Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/Archive 5

5,000 in a month!

From http://toolserver.org/~betacommand/reports/unref_blp_count.log

2010-11-29 00:04 UTC|20517

2010-12-29 00:12 UTC|15505

Amazing work by all, especially big thanks to User:Gigs, who proposed the watchlist message - I'd been calling out to get more people involved all year, but didn't know how to do it - you've actually done it.The-Pope (talk) 01:30, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Seconded! The watchlist message seems to have an amazing effect. Either that or loads of people started at the same time. WP:URBLP does maybe 50 a day but the extra effort of many makes things so much easier. For one thing your not swimming in the total figures against the 50 or so new unreferenced BLPs that are created or found each day. Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 01:35, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Thirded! I'm astonished, and delighted! --j⚛e decker^talk 01:38, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

If it wasn`t for the watch-list message I would never know about this project. This is definitely a good idea. Every project should have this kind of messages. I am not a "huge" help, but I do my part. Greetings to everybody. Adrian (talk) 18:28, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

That is very encouraging, thanks very much for your help!— Preceding unsigned comment added by J04n (talk • contribs)

I don't think every project should get a watchlist message, but this one is pretty important. I also found out about it that way, and I've been doing my bit since. Feezo (Talk) 18:54, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Me too. The watchlist message got me interested and motivated to help, and when I saw a list of Judaism articles to reference, I dove right in. I was amazed by how many thousands of pages were referenced in only about 2 weeks of the time I was working last month. Now that your message has disappeared from my watchlist page, I had to search out this page and tag it so I can find it easily. Keep up the good work! Yoninah (talk) 21:47, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Oldest UBLPs from the new & improved catscan

I stumbled upon the new improved WP:CATSCAN the other day and whilst playing around with it today, found our oldest current UBLP. This search ranks the UBLP articles by article creation ID, so Stephen R. Lawhead, created on 29 August 2001 is the oldest UBLP in existence (at the moment...) #2 on the list Max Weismann, created on 27 May 2002 has the following fantastic comment by the second editor... "and what has this person done to warrent an encyclopedia article?" They obviously didn't have an {{db-a7}} back then! The-Pope (talk) 16:11, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Great tool to work out which are possible WP:BLPPRODs. Article #26640044 and after. Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 16:47, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Only 12 more URBLP's left from 2002.  ;-) --j⚛e decker^talk 16:28, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

The oldest URBLP now was first created in June 2003. The 2002-2003-created URBLPs are, on average, easier to source than an average article, in my estimation. --j⚛e decker^talk 01:13, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

I would assume that that is because it was easier to find important people that didn't have articles yet back then. Silverseren^C 01:16, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

That's my thinking, too. --j⚛e decker^talk 01:18, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Creditable publishing companies

Hello guys, I think that this area is a real headache. When I write about living person, I do so in a order that calls attention to a large group. Some of the people are more creditable than others. Clearly you guys want concepts that tie into the best media resource, right? IE, Google Books ect. Large publishing companies?

This can not be the case with all Biographies of Living Persons, or we would not have new Biographies, right? Is there a list of creditable publishing companies. Can we not just go right to a set of rule that does not allow these new and unknown Biographies be listed? Because it seems like a major issue, with no end in sight. Thanks finding dreams 13:40, 11 January 2011 (UTC)--finding dreams 13:47, 11 January 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Findingdreams (talk • contribs)

That is more a question for the reliable sources talk page. We are doing quite well, and the end is in sight. At current rates it could be all over by March, even with a slow down it will most likely be May or June at the latest that the UBLP backlog will be history. Lots more to fix elsewhere then - WP:BACKLOG. The-Pope (talk) 14:06, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Google Books proves only that a book exists. They have scanned a number of self-published books, which do not satisfy WP:RS. No way around evaluating them - but a good first start is often looking up the publishing house on Wikipedia :-) --Alvestrand (talk) 23:20, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Indeed. One particularly poor class of sources are Wikipedia mirrors, some of which are published in book form (e.g., Books LLC. Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks is always worth a look if the reliability of a publisher is in question. The reliable sources noticeboard is another great resource (WP:RSN), searching past discussions will often give you precedent for the reliability of a particular publisher or not. --j⚛e decker^talk 01:11, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

No longer on watchlist?

I'd been setting myself the goal of resolving (sourcing or prodding) at least one URBLP every day (sometimes more), using the link from the Watchlist. But just now it's disappeared! Is that deliberate or a glitch? It was a helpful reminder, and a helpfully easy place to find the link to a random biog. PamD (talk) 23:51, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

How about making a more user-page-friendly version of {{Big Red Button}} (or at least providing it with documentation which explains how to size the button (as mentioned in an edit summary)?) I've fiddled around with a subst'd version of it and got my own red button on my user page now: perhaps more editors could be encouraged to do this, if it's not going to be in the watchlist header any more? PamD (talk) 00:17, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Happy Anniversary!

It's been a bit quieter this year than this time last year. A net reduction of 40,000 UBLPs in a year is something for all of us to be very proud of. Have a read of Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Biographies_of_living_people/Phase_I and the ArbCom motion for a bit of reminiscing about the old days! Should Jan 21 be renamed "International UBLP day"? The-Pope (talk) 16:18, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Of the 50,000 articles tagged as unreferenced BLPs on the day the project was founded only 6,000 are still in the category. Hut 8.5 21:37, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

Jonetani Kaukimoce

It says in the article that he died last year but I can't find verification...anyone have a handle on Figian death notices? J04n(talk page) 19:52, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

[1] says that someone by that name has died, and [2] seems to indicate it's the same guy. Hut 8.5 08:29, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Is there a deadline?

I've had a look on the project page whether there is a deadline by which all BLPs need to be sourced, but there doesn't appear to be any info on this. I tend to recall that such a deadline had been discussed. What is the status of this? Schwede66 03:21, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

A deadline was never formally agreed upon and, at this point, seems fairly unnecessary. All of the BLPs that are left should, very likely, be referenced and removed from the list by year's end, at the latest. Silverseren^C 03:27, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Back when there was a panic, there was talk of a deadline, by which drastic action would be taken against remaining unsourced BLPs. I think the panic has abated. --Alvestrand (talk) 13:39, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying this. Schwede66 14:39, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Effect of the watchlist notice - or more time to spend on it during the holidays?

300

I've plotted the number of UBLPs based on the log and the increase during the time the watchlist notice was in effect (4 Dec to 17 Jan) is quite dramatic! Definitely might need another run in a few months to try to finish them off. Maybe also partially due to time off work/school over the Christmas/New Year period, but the alignment of the two weeks since the notice has been removed to the two months before the notice was placed indicates that not many extra people continued on with the referencing without having the reminder there at the top of their watchlist.The-Pope (talk) 06:58, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

It at least gives an indication that bringing issues like this to a wider audience and asking them to help can make a positive difference, which is very encouraging. --Michig (talk) 08:33, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree. Also, you can see that the effect waned even before the notice was taken down, which, although obviously a negative, reassures me in a sense about the decision to take it down. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 11:23, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Big jump

Does anyone have any insight as to why there was such a big jump in Category:Unreferenced BLPs from January 2011 over the weekend? If memory serves there were around 470 - 490 on Friday, where it's now sitting at 980! --Jezebel'sPonyo^{bons mots} 18:40, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Mr.Z-bot upgraded every article in category Living People that had an 'unsourced 'tag as 'BLP unsourced'. J04n(talk page) 19:09, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Aahhh, I thought that might be it. I was hoping that it was a glitch of somesort, but alas it looks like they will all have to be reviewed as well. I'll grab my spoon and get to work. --Jezebel'sPonyo^{bons mots} 19:17, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Eh, it's not like 500 is that much extra work. Silverseren^C 19:18, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

It's been a long time since the number has actually gone up. On January 27th there were 11,661. After the weekend I had expected we would be closer to 11,400 - 11,500. Seeing it at 11,782 was just a bit of a shock. When there is momentum it is easier to keep new editors interested in sourcing; when the backlog starts increasing despite everyone's efforts I'm concerned that some editors will see it as a lost cause. That being said, it's important that these incorrectly tagged articles have been found and identified as unsourced BLPs so that they can be reviewed sooner rather than later. --Jezebel'sPonyo^{bons mots} 19:28, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Indeed, I really am glad they're tagged, but emotionally seeing the total jump does have a momentary affect. There are some questionable tags in that batch, I saw at least one Z-bot added tag that appeared to have a ref that used a ref tag, and then there's the eternal question of how to count ELs, but from the handful I looked at I don't think the increase is a glitch. I've known that there is a lot of what I've called dark matter URBLPs, it's not hard to see them when you look at the month's new tagging and see articles created in 2003 or 2004 (e.g., Robert Chasse, found via [3] )included in the list, but (thankfully), I'm starting to feel like we've made a real dent in the dark matter cases as well. So, it's a good thing, I'm just impatient to see an empty backlog!  ;-) --j⚛e decker^{talk to me} 19:37, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

At one point yesterday it was up over 11,900; I believe the projects did a good job nabbing a bunch as soon as they ended up on their lists. J04n(talk page) 19:43, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Searches by topic.

Whatever search tools are being used to determine URBLPs by topic are missing important topic areas. For instance, there are many unreferenced biographies of NFL players, but searching for that tag does not yield any results. I do not know how the searches are being performed. The {{ Wikipedia:WikiProject National Football League }} tag is on the talk pages of these URBLPs. I'm sure there are other searches by topic that are missing the appropriate tags.Cliff (talk) 18:16, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

here is an example. This Page Is actually entering something like

{{NFLProject}}

rather than the standardized

{{wikiproject NFL}}

. Perhaps this is why the topic search is returning no results. If anybody want's to tutor me in Bot programming, I'd like to tackle the project of searching for the

{{NFL project}}

tags and changing them appropriately. You'd probably have to hold my hand though;o Cliff (talk) 18:23, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

No need as the DASHBot lists automatically check all template redirects as well. Any unreferenced NFL player articles that you find will almost certainly not have any variation of {{WikiProject National Football League}}, but will probably have a college, Canadian or Arena Football project template instead. The-Pope (talk) 02:04, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Beatrice Pons

Perhaps someone could assist me with this. Someone inserted the statement that Ms. Pons has died into her article. I have scoured the internet, but have been unable to find anything definitive. I also posted messages on the article talk page, as well as the talk page of the user who added this, to no avail. Joefromrandb (talk) 13:56, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

If the death is not verifiable via reliable sources then it should be removed (as I see you've done). I have watchlisted the article as well and wil monitor it to ensure the info isn't changed again without a corresponding source. --Jezebel'sPonyo^{bons mots} 15:02, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for the help. Joefromrandb (talk) 15:29, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

The button appears to have stopped working

--FormerIP (talk) 00:55, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Yep, I'm hoping that's temporary, Catscan 2.0 is down as well, I suspect it's something going on with Toolserver. --j⚛e decker^{talk to me} 00:58, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

It's back! --j⚛e decker^{talk to me} 03:26, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Cat Scan not working?

I'm having trouble using Cat Scan to find unreferenced BLPs. A few days ago this query stopped working:

http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php?wikilang=en&wikifam=.wikipedia.org&basecat=Canadian+people&basedeep=9&mode=cs&tagcat=All+unreferenced+BLPs&tagdeep=0&templates=&size=512&stubop=or&links=4&hours=12&go=Scan&format=html&userlang=en

It gives me an error like this:

A database error has occurred Query: SELECT page_id, page_namespace, page_title, page_restrictions, group_concat(DISTINCT c.cl_to SEPARATOR '|') as cats, group_concat(DISTINCT if (t.cl_to in ('All_unreferenced_BLPs'), t.cl_to, null) SEPARATOR '|') as tags FROM page JOIN categorylinks as c ON c.cl_from = page_id JOIN categorylinks as t on t.cl_from = page_id WHERE c.cl_to in ('Canadian_people', …) GROUP BY page_id HAVING tags IS NOT NULL ORDER BY page_title LIMIT 1000 Function: getSubcategories Error: 1317 Query execution was interrupted (sql-s1)

Any suggestions? Pburka (talk) 19:17, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Try switching the cats around like this or try the new Catsan 2.0, like this? The-Pope (talk) 23:28, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Almost to 10000...

10009 on the big red button at the moment. Should be under 10k by the time the toolserver count gets published in 7 hours time. I tried to get there tonight but couldn't quite do it... if someone would delete all of my CSDs it would go close! Well done to everyone involved, 50k down to 10k in just over a year is better than most of us realistically thought possible. Now to finish them off. But if I see another American businessman with philanthropic tendencies, Colombian journalist, Indian filmmaker, Filipino actress or European musician, I think I'll explode. Might be time to get a message back on the watchlist notice... or should we wait another month? The-Pope (talk) 17:01, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

The total just dipped under 10,000. Well done everyone who has contributed.--Michig (talk) 17:30, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Nice to get down to quadruple digits. I'm in favor of another watchlist notice and another round of talklist reminders to authors. J04n(talk page) 18:15, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree with J04n! Quite a milestone! Congrats to all!--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 18:34, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Me three to watchlist notices and talklist reminders! w00h00 on 10000! --joe decker^{talk to me} 18:50, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree with the repeated emphasis, with a couple of caveats: 1) The farther we go, the greater the difficulty in properly sourcing what's left. I know I worked on "low hanging fruit" as much as I could. 2) We need to start planning for a focus on Category:BLP_articles_lacking_sources as well, which currently has about 45,000 articles in it, many of which were erroneously classified as unreferenced. A fair number of the number of articles that have left this category have been moved into that one. Jclemens (talk) 04:08, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

A quieter milestone

As of today, there are no remaining articles tagged BLP unsourced created before 1/1/2004. (Aroup Chatterjee is the oldest last I checked.) --joe decker^{talk to me} 23:52, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

Number of entries still at 9500

First of all, I don't think this is unexpected - the low-hanging fruit, as they say, has gone. The regulars must be tiring by now. You've been playing this game now for over a year. It's time to regroup and start making the difficult push for 0.

During the period of the last watchlist notice (4 December - 15 January), the number of URBLPs fell by 7400. The consensus was that the notice had helped significantly in this regard. I therefore propose a new watchlist message, a reworded version of the last message, to commence on 1 April. The more the push can achieve, the more motivated the "push for zero" will become. A virtuous circle can hopefully emerge.

I thank you all for your consideration, and apologies for only doing 50 myself so far. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 19:32, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Jarry, that's 500 down in 12 days, we're hardly dead yet.  :) I do think there is a tiring factor, on the other hand, it is my experience that the remaining things to reference haven't actually gotten harder, even though one might assume they would. 6-7 out of 10 articles I try and source have reliable usable refs on the 1st page of Gweb, Gnews or Gbooks searches. Because the group I work with has been working oldest to newest, I suspect that the first ones we dealt with were actually often pretty hard just b/c they'd gone so long unsourced. Yep, some "tiring" is going on a bit (I've done over 2200 bios at this point myself), and I've been distracted some by the events in Japan, but we will clear this out one way or another.

That what I thought: about 1100 in the last month. But that's still 6 or 7 months not including the fact that the rate of decrease is slowing... too long for my money (or yours! :P ) - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 21:09, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

That having been said, I will donate $50 to the WM foundation if another unref BLP watchlist notice is put up and left up for at least 10 days. Which you should consider a sign of my mental state about wanting to be done more than a bribe. --joe decker^{talk to me} 19:39, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

 Done Donation sent. --joe decker^{talk to me} 19:08, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Of the ~50,000 articles in the category when this project was set up about 3,800 are left, which means more than half of the articles currently in the category were added in the last year or so. I agree that another watchlist notice (or some other form of advertising) would be a good thing to try, though the category isn't ever going to empty because all the BLPPRODs are included in it. Hut 8.5 21:03, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Agree with another watchlist notice, would also be in favor of reminding the projects of their articles. Do we have a list of the 3800 originals? I think we should target them, it will be nice to say that all the ones we started with are finished. J04n(talk page) 21:39, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

We do now: User:Hut 8.5/Unreferenced BLPs/Originals. Hut 8.5 11:58, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Has recently dropped under 9,000 - that's 26 days for the last drop of a thousand. Still going in the right direction, albeit a little slowly.--Michig (talk) 18:18, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

The watchlist notice is probably helping a bit, just crossed 8,000 13 days later. --joe decker^{talk to me} 17:49, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

We've removed 500 in the last 5 days. The number of articles still unreferenced from when the project was founded has dropped to about 2,600, so about 2/3 of the current contents have been added since then. Hut 8.5 21:45, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Watchlist notice

I put in a request for another watchlist notice. J04n(talk page) 12:13, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Hopefully we can knock this out in less than a month. Gigs (talk) 17:43, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, got down to 7000 before it expired, which is a fair move from 9000. Still feels like a long way to go. --joe decker^{talk to me} 20:53, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

What our oldest URBLPs look like

Of Wikipedia's first half-million articles, there only ten six remaining unsourced BLPs save for a couple at AfD. --joe decker^{talk to me} 21:19, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

• Guranda Gvaladze 455332 (created 4 Feb 2004, sent to AfD, also note left at WikiProject Georgia (country))
• Jacques-Pierre Amette 472804 (sourced added from NYT, first hit on Gnews archives)
• S. John Ross (writer) 473192 (Sent to AfD)
• Kenneth M. Dye 473435 (sourced added from easily found via Gnews archives)
• Massimo del Pizzo 482272 ( a bit harder to find something through translation putatively reliable)
• Jerzy Samp 490487 (Pburka got this one, first page of Gnews hits, no trouble beyond sourcing in Polish)
• Wawrzyniec Samp 490523 (Pburka got this one, first page of Gnews hits, no trouble beyond sourcing in Polish)
• Anthony E. Rand 490700 (sourced, "not hard", says Hut 8.5)
• Gabriele Lesser 491446 (sources added, not hard Gnews/Gscholar)
• Ed Meyer (politician) 491859 (created 27 Feb 2004, was at AfD when I just looked)

I always find this sort of interesting, YMMV. --joe decker^{talk to me} 17:58, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

• You can remove Sylver from that list. It looks like it was incorrectly marked as a BLP. It's actually about a band whose members have their own (sourced) pages. I've fixed the categorization. Pburka (talk) 19:11, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
  • I've referenced Anthony E. Rand, he wasn't hard. Hut 8.5 19:15, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
    • Cool! Yeah, while I think Guranda actually is a hard case, I think it's useful to be able to have something to point to that demonstrates we're not, as is sometimes assumed, "down to the impenetrable unsolveable few" in referencing articles. This makes the point as well as anything, I think. And thanks to both of you! --joe decker^{talk to me} 20:13, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
      • Jerzy and Wawrzyniec Samp are also sourced now. I had to learn to read Polish, but Google helped me out with that. Pburka (talk) 20:40, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
        • Thanks!!, and yeah, Google Chrome auto-Google-translates at the push of a button, which I find very helpful for that. Over and above auto translation, could you comment above on how much digging those were? --joe decker^{talk to me} 20:49, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
          • The Polish ones were both straightforward, apart from being in a language I don't understand. I found them both in the first page of gnews hits. Pburka (talk) 20:53, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
            • Thanks! updated! --joe decker^{talk to me} 20:59, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
              • And I've sent the botanist AfD-ward and made a request for eyes at WP Georgia. Thanks, everyone, that was a fun project, and pretty much every one of WP's first 500K entries has now been sourced or sent for discussion. --joe decker^{talk to me} 21:18, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Two steps forward, one step back

User:Mr.Z-bot has just switched 299 articles from {{unreferenced}} to {{BLP unsourced}}, hence the jump above 6000 again. It seems that he's changed all the dates to May 2011, but normally there are lots of false positives (either refs are in the ext links, not actually living or actually with a proper ref, but the tag wasn't removed) in the list. The-Pope (talk) 02:21, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Many of them seem to qualify for BLP PROD as well. Hut 8.5 11:50, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

I doubt I got all of them, but I did send a couple dozen BLPPRODward on the 8th. A goodly number of them have creation dates before 3/18/10, though. --joe decker^{talk to me} 02:00, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Interesting factoid, as near as I can tell, only about 350 of the 6,000 remaining URBLPs were created after the BLPPROD cutoff date. --joe decker^{talk to me} 02:53, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Target figure?

With the number of unsourced BLPs dwindling, I wonder when we should consider the backlog elimination to be finished? The backlog has been shifting to include newly-tagged articles since we started this over a year ago. Obviously there will be an ongoing need to deal with unsourced BLPs, but we're never going to get down to zero due to articles going through various deletion processes. The work carried out by this project has been a great achievement and one that we should publicize when it's reached it's target. The question is, then, what is our target? I would suggest that if we get the total below 1,000 with no articles having been tagged as unsourced BLPs for longer than 2 months (other than those that may have been kept at AFD for example while still unsourced), then we will have 'done the job' re. the backlog and we can then concentrate on keeping the numbers at a low level. Any other views on this? If we aim for zero unsourced BLPs we will never realistically be able to say that we've done it.--Michig (talk) 10:04, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

I think we'll just need to get it down to only the current months list or all previous month articles are at deletion, like we do at WP:URBLPR - we consider a month cleared when all remaining articles are on deletion death row. 1000 is probably too high, unless a bot goes on a "UBLP discovery spree". I'd guess that the dashbot lists would still be generated and would be useful just to keep on top of newly found UBLP articles.The-Pope (talk) 14:19, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

If we can get it down to articles that have been tagged for 1-2 months then I think we can safely say the backlog is gone. Category:Category needed for instance isn't tagged as backlogged with two month categories outstanding. Hut 8.5 19:03, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree with the above, if, roughly speaking, almost every tagged unsourced BLP is at a deletion process and just awaiting the natural flow of that process, plus or minus a week or two, we've hit the milestone that's always been in my own mind. We are still a fair ways from that point, and most recently we've only been making progress on approaching that point because of a separate new effort to identify non-notable articles in the backlog and send them to deletion. Even with that effort, at current cleanup rates we're still months away from that goal line unless additional help is brought to bear. --joe decker^{talk to me} 19:13, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Re: additional help, I was thinking about getting people to sign up to pledge to handle n articles from the backlog. When a pledge total of x articles had been reached (edit: or, more likely, after y days) the whole scheme would kick in and you'd find out what your articles were. I think it might make a nice publicity stunt and I reckon 80% would follow through on their pledge, despite the fact that most people would feel more comfortable pledging than actually dealing with articles. Think, um, Blue Peter bottletop appeal, or some sort of telethon, I suppose. Just an idea, anyway. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 19:29, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Already been tried, though there X was rather too high for most people. Hut 8.5 19:53, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Slightly different; really, the minimum required n was too high. Here, I envisage more 100-200 editors (though it would work with 50) pledging 5-10 articles each, thus referencing (or nominating for deletion) 500-2000 articles in one fell swoop. 5-10 articles is a number a lot of people could commit to, I think. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 12:42, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/Pledgathon is what I was imagining. Currently a low "first pledgathon" target. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 21:41, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

The big red button is broken

I don't know if it's temporary or what, but it's giving a PHP error, headers already sent. Gigs (talk) 15:42, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

From experience, that will need Erwin to fix it. Has anyone messaged him? - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 18:03, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

It's working again.--Michig (talk) 15:49, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Milestone

As of today, every article which was tagged "unsourced BLP" before March 18, 2010 (the mark of the BLPPROD era) has now been sourced, deleted, or is currently PROD'd or the subject of a current deletion discussion. The vast majority of the fifty thousand articles involved had one or more sources added to them.

While we've discovered more articles, created before that date but not tagged as of that date since, I still think this is quite a milestone. Congratulations to everyone who has helped us reach that, we are still, slowly but surely, closing in on the day where there isn't a backlog of unreferenced BLPs at all. --joe decker^{talk to me} 17:57, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

That's not quite true. There are plenty of articles (100+) which were tagged as of March 18 where the tag was removed but subsequently readded. There's a list of most of them here if anyone wants to work on it. Hut 8.5 15:22, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I will take a look. I'll actually sort through and address them all, based on a review of the first ten or so, around half of them aren't actually unsourced BLPs. --joe decker^{talk to me} 01:47, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

• Huge milestone! All those weeping over BLPs in January 2010 mostly didn't do crap to fix the problem, a relatively small group has. Bravo! (Subsequently re-added doesn't count in my book!!!111).--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 02:33, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Couldn't agree more, but I'm gonna work through that list anyhow. Because I'm just that kinda guy.  :) --joe decker^{talk to me} 02:35, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

What our oldest URBLPs look like Redux, the last ten of the first million

There are only 10 BLPs left of the first million Wikipedia articles (as judged by article ID #, which is roughly correct.). There is a popular conception that the oldest ones are the most intractable, but that often proves, in my experience, not to be the case. I haven't looked at any of these ten, much as we did with the last ten of the first half-million, let's see how tough these are.

If these are anything like what I usually find, you will notice that many of them, despite 2004 creation dates, were only tagged as unreferenced BLPs quite recently. Let's go see!

• Riley Darnell 907060 -- had an external link of the official site (he was Tennessee Sec/State), which via wayback machine was enough to WP:V his position, there's more available via Gbooks [4] pretty easily as well
• Michael E. Ward 912374 - relatively easily sourced via GN Archives
• Alberto Romulo 913208 - easily sourced Gbooks
• Chuck Curran 935049 - relatively easily sourced via GN Archives
• Todd Terry 938257 - Michig added a bunch of sources
• Paul Bailey 938743 - now largely (and fairly easily) sourced (--Michig (talk) 20:01, 4 July 2011 (UTC))
• Jeff Sagarin 938917 - This already had a valid New York Times reference
• Mike Shoemaker 947757 - easily sourced via Gbooks/Gnews with the name and the word Ohio
• Partawi Shah 986258 - redirected to duplicate article
• Stirling Gallacher 990765 - now partially sourced (--Michig (talk) 20:38, 4 July 2011 (UTC))

Enjoy! --joe decker^{talk to me} 21:48, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

And we are all done! The-Pope (talk) 23:49, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Woot! One more snuck back onto the list while this was ongoing, but I cleaned him up too, the lowest article iD now unsourced (as of a minute ago) is over 1M. --joe decker^{talk to me} 03:48, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Total under 3,000

The total just dipped under 3,000. Looks like we might get there some time in August.--Michig (talk) 17:22, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Another small milestone: we now have more articles tagged in 2011 than 2010 (even if you exclude articles tagged for deletion). Hut 8.5 18:40, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Guidenace on what constitutes unreferenced

Hi, looking at Joel Goodness which popped up on my radar whilst asessing Theatre Project articles, I would like some guidance on what constitutes "unreferenced". The article has three ELs, one to IMDb, one to IBDb and one to a wiki. The first two may be acceptable for casting details, and the wiki for nothing. So should this be categorised as "unreferenced" or "needs reference improving"? Jezhotwells (talk) 14:30, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

• "BLP IMDB refimprove" is a good tag to use in a case like that. If you can find any articles about the subject in a quick google news search, I'll usually add that as well (I see some mentioning him here, but no profile pieces).--Milowent • ^talkblp-r 15:08, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
• I would categorise that as unreferenced since none of the sources counts as reliable. If one of them was reliable then I would tag it as needing more references. Hut 8.5 15:19, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

IMD may be a reliable source. short conversation here Talk:Internet_Movie_Database#Reliable.3F. I did not find a discusion on it at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, for broad topics like is the movie published, who was in it, I generally consider it to be a WP:RS. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 15:36, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Take a look at WP:IMDB--Jac16888 ^Talk 15:46, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

There are several general advice pages that advise against using it as a source [5][6][7] and many discussions at the reliable sources noticeboard that are generally negative (some more recent examples: [8] [9]) Hut 8.5 15:58, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I added the {{BLP IMDB refimprove}} tag,I didn't know that one. Jezhotwells (talk) 01:06, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Categories gone all wonky?

Something seems to have happened to the Unreferenced BLP categories yesterday. For example, Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada/Unreferenced BLPs now includes former prime minister Jean Chrétien and union leader Buzz Hargrove. While these could certainly be better referenced, they're certainly not unreferenced! Does anyone know what's up? Pburka (talk) 23:25, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

It has something to do with the "unsourced section" template. There's some discussion here. Zagalejo^^^ 23:31, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Dutch politicians

There seem to be quite a few unreferenced BLPs right now of the form "XXX is a (former) Dutch politician." Are there any Dutch speaking editors who can get through these quickly? It seems like they're mostly pretty easy to source, but the effort of translating pages to English is fairly cumbersome for a non-Dutch speaker. Pburka (talk) 23:28, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Wow, that doesn't sound like it includes a claim of notability. Sadly, I can't actually recommend A7'ing them, but .... --joe decker^{talk to me} 21:01, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

Let's finish this off!

With fewer than two hundred unreferenced BLPs (not counting those currently in a deletion process), it's time to finish this off. Come on, lend a hand, and lets all push this thing through the finish line together! --joe decker^{talk to me} 13:57, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

• Any idea what the rate of additions to the list is? I suspect we're rapidly approaching the steady state. Pburka (talk) 15:23, 27 September 2011 (UTC)
  • I'm not sure how many things get added a day, a lot of times new additions have come in lumps, but I'm guessing it's a couple dozen a day or so on average, much fewer most days, a lot more now and then. In terms of where that leaves us, I think we could push this to the point where there were only 50-75 articles on the Big Red Button, essentially all of them at a deletion process. (Those that aren't can either be sourced or sent to a deletion process, very very very few really take "days" to decide.) So how many are at deletion at any moment? Typical right now is 140 plus or minus 10 articles at deletion. That's amazingly constant. Most of those are at BLPPROD, and many of those could be sourced and are notable, but there will always be the handful of non-notable-at-PROD/BLPPROD, plus any of our articles at AfD and articles at copyright investigation. I'm guessing that at a steady state, that's 50-75 articles
  • You can tell that many BLPPRODs do get sourced, by the way, BLPPROD does get people to add sources to articles. Check the categories for proposed deletion by days left, you can see the falloff as people work that queue as well. --joe decker^{talk to me} 15:40, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

Previous months have reached around 300 unless MrZBot or Suncreator (or others) went on a "BLP conversion" run, so it's about 10/day - but that 300 would include the 100 or so BLPPRODs, so maybe it's less -but this is also the "net remainder at the end of each month, so it doesn't count the many that get tagged and untagged/deleted/retagged within a month. The-Pope (talk) 15:51, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

It is my pleasure to report

That, at least as of a few minutes ago, the encyclopedia had no BLPs marked unreferenced, save for those in a deletion or copyright investigation. As a result, I believe we have now reached "steady state." --joe decker^{talk to me} 17:11, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Almost. We had a couple of users fix some deprecated parameters, which has led to a few more surfacing. However, that should be the last major push. I've been helping out trying to BLPPROD eligible articles and tag anything that's totally irretrievable for speedy deletion; we were up to about 200, but it's steadily coming back down again. One last push ought to do it. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 20:18, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

The "backlog elimination" task was completed in September, but we all know that we will always have both new UBLPs and old discoveries, so there will always be a little bit of work to do. I think I'll start merging WP:URBLPR to a sub page of here, and rewrite both pages to reflect the maintenance side of things, rather than the "IT'S A HUGE PROBLEM" approach. The-Pope (talk) 02:21, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

The new ones are a lot easier to handle, as the NPP types like myself can just BLPPROD them (or if we know something about them, we'll reference them; I have done this on occasion), it's the recent spate of older ones that are tougher to handle. The 60-70 that just came up were because a couple users fixed a few deprecated parameters in templates; now that's done, and most of those articles are being dealt with in some way (though a few do still need attention). We probably won't have influxes of older articles that large again. It's not such a huge problem now, and I think reframing it will really help to get more people involved. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:40, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

I remember thinking about 4 or 5 times now "We probably won't have influxes of older articles that large again"! And the latest one was tiny compared to some of SunCreators and MrZBot's work in switching unref to BLPunref. In the final days of the UBLP backlog elimination we found a few hundred unreferenced "translated from other wikis" articles. I'm expecting that we'll get a batch of 50-200 every month or so when sometime finds a new search method/bug/etc. Also, in case it isn't clear, your NPP work is greatly appreciated around here, as it helped to keep most of our work focused on older articles, not newer ones. The-Pope (talk) 05:44, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

If your looking for new unreferenced BLP add User:AlexNewArtBot/URBLPNTSearchResult to your watchlist and manually(as some false positives) check thought the list when it updates. Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 15:38, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

• I do hate that BLP PROD results in the deletion of notable people if no one catches it in time and adds a reference. I've noticed that a fair amount of the new BLPs added for this month that are unreferenced are actually about notable people. Silverseren^C 05:55, 8 October 2011 (UTC)
  • If they are really notable, someone will recreate it sometime. Wiki-darwinism works in the long run, even if we short change some subjects in the short run. Gigs (talk) 01:57, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
    • I do think BLPPROD shouldn't be used on some cases though, which are already community known to be notable, such as professional sports players. Silverseren^C 03:42, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
      • The chances of something slipping through the cracks are MUCH lower if the tagger also ensures that it is categorised properly (or tags it as uncategorised too, to let a catgnome do their work) and also allocated to relevant wikiproject(s). If it's a bare bones article with no cats and no projects, then yes, it can easily be missed and lost. We shouldn't EVER be confusing the BLPPROD rules with notability rules - they are 100% separate and should not be linked at all. If people are truly notable, then it is normally easy to find appropriate cats or projects and hence other people interested in the topic can find the article. The-Pope (talk) 04:27, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
        • Yeah. In particular, BLPPROD grew out of WP:V, WP:BLP, and perhaps WP:NPOV, rather than WP:N. I would suggest that it is not too hard to add a source for anyone who is truly notable, and that anyone who actually cares about saving notable but BLPPRODed bios has a very simple path towards doing so. I do think that extremely notable people are probably better just dealt with than BLPPRODed, but IMHO that's the exception, not the rule.
        • I'd add that I don't actually particularly *enjoy* BLPPRODs, I do think they're a sad necessary even if you want to honor the community mandate that BLPs have at least the most trivial sourcing. I believe that better methods could be used to honor that mandate with some work, for example, the community-supported but pocket-vetoed WP:ACTRIAL would have, IMHO, helped enormously--and I believe a better solution would involve a better way of communicating and enforcing community requirements on biographies at creation time, through whatever mechanism. The more an author gets feedback that there's a problem with their article before they hit save, the fewer articles we're going to have to triage through deletion processes. --joe decker^{talk to me} 18:18, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Moving Forward

Mark historical? Retool for maintenance mode? Retool to expand to blp refimprove? Where do we want to go with this page? Gigs (talk) 15:24, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

There are some 55,000 partially sourced BLPs. 1,700+ of which are sourced only by IMdb, so we could start munching through those. I'm sure there are many more BLPs supported only by external links (official sites, social media etc), but going through IMDb sourced only BLPs is a good place to start. Mattg82 (talk) 22:06, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

you'll have to work quickly, the IMDb template is up for deletion The-Pope (talk) 00:35, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

I've saved the list of pages marked with the template to my computer and I'll post it in my userspace if the template gets deleted. We could start work on poorly sourced BLPs instead but to be honest it wouldn't be a very efficient method of catching BLP violations. Hut 8.5 09:58, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

FWIW, my vote is to mark this page historical with a note at the top explaining what this was about and what we accomplished, and to put further efforts under a new project. Gigs (talk) 15:19, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

The way to move forward is definitely to have a shot at all those blp refimproves (many of which were actually produced by this project, by partially sourcing previously unreferenced BLPs). Whether it is the same project or a new one - it is less important. GregorB (talk) 14:36, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:HighBeam

Wikipedia:HighBeam describes a limited opportunity for Wikipedia editors to have access to HighBeam Research.
—Wavelength (talk) 16:15, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

GAH! Revive?

Over at http://wikipediocracy.com/2012/08/08/fame-without-proof-on-wikipedia/ , they're SHOCK! HORROR! noticing the project. Shall WP:URBLP be revived, if only to put it to bed again ASAP? (I personally don't think any project should ever be declared defunct, just resting, pining for the fjords). --Lexein (talk) 18:19, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Heh. Yeah. In addition to some missing-the-point, there are some fair criticisms and concerns as well. I'm sensitive to the point that adding one reference and moving on does little to completely reference an article, and given that I spent eighteen months doing nearly nothing but that, well, it's probably fair for me to criticize the practice, as well as defend it. Still, I felt the effort put some eyeballs on some of those articles. I do feel that some good got done. And there are certainly a number of old BLP issues that I found in my work at URBLP/URBLPR that probably wouldn't have been addressed without that effort. Whatever, it is what it is.

i'm deeply sympathetic to their concerns about promotional content, we have no effective solution for dealing with that flood, and that's a pity.

A couple related comments for the unreferenced BLP crowd:

At present, the biggest lump of unreferenced biographies is a group of about 1150 which hopefully can be largely addressed with a BRFA that's sitting around waiting for discussion to begin.

More critically, I still feel that we need better tracking of new incoming BLPs and better ways of improving guidance to new editors that references are required for such things--nothing in the new redesign of the edit screen spends a word on the topic, and I think that's a pity. The problem is at the article creation end of things, we start having problems of WP:BITE and additional workload the moment we let it linger any longer. The failure of Wikipedia to find ways to structurally improve the situation makes me less enthused about grunting through new articles that demonstrably don't meet the standards we theoretically demand. --j⚛e decker^talk 18:36, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

I get your points, and the multiple problems with Wikipedia which can't all be addressed by one project like this. I do understand that a few editors did a massive amount of heavy lifting to reduce the backlog. I'd like to hear about what was learned in the process, and of any tools and/or techniques which were developed along the way. Perhaps in a subpage called /Pass_1_lessons_learned.

My difficulty in this particular case is with the notion of calling the project defunct AND inactive, when the project has no stated year of activity, termination date, or termination criterion in its title or first paragraph, and when it is known that the need for such cleanup will always be with us, for reasons beyond our control.

"Defunct and inactive" is discouraging and unhelpful, and IMHO sends a bad message to Wikipedia skeptics (and partisans!).

The phrases "Maintenance-level activity" or "reduced-pace activity" might be helpful, and even encouraging.

In the meantime, can I get an 'amen' to reactivating the Big Red Button? That's a beautiful and automatic tool which helps any editor who wants to add a source to something, to get to work without having to wade through categories.

I wouldn't be averse to strengthening the goals, such as "add multiple reliable sources to BLPs", in the first paragraph. I mean, who reads only the lead paragraph? Lots of people. --Lexein (talk) 19:37, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I don't think that article is very informed. The count of unreferenced BLPs is inflated considerably by the fact that all articles with BLP PROD tags on are automatically included. Since these articles are guaranteed to exit the category for one reason or another in ten days or less they don't really count. At the moment we only have 127 unsourced BLPs which aren't tagged for some sort of deletion. None of these articles have been tagged for longer than about a month, so it isn't like we aren't dealing with the problem. The author seems to have been a bit desperate in their search for examples, as one was deleted over a week before the piece was even published. Given Kohs' history I find it somewhat ironic that he is complaining about us hosting promotional content.

I suppose we could reopen the project, if for no other reason than to co-ordinate the work that is still being done. But I don't think we should look on it as being particularly important. The number of BLP violations that I caught by referencing these pages is tiny (at least on the occasions when I wasn't actively looking for them), and having a reference doesn't say anything about the presence of BLP violations, as plenty of people recognised. Hut 8.5 19:40, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Actually, there are around 1100 unreferenced or essentially unreferenced biographies I know about, most of them just aren't tagged yet, most of them appear to have a ref that fails verification. Nobody's working on most of them, near as I can tell, and as they were created by an autopatrolled user, so they were all exempt from WP:NPP. I do think that there's some hope of getting those automatically dealt with, but i'm actually quite concerned the the London Olympics profiles will go away before BRFA completes its process. In which case, it might be time for a little BLPPROD love. --j⚛e decker^talk 20:07, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

I imagine it ought to be possible to source them (or the vast majority of them) even without the bot. I found recent Olympic athletes were very easy to source before, and a few picked at random from your list had sources readily available. Hut 8.5 20:57, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

You are welcome to help out. I've provided the list. It's pretty easy, save for the fact that around 7-8% of them have the name wrong. I should have a new version of the list up in an hour or three, I'm rerunning it to account for a couple database templates that are source-equivalents. --j⚛e decker^talk 21:00, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

PROTIP: The search engine at london2012.com already doesn't work for the Summer 2012 athletes, but if you go to their profile pages, which are still live, you'll be able to search from there. E.g., here. --j⚛e decker^talk 21:08, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

I just tried searching from the main page and it seems to work on the couple of samples I tried. The search result brings up a mini-profile for the athlete along with any other results. Clicking on the mini-profile brings up the full profile. -- Whpq (talk) 21:14, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, apparently I'm full of it.  :) Sorry about that! It may be that I tested it on one of the examples in which the name I had was slightly wrong. Thanks for the data! --j⚛e decker^talk 21:18, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

I think I see what happened now. If you go tot he site now, the homepage redirects to http://www.london2012.com/paralympics/ and the front page search only searches the Paralympics (e.g. http://www.london2012.com/paralympics/search/index.htmx?q=Amy+ATkinson. But if you chop out the "/paralympics" out of the URL, you get http://www.london2012.com/search/index.htmx?q=Amy+ATkinson which does bring up search results. I've also found though, that webcitation.org reports a page not found when trying to take an archival copy of the athlete's profile page. Note that it isn't being reported as "nocache". Odd. -- Whpq (talk) 11:55, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

I might just take up that challenge too. I've worked on several sports bios including creating some. I've found that the IAAF has a pretty good database which helps confirm basic athletic information. Although off-topic for Summer Olympics work, I've also found the FIS has a pretty decent database to support sourcing of skiers. -- Whpq (talk) 21:09, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, there are *lots* of good solid places to reference most of them. I'm just a little frustrated by what seem like innumerable roadblocks I've encountered trying to deal with them the last couple weeks. Any help appreciated. --j⚛e decker^talk 21:11, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

BBC Sport [10] seem to have a profile of every athlete. Don't know if it's possible for a bot to grab information from that. Hut 8.5 21:52, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

In most cases, probably yes. If BAG permits, of course. --j⚛e decker^talk 21:53, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

List updated. --j⚛e decker^talk 22:02, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Is it permissible to mark off the ones that have been referenced on your list or do you need that format untouched? -- Whpq (talk) 11:55, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Oh, if it's helpful, mark away! I'll replace it whenever I rerun the scan if that's okay, but it's just cut-and-pasted from shell output. --j⚛e decker^talk 03:35, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Boldly

I didn't hear any screams of Noooo! (my 2nd comment above got no love, snif) so I boldly reactivated the project, slightly copyedited. The appearance of a dead project with a non-zero todo list, which is currently actively linked to by WP skeptics, just bugged me. Revert if you will, I won't re-revert. I fixed one BLP Calle Kristiansson pretty well, by the way, though I still feel it needs a ref for his birthdate, so it's still {{refimprove}}. --Lexein (talk) 22:46, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Can't hurt. I'm pretty sure there's still a fair bit of unreferenced but not tagged stuff out (not counting the stub pile I was whining about). Perhaps this will pull a few extra hands. --j⚛e decker^talk 23:51, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

And heck, if people run out of bios, there's always "BLPs sourced only to IMDB", or the like. --j⚛e decker^talk 23:53, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Despite some social networkers equating talk page usage to how active a project is, some of us are still using the tools/lists/bots that this project developed to reference BLPs, regardless of the heading on the project page. We probably should get around to alligning/merging WP:URBLP and WP:URBLPR, making sure it is as clear and informative as possible (especially in the opening paragraphs) and link it from as many other cleanup project pages as possible. The-Pope (talk) 00:00, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Olympic Athlete list

I see that the list has undergone some updates which include bot testing. Is the bot going to be approved to clean all these up? Should I continue doing any more manual edits? -- Whpq (talk) 20:51, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

I can't be sure, but I'd guess they'll approve my continuing with the run, although it may take a week or so for BAG to review the trial information, they seem backlogged. This won't solve everything: At best the bot will clear 70-80% or so of the remaining list, there's enough name mismatches that will have to be done by hand that I'd say there will be some hand-based work.

If you'd like to review the contributions from the bot (and you might also check my own contributions about the same time, to see which ones I had to deal with manually), and comment on the BRFA, that might provide some data to BAG that would assist them in their determination.  ;-)

To answer your question: It might be best to wait until the bot has had a chance to run on what it can do effectively before pushing more there by hand.

(If you do want to push ahead, I'd focus on names with diacritics (still working on the matching logic to improve matches there) and Chinese & Korean names (were often there's a disconnect as to which part of a name should go first, Foo Bar, vs. Bar Foo), my code it too cautious (or unintelligent) to handle that case.) --j⚛e decker^talk 21:13, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

It appears that your bot has been approved. I'll wait until the bot has cleared what it can. I'll pitch in to deal with the one's requiring manual edits after the bot is done. Just leave a note here when the bot runs are complete and I (and I'm sure others) will see the note and spring into action.-- Whpq (talk) 21:31, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Man, that was quick! I'll probably have it run through 50 or so in the next little spurt, and may post a list of the ones it passes on for manual attention, if I do get that list, I can post it here. (If it's really short I'll just handle it myself.) Then I'll repeat, larger chunks as I get more confident that the code isn't going to suddenly explode and delete every species of aardvark or something. --j⚛e decker^talk 21:54, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Okay, I ran through 50, it kicked out about 4 that could use eyes, marked GOFIX at [11]. I'm going to spend some time checking the bunch it did by itself, if someone can pick up those four. I also welcome any feedback on its edits. Also, for the bot edits, keep an eye out for common names that might be shared by multiple athletes, I checked "Paul Williams (sprinter) " for just that reason. --j⚛e decker^talk 22:29, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Will probably attempt another run of about the same size or a little larger in a half-hour or so. Actually, just starting, and I expect the fixes I've made in-between should pick up the 3-4 it passed over last time, so probably nothing to do until at least the next batch is complete. --j⚛e decker^talk 22:38, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

Manual To Do List moved to here, up to 36 items for manual attention

That's my last run for tonight, so any manual assistance on those twelve would be very helpful. I think we've knocked off Athletes and Basketball players just in those two spurts, and I'll increase the batch size again in the morning and run. Thanks! --j⚛e decker^talk 00:00, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

I've fixed these. The only thing that caught my eye was that your bot identified Mohamed Ramadan (boxer) as being weightlifter Nahla Ramadan Mohamed when actually he should be Mohamed Eliwa. One athlete in the list actually has two profiles [12][13]. Hut 8.5 12:21, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Hut, you are awesomely fast. I did a couple last night. I tried to start in the morning and got an edit conflict with you. And now you are done! -- Whpq (talk) 13:13, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Oooh, good catch on Nahla, one of the reasons I was hesitant to allow partial matches to be automatically applied was an increased risk of errors like that. Oh, and fascinating (about Anime).... very cool. I'll start up a new run here.  :) --j⚛e decker^talk 14:41, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

I've reloaded the manual to do page, this time I caught a half a dozen or so articles in the group with no refs at all in addition to 30-some with the "london" ref, in at least the first case it's because someone had removed the "useless" ref. I want to look through the automatic results a bit more and make a very quick update to the accent table, but I'll probably add another group in an hour or so. --j⚛e decker^talk 15:23, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Manual list updated, I think I've finished most if not all of what the bot was able to do itself. W00t.  :) --j⚛e decker^talk 05:23, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

For yucks, I had the code do a read-only pass over the Paralympian articles, but there was not much work to do, I just cleaned up a handful of missing BLP categories is all. --j⚛e decker^talk 16:46, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Disambguators

In doing the list at User:Joe Decker/olybatch1, I blew past Fernanda da Silva as it looked like somebody else had already referenced and expanded the article. I backtracked after seeing Diana Garcia who is a poet and clearly not an Olympic athlete. Fernanda da Silva fooled me because she is a handballer and so the bio looks like a typical athlete bio. Fernanda da Silva (cyclist) appears to be the article that needs work. Can the list be regenerated with disambiguators so we can be sure we grab the right artcile? -- Whpq (talk) 13:25, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, it'll take a bit, but it's not hard. Sorry about that! --j⚛e decker^talk 15:03, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Okay, I've started a traverse, and I've got the first 20 or so back and there. I'll update it later today with the rest of the results once I have them. --j⚛e decker^talk 19:57, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

 Done --j⚛e decker^talk 22:29, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Purpose of this board

Question: does the scope of this project include only those articles which are completely unreferenced, or does it also include those with minimal sourcing that doesn't cover all of the information included? I'm looking for some help on an article that's in the latter camp, but if this isn't the place, just let me know. Cheers, WWB Too (Talk · COI) 14:35, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

If an article has references that support some of the content then it isn't unreferenced. (You might find that someone here is prepared to help you anyway.) Hut 8.5 14:56, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, makes sense. Just in case there is, the article is David Marchick, I've explained the article's problems in a note on the Talk page, and have prepared a new replacement draft currently in user space. I want to avoid making direct edits, because it's on behalf of Mr. Marchick's employer. I've had trouble getting a reply, even after adding a {{request edit}} template, so I hope someone here is interested. WWB Too (Talk · COI) 16:13, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Just following up here to say the request has been answered. WWB Too (Talk · COI) 15:38, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

BLP unsourced tag

I come seeking clarification.

Is the {{BLP unsourced}} maintenance tag for:

• A) BLP articles with no references, sources or external links of any kind.

OR

• B) BLP article with one or more sources or external links, but no inline citations.

I know it is for A) but I have read different things about whether it applies to B). Ever since I replaced the tag with {{BLP sources}} on an article with only a single external link, and someone reverted it and told me I was wrong, I have beileved that both A) and B) are correct. But just now when I was looking for something else, I found a number of discussions on the tag's talk page saying that infact the tag only applies to A) and it shouldn't be applied to B) - and the tag category is backlogged because the majority of article are incorrectly tagged.

What I want to know is, which is correct. And I also want the answer put in big letters on template documentation so that everyone knows what the answer is one way or another. -- Patchy1 07:47, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Never option B) unless the external links are generic links not confirming anything about the article subject - ie, an external link to a faculty/club/stats site that is specifically about the person IS a reference and should have the BLP sources tag; whereas an external link to just the university/club website home page is not a reference and the BLP unreferenced is acceptable. If there are no inline citations then {{No footnotes}} is the best tag to use. The cat blows out to a few hundred normally after a bot run that converts unreferenced to BLP unreferenced, without checking if the unreferenced tag is correctly applied or not. In terms of wikipedia backlogs, it is very small either way.The-Pope (talk) 08:16, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Indeed. (I will admit, although not proudly, to using (B) occasionally when the "sources" have been horribly unreliable.) --j⚛e decker^talk 20:44, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

To give an example, I probably wouldn't have made this change. While not explicitly listed as a source or reference, a link to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to a paper someone has published is a fairly reliable source that the person is a, say, a scientist. It's not a reference that tells you much, but it certainly says something. Like, "has been published in the PNAS.", and PNAS is certainly reliable. --j⚛e decker^talk 22:04, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Ok sure. So what you are both saying is it doesn't apply to B) unless the link is generic or rubbish, is that right? So by that the majority of articles tagged with {{BLP unsourced}} are incorrectly tagged, and the tag should be replaced with {{BLP sources}} and/or {{no footnotes}}? Is this your opinions on what it should be used for or is there some relevant policy as to what is considered sourced and unsourced, if there isn't, should there be, because it sounds pretty ambiguous, inconsistent and confusing from what I have read. -- Patchy1 00:43, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

(I'm not saying I think what either of you have said is ambiguous, inconsistent and confusing - just to clarify -- Patchy1 00:46, 20 December 2012 (UTC))

To me it ask comes back to common English. Unreferenced means without references, not without proper citations, not without inline citations, not even without reliable references, but that last point is still questionable. Last night I switched a bunch of NFL players that were tagged with {{BLP unsourced}} and replaced it with {{BLP sources}} and {{no footnotes}} if there was a valid link to that players stats on NFL.com or similar. We really need to just apply the most relevant tags, not the highest profile ones. But until we get acceptance of a clear set of tags for no references, unreliable references, more references, we will be stuck with this grey area for some articles, like that academic (which is why I like to stick to sports people). The-Pope (talk) 01:18, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

I think we need a definitive hierarchy of tags, with clear guidelines on what goes where. For the purpose of this example 'sources' means anything backing up the articles content from books to websites, regardless of where it is in the article. I was thinking, in this order:

• {{Prod BLP}} - existing process
• {{BLP unsourced}} - no sources whatsoever
• {{BLP unreliable sources}} - sources are generic or rubbish (or just delete the sources, but this might be troublesome as the next step would be BLPPROD, and some people may disagree about the quality with the sources and argue the source was only removed to allow BLPPROD to be allowed)
• {{BLP single source}} - one source
• {{BLP no footnotes}} - no inline citations
• {{BLP single source/no footnotes}} - one source, not an inline citation
• {{BLP IMDb-only refimprove}} - only source is IMDb (I also propose we deprecate {{BLP IMDb refimprove}})
• {{BLP selfpublished}}/{{BLP primary sources}} - only source is website/blog etc of subject
• {{BLP sources}} - if none of the above apply and there is enough content in the article or unverified statements to warrant more sources being needed.

I think more specific maintenance tags with their own categories makes the job of fixing the problems and clearing the categories much easier as the milestones are smaller - if that makes sense. Oh well thats my idea and it looks good to me, I would be interested to know what others think. -- Patchy1 11:17, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure I have included all of the existing BLP tags, let me know if there are others I have missed. -- Patchy1 11:18, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

{{BLP sources}} now includes a |reason= parameter, to add a bit of explanatory text, for example Blogs are low quality sources, please use WP:RS. This may address the need for some of the above explicit templates. --Lexein (talk) 11:28, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Hmm I see, that won't categorize different problem though, which is a big driver for me. -- Patchy1 11:52, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

• My 2p - the 'BLP unsourced' tag is for just that i.e. unsourced articles. If an article has a source, whether that is inline or as an external link, then the tag should not be used. GiantSnowman 20:36, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

  There's an argument both ways, but I worry that this muddles editor's already muddled understanding of the difference between an external link (e.g., IMDB, official home page link) and what we would normally consider a source. Perhaps that battle has already been lost. --j⚛e decker^talk 16:39, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

  I do not consider somebody's official website as a source. IMDB / similar database (dependent on profession) would be OK, and {{BLP sources}} should be used instead. GiantSnowman 16:49, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

  Or {{BLP IMDB refimprove}}, yeah. Fair enough. --j⚛e decker^talk 18:56, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Citations on Wikipedia and discussion at meta:WebCite

There is a discussion at meta:WebCite regarding citations on Wikipedia that may be of interest to the members of WP:URBLP and others that reference our BLP articles. For those who don't know, webcitation.org is used to archive newspaper articles and other reliable sources that disappear from the original websites. Wikipedia currently has 182,368 links to this archive site. Regards. 64.40.54.47 (talk) 11:30, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

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Just seeking a wider range of input from informed persons at Template_talk:Height#rfc_97AACED.--Gibson Flying V (talk) 01:22, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

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Someone needs to fix the links to toolserver to point to where they've been migrated. George8211 / T 11:02, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal

Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:48, 1 October 2014 (UTC)