest false positive rate - categories can be removed for a whole number of reasons, including vandalism and simple mistakes, and we'd run the risk of triggering this every time a page was blanked. Plus, it might be computationally time-consuming to have something checking this regularly...
Any thoughts?
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
c) [[Category:Living people]] - dead people have the cat removed
As far as I know there is no easy way to track category removal. Special:Relatedchanges/Category:Living_people will not show edits which remove the category, and any edits previously visible on this list (prior to category removal) will disappear from it.
Matters of propriety may have discouraged this in the past but now that we have the __HIDDENCAT__ feature, we might consider adding dead people directly to [[Category:Dead people]].
—C.W.
2009/3/5 Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com:
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
c) [[Category:Living people]] - dead people have the cat removed
As far as I know there is no easy way to track category removal. Special:Relatedchanges/Category:Living_people will not show edits which remove the category, and any edits previously visible on this list (prior to category removal) will disappear from it.
A bot could download and save the titles in the category once a day and compare today's to yesterday's and list the ones that have been removed.
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
A bot could download and save the titles in the category once a day and compare today's to yesterday's and list the ones that have been removed.
There's also DynamicPageList[1][2], but I doubt that that would be enabled on a project as big as en.wp. (It's already enabled on a number of smaller projects.)
[1]http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DynamicPageList [2]http://semeb.com/dpldemo/DPL:Manual_-_DPL_parameters:_Controlling_output_vol...
2009/3/5 Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com:
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
c) [[Category:Living people]] - dead people have the cat removed
As far as I know there is no easy way to track category removal. Special:Relatedchanges/Category:Living_people will not show edits which remove the category, and any edits previously visible on this list (prior to category removal) will disappear from it.
Bleh, I suspected this was the case.
Matters of propriety may have discouraged this in the past but now that we have the __HIDDENCAT__ feature, we might consider adding dead people directly to [[Category:Dead people]].
Wouldn't it be unnecessary? After all, they'll all be in [[Category:YEAR deaths]], all of which will be subcategories of the main one...
(Actually, I suppose that's option d), see who's had the current year-of-death cat added. Hrm.)
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 7:18 PM, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
c) [[Category:Living people]] - dead people have the cat removed
As far as I know there is no easy way to track category removal. Special:Relatedchanges/Category:Living_people will not show edits which remove the category, and any edits previously visible on this list (prior to category removal) will disappear from it.
Matters of propriety may have discouraged this in the past but now that we have the __HIDDENCAT__ feature, we might consider adding dead people directly to [[Category:Dead people]].
No way to track category removal, but there is already vaguely the function you are looking for in the API.
http://toolserver.org/~samkorn/scripts/recentdeaths.php tracks the latest 50 additions to [[Category:2009 deaths]].
A bot could quite easily go through, say, 50 years worth of categories and collate a list of people added to the category in the last day and post it on-wiki. If it would be helpful, I'll do that tomorrow.
Sam
It's not automatic but if the person's talk page has the WP Biography banner on it, it has a switch called "living" which will put them in one of the following three categories (not word for word naming): 1. Living People 2. Dead People 3. People missing Living statement That combined with the death categories that different infoboxes put them into should give you a pretty good coverage.
This subject is one of the reasons that Semantic MediaWiki was designed.
For example, in the article for [[Marilyn Monroe]] there is an infobox and it contains a template parameter with this code:
deathdate = {{death-date and age|August 5, 1962|June 1, 1926}}
In order to give the article [[Marilyn Monroe]] the semantic property deathdate you would write the exact same thing as above in the article. The difference is that in template {{death-date and age}} you would also write [[Died on::{{{1}}}]] which means [[Died on::August 5, 1962]].
The alternate method is to insert this semantic property inline with the article text. For example, "Marilyn Monroe died on [[Died on::August 5, 1962]]." This renders as "Marilyn Monroe died on August 5, 1962".
The great benefit to this is that you can now ask semantic queries to output this information. For example, to print out the date that Marilyn Monroe died, you would write an ask parser function: {{#ask: [[Marilyn Monroe]] | ?Died on}}. This prints "August 5, 1962".
In order to print a list of all actors who recently died in table format, you might write: {{#ask: [[Category:Actors]] | ?Died on | sort=ascending }}.
Of course you can also manually maintain a list of recent deaths, which I think is done.
You can ask these sorts of questions using DBpedia as well: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/OnlineAccess
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 5:27 PM, K. Peachey p858snake@yahoo.com.au wrote:
It's not automatic but if the person's talk page has the WP Biography banner on it, it has a switch called "living" which will put them in one of the following three categories (not word for word naming):
- Living People
- Dead People
- People missing Living statement
That combined with the death categories that different infoboxes put them into should give you a pretty good coverage.
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2009/3/5 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
A month or two ago, someone wrote to OTRS asking if we had any way of displaying a list of people who'd just been listed as "dead" by Wikipedia. It strikes me that this is quite an interesting idea - on the one hand, there's some interest from reusers about a ticker of "recent obituaries", and on the other hand, it's useful for *us* so we can keep an eye on subtle vandalism and ensure we have cast-iron confirmation of any reported death... it being, of course, quite embarrasing to report someone's dead when they aren't.
For confirmed recent deaths: {{Recent death}} is routinely put on confirmed recent deaths. No time expiry, but the doc notes "The template should be removed once editing has been resumed to a normal level."
Would I be right in guessing that vandalism usually just adds claims of a death and doesn't add the template or remove [[Category:Living people]]?
- d.
On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 2:04 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/3/5 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
A month or two ago, someone wrote to OTRS asking if we had any way of displaying a list of people who'd just been listed as "dead" by Wikipedia. It strikes me that this is quite an interesting idea - on the one hand, there's some interest from reusers about a ticker of "recent obituaries", and on the other hand, it's useful for *us* so we can keep an eye on subtle vandalism and ensure we have cast-iron confirmation of any reported death... it being, of course, quite embarrasing to report someone's dead when they aren't.
For confirmed recent deaths: {{Recent death}} is routinely put on confirmed recent deaths. No time expiry, but the doc notes "The template should be removed once editing has been resumed to a normal level."
Would I be right in guessing that vandalism usually just adds claims of a death and doesn't add the template or remove [[Category:Living people]]?
I would guess so. Vandal edits probably also fail to add the year of death category.
The simplest and most comprehensive way, IMO, would be to pick up all edits that include the word "death" and "died", and maybe euphemisms like "passed away" as well, and common causes of death ("murder", "killed", "heart attack", "cancer", "accident"). That would pick up most of the changes (and a lot of noise), except the ones where someone silently adds in a year of death and nothing else (unfortunately, these would be the problematic ones, so look for edits that add in a four digit number to the article that looks like a year - not just the current year, though special focus should be on those edits).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemisms_for_death
"...dysphemisms such as worm food, or dead meat..."
Only on Wikipedia would you find something like that!
My favourite was "assumed room temperature".
Carcharoth
I do not see anything automatic about it. Someone sees an obituary for someone big that they know. Since they hav a hand in the article, they delete the [[category:Living Persons]]. Someone wants that sourced, so they put it back in with a request on the talk page for {{fact}} or a new sentence to the effect, and a source. Natural Causes, Inquest, Accident, etc.
Perhaps the new abuse filter can be used to warn people apparently claiming a death against falsely making such a claim (remind them of the need for reliable sources) and at least log possible claims so they can be reviewed.
"WODUP" wikiwodup@gmail.com wrote in message news:b6a9cba80903172346j33518c1fy859ccdc5cc92364@mail.gmail.com...
Perhaps the new abuse filter can be used to warn people apparently claiming a death against falsely making such a claim (remind them of the need for reliable sources) and at least log possible claims so they can be reviewed.
That sounds way into and against "Assume Good Faith". I doubt that anyone who finds an obituary (or attends a funeral and is forced to find an obituary) will appreciate automation for cancelling their account. It just does not seem like a process that can be automatic. In the worst case, someone else will find the obituary and end up supporting an unblock motion, based upon happening to see a short edit war. Screw automation. _______ http://www.playscreen.com/ringtones/preview.php?Cat_Id=1&Cn_Id=10282 BlakDog: I rephrased a tune, without lyrics, that I developed for a commercial, and it was censored for containing the word "condom" in the lyrics, and perhaps being a bit too realistic with what condoms in a bar might mean. Roughly the same synthesizer version as "Lohruh, Regruntled".
On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Jay Litwyn brewhaha@edmc.net wrote:
"WODUP" wikiwodup@gmail.com wrote in message news:b6a9cba80903172346j33518c1fy859ccdc5cc92364@mail.gmail.com...
Perhaps the new abuse filter can be used to warn people apparently claiming a death against falsely making such a claim (remind them of the need for reliable sources) and at least log possible claims so they can be reviewed.
That sounds way into and against "Assume Good Faith". I doubt that anyone who finds an obituary (or attends a funeral and is forced to find an obituary) will appreciate automation for cancelling their account. It just does not seem like a process that can be automatic. In the worst case, someone else will find the obituary and end up supporting an unblock motion, based upon happening to see a short edit war. Screw automation.
Blocking? where did you get that from all WODUP suggested was to have something like a editnotice telling them what to do and also have a log of all the changes like that so they can be easily reviewed [and vandalism easily caught if thats the case].
I tend to think that the only thing that could be automatic in this case is when the article is created, and someone puts it into [[category:Living People]], then a {{blp}} template pops into the talk page; there would be no automatic deletion of the {{blp}} template. And yes, nodding to WODDUP, false deletions from the category are hard to deal with.
{{blp}} could go into anyone's talk page. I would not mind at all if it went into mine, especially since someone deleted it. _______ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Brewhaha@edmc.net In keeping with about eighty percent of my USENET history, I will be using the freenet.edmonton.ab.ca domain, which maps to the same Internet Protocol numbers.
If all you wanted to do was add {{blp}} to talk pages where the article is in Category:Living people, I'm sure there wouldn't be any problem having a bot do that.
About automatic death flagging, however, I don't see why the AbuseFilter can't be used to detect when somebody adds that a subject "died today" or that so-and-so "was killed" or whatever. Even if it's decided that the threat of false positives is too great to allow the extension to warn users ("It looks like you're... If you're sure, please remember to attribute this to reliable sources, then click 'Save page'. Thank you."), having a log of possible wiki-deaths would be helpful.
On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 10:13 PM, Jay Litwyn brewhaha@edmc.net wrote:
I tend to think that the only thing that could be automatic in this case is when the article is created, and someone puts it into [[category:Living People]], then a {{blp}} template pops into the talk page; there would be no automatic deletion of the {{blp}} template. And yes, nodding to WODDUP, false deletions from the category are hard to deal with.
{{blp}} could go into anyone's talk page. I would not mind at all if it went into mine, especially since someone deleted it. _______ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Brewhaha@edmc.net In keeping with about eighty percent of my USENET history, I will be using the freenet.edmonton.ab.ca domain, which maps to the same Internet Protocol numbers.
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