[WikiEN-l] Living Biography Patrol

[MacGyverMagic/Mgm]

Let's make one thing clear. While bios can cause problems if they're
inaccurate or even libellous, that doesn't mean they're more important.
Every articles should be accurate and vandalism-free -- which is why I hope
Stable Versions will roll out very soon.

With all this talk about biographies of living people I thought I'd take
another angle. To see where we're failing we have to take a look at how
living bios are patrolled for vandalism and other problems. Are they
randomly checked on recent changes, are they checking by people that
watchlist the article? How many people are involved and can they do the job
without spending all their time on it (in other words: is it scaleable?)

I'm asking you guys to brainstorm on things we can do to make the job of
keeping bios clean without going through radical steps.
(I'm talking about articles that could happily exist without a focus on
negative material. You can't focus on something positive with articles on
convincted murderers or scammers, but that doesn't affect their encyclopedic
qualities.)

Here's my ideas on how to improve living bio patrol which nicely tie in with
[[WP:IRE]]. I'm going the technical route, but perhaps someone else can come
up with other ideas. In all cases we need to make sure the checks are done
by people who know their job. I appreciate newbies, but if they don't know
how to source material or what constitutes a reliable source, they won't be
able to help effectively.

* Stable Versions
* Put User:HumanBot and have it cycle through every living bio so people can
check everything since the list check.
* Have a special external program do the same. Perhaps give the vandal tools
a built in functionality that focuses on bios
* Until SV is up, have some bot list articles somewhere that haven't been
checked but should've been. (Vandalism that gets through is usually material
that doesn't get noticed on RC patrol)
*How is WikiProject Biography doing on article patrol?

Mgm