Checklist for new articles, especially biographical ones:
- (1) Briefly read the article. Does it make sense? Is the format and language comprehensible? If not, this is a clear indication that further attention is needed. Consider that the article might be a copyvio or translation. Try a Google search to check for copyvio text (how much can we rely on the bots to pick this up?), but also remember to look for human-recognisable signs that the text was copied from a book or a website.
- (2) Take a brief look at the article background (some of this can be automated). Look at the size of the article. Look at the creation date. Look at the contribs of the person who created it. Check whether it had been patrolled soon after creation or not. If the creator has only a few contributions including creating the article, this can be an indication that this article is an old drive-by addition and that more work is needed. Look at the editing history after creation. Check the article is not currently in a vandalised state. How many edits have been made since creation? How much has the article changed since creation (use a diff to compare initial article with current article)? How much has been vandalism and reverts, how much has been useful additions that stayed in the article. Has there been activity on the talk page other than project tags? Look at "what links here" for the article: does it have many incoming links or not? Are the links correct (this is harder to judge, but important, as if the links in other articles are incorrectly pointing here, that needs correcting)? Are there links to this article outside articlespace (e.g. noticeboard or user talk page or AfD links)? Also check for interwiki links and search for articles on other wikis. [There may be more background stuff I've forgotten, but a lot of this can be easily automated for all articles, not just biographical ones.]
- (3) Does the subject of the article meet notability criteria? A list of the biographical notability guidelines would help here. If not, consider nominating for deletion (or PROD or redirect to a more suitable article), but first do at least a brief Google search. One bit of automation that would help here would be to find those articles that have a low number of Google hits (mostly to Wikipedia mirrors, if that can be detected) and to flag those for urgent attention for checking with sources (will not work with common names, unfortunately - humans will have to do more intricate searches based on the person's profession and birth year, if known). Any automated Google search could include the categories to help reduce the number of hits. If not sure, do not just move on, but be sure to add a notability tag
- (4) Is the article adequately sourced? If the sources are online, check the article is accurate. If it is not adequately sourced, add tags and consider removing unsourced material (for BLPs, removal of unsourced material is expected). for notability or sources).
- [For both (2) and (3) If people work steadily through the dated categories for the notability and sources tags (especially if the BLP ones are filtered out for special attention), someone should arrive at the article to do that work eventually, but if the article needs work now, take a minute or two to tidy it up, and do not forget to add the BLP category, at a minimum, to aid tracking the article.]
- (5) Once it has been established whether the article meets minimum comprehensibility standards, whether the article is a copyvio or not, what the article background is, and whether the article subject is notable enough for a Wikipedia article, and whether the article is adequately sourced, then a basic checklist that applies to all biographical articles can be used to check, expand, tidy and improve the article:
- (a) Check title of page conforms with Wikipedia naming conventions and style guidelines.
- (b) Check spelling of name matches spelling in sources. Create redirects for alternative names and spellings and consider listing the article at surname disambiguation pages.
- (c) Check all links to the article (including those via redirects). Check the articles linking to the article are saying the right thing (e.g. no BLP violations in the other articles), and indeed are actually referring to the correct article. If not, disambiguation pages may be needed, or possible delinking or changing to a suitable redlink (while noting the disambiguation area for clean-up). Also do a search for the article name in the text of other Wikipedia articles and consider linking if not already linked (is there a way to distinguish links from bare text in search results?). This checking of links needs to be repeated periodically.
- (d) Check birth and death years (and dates if known) against the sources (if the article looks reasonable and sourced to a biography that you can confirm exists and was published by a recognised publisher, that is usually fine - though do add online sources for convenience and increased ease of verifiability). If unsourced, mark as needing a source, or find and add a reliable source. Add birth and death year categories, and put the years and dates in the infobox if there is one (if there isn't one, there is no requirement to add one). Do check that the birth and death years and dates in the text, infobox and categories all agree. If birth and death years are missing or not known, add the relevant categories. If the person is living or possibly living, add those categories.
- (e) Add basic categories for nationality and profession.
- (f) Add a DEFAULTSORT value.
- (g) Add the Biography WikiProject tag to the talk page. If possible, fill in the parameters, but there are others who will do that if the basic tag is added.
All the above is probably a rewrite (with additions and omissions) of guideline that undoubtedly exist at WP:NPP (new pages patrol) and WP:WPBIO. But it can certainly apply to BLPs, as well as to other biographical articles and to articles in general.