[WikiEN-l] Biography stub dump, anyone?

[Stan Shebs]

Magnus Manske wrote:

> At http://world.std.com/obi/Biographical/
> there's a copyleft list of 15,000 biography stubs (one-liners). It 
> goes like this:
>
> Abbot, Charles Greeley (C. G. Abbot)  US astrophysicist; secy. of 
> Smithsonian Institution 1928-1944 _1872-1973
>
> I think we all agree to use that resource. But how?
>
> 1. As one (or multiple) long lists, with links to the appropriate 
> article, so we can manually paste the stub into the article
> 2. As automatically generated stub for each non-existing article
>
> #1 would not require much work, #2 would need one of the wiki-bots.

#1 I think. We have a huge number of bios now, but not a full set of
redirects for each variation on a name, so you'd likely end up with
a huge number of duplicates, and inevitably people will start to
"fill in" the dup, not realizing that a complete article exists already.

A semi-workaround for a bot might be to compute alternate name forms
and see if they exist, although that won't help for multiple similar
names. Sooner or later you'll have to determine identity by looking at
dates and content, which seems like an easier activity to do from a
list of free links + content than by undoing the mass effects of a bot.

Stan