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? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk