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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2010-01-25. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Births and deaths: Wikipedia biographies in the 20th century (10,809 bytes · 💬)

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• I would be interested in knowing how many of those "12 a day" had articles before their deaths and how many were only created because their obituaries appeared in other media. Rmhermen (talk) 04:18, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

  Good question. I'm trying to get those figures, so maybe there will be a follow-up to this. Carcharoth (talk) 09:06, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

• Interesting study, it clearly shows the effects of recentism and war deaths. I've been writing some biographies on 70s theater personnel lately; most of their births were before 1940, showing that there are definitely gaps in our coverage with respect to less-recent people. I'd like to see this study done again in a few years to see how the distribution changes (if at all). --Cryptic C62 · Talk 04:24, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

  "Recentism" is not a problem unique to Wikipedia. Look at any collection of biographies, & you will find it skewed towards the more recent period. We favor people who make a personal impression, who are part of our living memory, which means the problem begins starting 3 generations back from the current date. One of Wikipedia's strengths is that we have no limits on space: as time goes on, there is no need to remove articles about people who were important in their day, but now have become of interest only to graduate students in need of a subject for their theses. Print encyclopedias have always needed to prune their content to keep their sizes manageable. Wikipedia may never rescue every subject of note that has been denied their proper due, but at least we can prevent more from being unjustly forgotten. -- llywrch (talk) 20:33, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

  It's more a question of what records survive from earlier, and the motivation and resources to write and maintain the articles. Carcharoth (talk) 09:06, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

  There is that factor, undeniably. However, whether a person makes some kind of personal impression is far more decisive -- which can be shown by a simple experiment. I think we'd all agree that the last three centuries, back to 1700, are fairly well documented: if someone wants to write a biographical article on some notable who lived in those centuries, the resources are there. Pick a year in the last 50, look at the category of deaths for that year, then compare the number to prior years at 50 year intervals back to about 1700: the drop-off in articles is astonishing. (I did it starting with 1990, in which category there were 2404 articles, & the drop-off went like this: for 1940, 1548; for 1890, 783; for 1840, 341; for 1790, 161; for 1740, 102; & for 1690, 94.) But, as I wrote, this failing is not unique to Wikipedia: to grab an example at random, half of Jerome's biographies in his De Viris Illustribus lived within 100 years of when he published the book -- circa AD 390. Dead people -- whether white males or not -- are just not that interesting to most people. -- llywrch (talk) 19:43, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

  I agree with you to a large extent, but you have to take the demographic transition, particularly in Europe, into account. Only if you hold these numbers up to demographic developments, can we really see how presentist the project is. Lampman (talk) 08:39, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

• An even more active MilHist BLP output would increase the peaks in deaths for the two world wars. It's interesting that we have far less reach into the participants in WW1 than WW2. The peak in births in the early 80s owes much to the coverage of popular culture. Tony (talk) 05:44, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

  I don't think you mean BLP, because BLP stands for Biographies of Living Persons, but yeah.—greenrd (talk) 09:37, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

• Ehm, we don't have Generation Alpha anymore, it was AfDed back in November and now G4ed. ;-) --Tone 18:59, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

  Ah, but it was interesting to see it be created and put in the 2010s birth decade category. :-) Carcharoth (talk) 09:06, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

• Fascinating. The spike from 1970 onwards presumably comes to a large extent from active and recently-retired athletes. Lampman (talk) 23:10, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

  Plus Actors, beauty pageant winners and popstars. ϢereSpielChequers 00:50, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

  All contemporary culture, effectively. Carcharoth (talk) 09:06, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

  Beauty pageant winners make up a tiny percentage, and actors don't have such a definite cut-off point. Pop stars...yeah, maybe. Lampman (talk) 05:26, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

• a bit OT, but what's with the DD/MM/YYYY date? ;) Interesting article. I wouldn't really say that there's anything meaningful which could be drawn from it outside of the context of Wikipedia, bit it's at least an interesting tidbit of knowledge. Thanks for taking the time to compile the numbers and write it up. (and PS.:There's absolutely nothing wrong with a focus on pop culture. There's a reason that it's "popular culture", you know. If it bothers you that there is more pop then not, quit complaining and start writing! Complaints about athletes, television shows, and Pokemon became tedious years ago. We're steadily becoming stodgy around here.)
  — V = I * R (talk to Ohms law) 09:39, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

• Really interesting post ! I worked on the figures of fr:WP (my home-wiki) and it seems that they are quite similar to yours. The graphics can be found here: File:Naissances et décès dans les biographies de frWP, 1899-2009.png. Pymouss Let's talk 14:35, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

• I've tried normalising the data so we can compare the two sets more easily - birth years on fr and en; death years on fr and en. Pretty directly comparable, but you can see a very interesting lowered birthrate on the frwp data during the First World War, and a spike in deaths at the end of the Second... Shimgray | talk | 20:12, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

• Those are great charts! I also notice that the birth rate tapers off earlier, so it seems you have fewer child prodigies. What you do have is the youngest person in the world with his own English Wikipedia article (Prince Gaston d'Orléans, poor kid...) Lampman (talk) 08:18, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

• Thanks! I've rerun the stats again with five languages, rather than three - there's a more detailed discussion of what the results might imply here. Shimgray | talk | 17:40, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
• As a response to Lampman's comment about "fewer child prodigies", there is another factor to compensate for in these stats: a number of missing birth dates, which is a significant number as late as the 1950s -- even in the developed world. (Births at home, not in a hospital or medical clinic, was not unusual in the US into that decade.) Articles about people from the lower socioeconomic classes -- actors, artists, businessmen -- are more likely to lack dates/years of birth. As a result, there is a difference between the total number of births & deaths for any generation, & the value of this difference increases as one goes back in time. -- llywrch (talk) 06:08, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

• Mmm. And, of course, there's Category:Year of birth missing (living people) - 48,000 people whose years of birth we don't know, but who are presumably distributed somehow from 1920ish to now. Conversely, though, we have the effect of people who are well documented (ish) until they "drop off the record"; we can be reasonably confident they're dead, but we have no idea when it happened. There's around 11,000 of these, either "definitely unknown" or just not yet listed. Shimgray | talk | 16:46, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Someone asked how many of these biographies get created because of media attention around their death, so I took it upon myself to look at article creation on dead people directly after their death. A look at deaths in January 2009 shows 13.26 deaths a day, which corresponds quite well with the above numbers.

I then looked at the month from 29 December 2009 till 28 January 2010 (I excluded 12 January, because of the extraordinary high death tolls from the Haiti earthquake – 32). This gave me an average of 12.76 a day, which is not too far below the number from January last year. However, this contains some red links, and these get deleted after one month (the ones from 28 December have already been culled). Of my sample, 2.83 were red links. That leaves 9.93 live links per day; 3.33 less than the average from last year. So accordingly, 3–4 biographies on dead people – a day – will have to be created over the next year to get to the normal level. I’ll try to also put up a graph of how the blue-to-red ratio moves over the course of the month. Lampman (talk) 06:48, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Here's the chart. Lampman (talk) 07:42, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

• Thanks for all the responses, in particular those looking at the trends in other languages, and the various blog posts that have resulted from this. Even more fascinating than I first thought! Carcharoth (talk) 23:41, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

BLP madness: BLP deletions cause uproar (14,287 bytes · 💬)

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RFC again: Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Biographies of living people

A graph of current opinion can be found here: User:Peter cohen/BLP RFC stats. The two opposing views which have the most support is:

1. Jehochman, who currently wants deletion policy to be more strict, with 139 people supporting, and
2. Collect, who feels existing policy is satisfactory, has 51 editors supporting.

Ikip 04:05, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

• The whole referencing problem stems from a decline in the number of editors. The more draconian we get, the less newbies will turn into valued editors. So, we've got a vicious cycle. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 04:17, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

True, see my comments (hidden) on how the media feels about what is happening at wikipedia: At the Durova it is not pretty. These 7 journalists and one PHD dissertation are the canary in the coalmine about how many wikipedians are treating new editors. Ikip 04:27, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Is there nothing happening on Wikipedia that is not somehow resultant of editors picking on newbies? Give me a break. The reason BLPs remain unsourced for months, if not years, is because many of them are about people who are not well-known to the general pupulation, many people are generally apathetic (or not knowledgable) about doing sourcing work, and because lots of people are basically lazy. It's easy to write something that you know is true and leave it than it is to go dig up the book where you read it and create a proper citation. The vast majority of newbies aren't even familiar with WP:RS, much less our citation styles. Please stop pushing this agenda everywhere. <>Multi‑Xfer<> (talk) 06:02, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

• I am a relatively new editor and a significant problem I have in following the chain of events in this news article is the extensive reliance on abbreviations, jargon and code words that only the more experienced members of the editor community can easily follow. For example: ANI, PROD, RfC, CSD, AN, ArbCom. This article sounds like a Pentagon briefing, it is not English, per se. It would be more "open" and "transparent" for the community, especially for newer members, if the prose used in the "newspaper" used common vocabulary and complete words, that anyone could understand. Thanks for listening. --Mdukas (talk) 06:41, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

FYI:

• AN = Administrators' noticeboard
• ANI = Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents
• ArbCom = Arbitration Committee
• CSD = Criteria for speedy deletion
• PROD = Proposed deletion
• RfC = Requests for comment

The Wikipedia:Glossary has more. — Athaenara ✉ 07:07, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Athaenara, thank you. I wish the author of the article could have simply done the same thing. We don't all speak or understand "wiki". thx. --Mdukas (talk) 01:32, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Happy to help! — Athaenara ✉ 11:04, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

• Just great. Deletionists are taking over. Wikipedia is going to hell in a handbasket. It's people like User:Rdm2376 who need to be deleted on sight, not the articles.  Grue  10:06, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

   Eaten by a grue?  Sorry. Couldn't resist. —what a crazy random happenstance 11:49, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

• Two Years here and still a novice I admit, but my entire two years work has now all been deleted and and a huge gap in the progression of digital technologies now exists in wikipedia through a flawed AfD process. No wonder Wiki is losing good editors, I know I wont be spending time on it anymore when all I'm trying to do is to accurately make an article and reference it properly. Bring on the multitude of Biographies for Horses that win minor horseraces!! I'm sure my kids would really like to know about Mr Ed than living pioneers and inventors! --Cafejunkie (talk) 17:06, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

• (LOL)--I'm afraid right now I think we should just get rid of admins. We pretty much only need them to undelete stuff other admins have deleted. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:20, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

2 opposes = solid opposition?

• Where is the "solid opposition" to wholesale introduction of flagged revisions, as proposed by User:TheDJ? All I saw at the linked discussion were two (2) Opposes by people who do not seem to have any experience of how flagged revisions work on Wikinews and German WP. Have I missed another discussion elsewhere? If this is all the opposition expressed, TheDJ's idea is worth looking at. --JN466 11:46, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

I have amended it to state that the proposal saw little response. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:59, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. (I am still tempted to add a "citation needed" tag to the statement that it "might be impractical due to en.wiki's size." If it works well for a Wikipedia that has 1 million articles, it'll likely also work for one that has 3 million.) --JN466 13:33, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't flagged revisions get a 60 - 40 vote with Jimbo deciding that we would have it anyway, and that most policies usually need at least 70%? Ikip 05:36, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Misleading account of events

This account of events is inaccurate. The deletion spree was started by Gregory Kohs, a banned editor, who coordinated off-line with at least one administrator to do a "test" introducing vandalism to unwatched and unreferenced biographies. I believe there was also something about the purchase of an admin account (user:Cool3?). The conspiracy was exposed and blocks issued, but deletions followed with support from the Wikipedia Review crowd where Kohs is active, until a consensus of Wikipedia editors objected (see voting results on proposal that unreferenced biographies can be speedy deleted). How do we get this misleading depiction fixed? ChildofMidnight (talk) 17:28, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

It's my understanding that the Kohs issue was unrelated; MZMcBride apparently provided Kohs with a short list of unwatched BLPs, and also the Cool3 account was apparently purposely compromised. See Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/MZMcBride 2, but except for also being about BLPs, I don't think the two issues are related.--ragesoss (talk) 17:42, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

The short list was 8,000 articles wasn't it? An Arbcom used an alternate account to add them to a watchlist. And the deletion spree that followed was very much related and driven by the same activists on Wikipedia Review, was it not? ChildofMidnight (talk) 18:18, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

The list that was given to Kohs, it seems, was 20 articles: User_talk:MZMcBride#Request.--ragesoss (talk) 18:42, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Oh. And then an Arb set up an alternate account to watch 8,000 that were unwatched? Is that how it happened? I'm not an expert which is why I was disappointed that there wasn't a better account of the events. ChildofMidnight (talk) 19:19, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm not totally versed on all this either; there's just so much discussion in so many places that it's hard to get a clear big picture view without having been following it all along. But where did this 8000 article arbcom watchlist come in? I hadn't seen anything about that.--ragesoss (talk) 20:08, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

There were 8,062 unwatched BLPs identified by MZMcBride and subsequently forwarded to Arbcom after they discovered that he had offered to supply them to a banned user. The Kohser said he'd only received a small sample, and after User:Newyorkbrad requested the sample, MZMcBride listed the twenty articles on the 18th Jan. The mass deletion of unsourced Biographies without notification to the creators started a couple of days later. Apart from the chronology and the fact that both seem to have been planned on Wikipedia Review, I'm not sure what connection if any there was between the deletion of BLPs without attempting to source them or inform the authors and the vandalism of BLPs experiment. ϢereSpielChequers 01:36, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Does this have anything to do with Casliber's claims.[1]

Are you talking about this: The BLP offwiki forum dedicated to tightening up BLP practices any bets how quick this will be deleted?[2] Ikip 05:54, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

The first I heard of it was when it had been linked to ANI and whoever was running it promptly replaced the contents of the site with the goatse picture. I don't know if it had been used for offsite canvassing by deletionists in AFDs and other !votes. But I don't trust anyone who is prepared to use the goatse in that way. ϢereSpielChequers 12:10, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

What did the Arbcom do about it? Ikip 13:26, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

I don't know if its been to Arbcom or who if anyone has admitted being part of it. ϢereSpielChequers 15:19, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Both Durova and Casliber seem to have talked to members of the group, or been alerted in some way about this group. Ikip 16:06, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

I would argue the lack of references on BLPs (and all articles, in general) is partially a result of Mediawiki's unfriendly editing interface. We need to make it easier for new users to add references when there's a "Citation needed" at the end of a sentence or a big unreferenced tag on the article. How about a series a screenshots or even a short video clip? We need to teach these same users to add references instead of having a very limited number of experienced editors fixing it for them. Mahanga^Talk 19:52, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

User:Ikip/ref is a start on how to reference. Ikip 20:11, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

• Without getting into the larger issue, I applaud ArbCom for making a simple, classy decision to declare an amnesty. That's the kind of low-drama forward looking approach we need more of around here. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:38, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Way back when...the 'External links' section was used for references for the entire article. Obviously that wasn't the best idea in the world, and it became the common practice to provide separate citations for each statement. I can understand putting these older articles into some sort of 'purgatory' where they can be fixed up, but I certainly can't agree to deleting non-controversial articles about various elected congresspeople, including those no longer in office (which means the Project Vote Smart et al material is no longer available, which means it would be difficult to re-create the article from scratch). I'm sure there are similar stories in other areas. If there are specific problems with specific articles, fine. I just don't believe that one size fits all. (And yes, those who can't figure out how to copy and paste a ref from another article to use as a template of sorts are at a disadvantage with new articles. However, I think many are just too lazy to bother doing anything at all with refs.) Flatterworld (talk) 22:48, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

In the news: Wikipedia the disruptor? (985 bytes · 💬)

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• wikipedia is a free resource of knowleadge ..i as a person will jump to wikipedia to gain something...keep it up(tanmay sarkar 12:24, 29 January 2010 (UTC))

Vaknin

I think that it's worthwhile noting that Sam Vaknin wrote an opinion piece that direly predicted we would "implode". I actually took the time to respond, see User:Ta bu shi da yu/Global Politician. I was considering adding this to the article, because the emails I got from him were quite illustrative of his thought processes.

Quite a turn-around, I must say! - Tbsdy (formerly Ta bu shi da yu) ^talk 02:20, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Nice!--ragesoss (talk) 02:49, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

News and notes: Biographies galore, Wikinews competition, and more (886 bytes · 💬)

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Just wanted to mention the Wikinews competition is open to all, you don't have to be a wikinewsie (you don't even have to have edited before). Its not to late to join for anyone interested. Cheers [disclaimer: I'm active on wikinews]. Cheers. Bawolff (talk) 01:54, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Regarding "is readily apparent", obviously, the majority of people born in the twentieth century are still alive (or are dead but we assume that they are alive). The analysis provides no information about the proportion of biographies that are of living people. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 18:01, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News (226 bytes · 💬)

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RosUNwell.com Roswell.Org.UK Spacekey.Co.UK where are their listings?

WikiProject report: Writers wanted! The Wikiproject Novels interviews (1,209 bytes · 💬)

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• That's an interesting interview. I wish The Sea-Wolf can become a GA (but of course, up to now it still isn't a very good article.) Kayau Odyssey HUCK FINN to the lighthouse BACK FROM EXAMS 13:56, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

• If you post a note at the forum, and list it at the Collaboration department as well, you might well get some help with it. Best wishes, Alan16 (talk) 19:31, 26 January 2010 (UTC).

• Good interview. I will probably join the WP, considering I'll be doing a lot of novel studying in the next couple of years. MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 19:11, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

• I would encourage you to join, MasterOfHisOwnDomain. The more active members, the better. Regards, Alan16 (talk) 19:31, 26 January 2010 (UTC).