On 26/04/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
I started a discussion at [[WT:BLP]] on the proposal that we implement a variant of proposed deletion as follows:
It is proposed that this article be deleted as a biography of a living individual which does not cite its references or sources.Based on what I saw when going through some of that {{unreferenced}}-containing BLP list, the rate of false positives could be in the range of 90% or so. Having deletion be the default result of such a tag could result in losing a lot of useful stuff.
Are we planning to tag these automatically from the list generated earlier? I don't think that's the best way to go about it, due to the false positives, but if you do, some suggestions to make it work more smoothly:
* Aim to tag [a fraction] of the unreferenced living bios each week - perhaps one in six? That'll mean the whole set has hit the 14-day limit after two months, a reasonable timeframe for a long cleanup, and avoids completely swamping people in one go.
* Ensure the tag populates an "unsourced biographies marked for deletion" category, which will give people wanting to clean it up a good position to start on and an easy way of seeing the response rate.
* Widely publicise that this is going to happen, so people can help work on it.
* Keep a list of articles tagged and then later detagged, to run a check on later to see how well it worked.
The idea would be to give a bureaucracy-free route to removing *unsourced* biographies. The unsourced condition may be the result of removal of questionable sources for negative statements, that should not make a difference.
Why not use {{prod}}?
I did a little test on this a while back, taking the worst kind of unsourced biographies - the kind that are absolute libel if they transpire to be untrue - and marking them for prodding unless sourced. The usual response was to source and remove the tag, but a couple of times it ended up being removed with no sourcing and brisk comments about "notable topic, take to afd".