[WikiEN-l] Automatic death flagging?

[Sam Korn]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 7:18 PM, Charlotte Webb
<charlottethewebb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> c) [[Category:Living people]] - dead people have the cat removed
>
> As far as I know there is no easy way to track category removal.
> Special:Relatedchanges/Category:Living_people will not show edits
> which remove the category, and any edits previously visible on this
> list (prior to category removal) will disappear from it.
>
> Matters of propriety may have discouraged this in the past but now
> that we have the __HIDDENCAT__ feature, we might consider adding dead
> people directly to [[Category:Dead people]].

No way to track category removal, but there is already vaguely the
function you are looking for in the API.

http://toolserver.org/~samkorn/scripts/recentdeaths.php tracks the
latest 50 additions to [[Category:2009 deaths]].

A bot could quite easily go through, say, 50 years worth of categories
and collate a list of people added to the category in the last day and
post it on-wiki.  If it would be helpful, I'll do that tomorrow.

Sam

-- 
Sam
PGP public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sam_Korn/public_key