[WikiEN-l] Unsourced biographies

[John Lee]

On 4/27/07, Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/26/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at 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.
>
> My survey of BLPs is only half-completed so far, but from what I've found:
>
> *One article in seven is a biography of a living person, for
> approximately a quarter-million of them.
> *90% of these articles have neither footnotes nor references.
> *About half have only links to official or fan websites.
> *25% have nothing that could be considered a source under even the
> most generous definition.


Obviously I have a rather biased sample, but the BLPs I've worked with have
largely turned out to be unattributed copyvios (as in, not even a link to
them) from official biographies or press releases published online. Of
course, determining how many of our BLPs are actually copyvios is a
different question altogether...

Johnleemk