Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Docu (talk | contribs) at 08:39, 13 May 2007 (→Question). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Old talk: Archive 1 (This archive is incomplete due to page blanking - see also the archive page history), Archive 2

Please note: This is not a typical category! Read the archived discussion and reasons for its existence before complaining about the "point" of having this new, administrative-style category.

This category was nominated for renaming on 2006 January 23. The result of the discussion was no consensus to rename. An archived record of this discussion can be found on this log page.

This category was nominated for deletion on 2006 January 19. The result of the discussion was keep per edict of Jimbo Wales. A longer version of this decision can be found here. The original discussion is recorded below.

Biography Category‑class

This category is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Misplaced Pages's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography Category This category does not require a rating on Misplaced Pages's content assessment scale.

CfD debate

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the category above. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section of this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result was Kept through an edict from Jimbo. - Haukur 20:56, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Note from Jimbo: This category is desperately needed to deal with a growing problem. Misplaced Pages:Biographies of living persons is an attempt to deal with the problem, but in order for that policy to be effective, we need a convenient way for people who are interested in this topic to systematically go through vetting these articles. I am flexible on the title and structure of the category, of course, but I believe that CfD is not appropriate.--Jimbo Wales 15:36, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Second Note from Jimbo: Let me be clear about this. This category is desperately needed and is not optional. I am willing to impose it from top down if necessary. I am flexible as to the title and structure of this category, but CfD is not appropriate.--Jimbo Wales 20:01, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Third Note from Jimbo: This AfD is closed. Take it to the talk page.

(adding back the comments/wangi 20:54, 19 January 2006 (UTC))

• Delete L-O-L. Michael Jackson, Mustafa Sandal and Brian Curtin, who knew? --CDN99 15:03, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Comment Danny and Jimbo have created this category for the purpose of a project to improve and monitor biographies of living persons. Further information is to be provided on the mailing list; I will update the discussion with a link when I have it. Demi /_C 15:10, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
  • An announcement has been made. Demi /_C 15:24, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. It's a good idea. SlimVirgin 15:30, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Comment. This category will, if updated accordingly, contain tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of articles. Who will ever have the time to go through them? No vote. JIP | Talk 15:33, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Comment: What about implementing a Special page that lists all articles with a birth date category, but not a death date category? This would effectively be the same as a "Living People" category (after fixing articles that mistakenly omit a death category). Carbonite | Talk 15:35, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

  There really isn't a simple way to accomplish what you've requested. It would basically require some HUGE set operations (union of all years born - union of all years dead) and thus couldn't be made available via a special page. I can however perform this query offline, which will be good to tell people what to tag. --Gmaxwell 16:00, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

  Perhaps you could create a bot which finds articles which fulfill these criteria and adds them to Category:Living people. You can have it collect articles with a year of birth category for years higher than, say, 1890, and no year of death category. Somehow I think that using Category:Living people will be more maintainable in the long run but we can use the information we already have to jumpstart it. - Haukur 16:02, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

  I'm already on it, I'm halfway done, see here (caution 3mb list).. The problem is that all 64,000 must be checked by hand, because there are quite a few who look alive in their analysis because we don't know their year of death. If there weren't quite so many I'd make a semi-automated bot show me all the first paragraphs and let me say yes/no.. In any case, even if all these were added this would not be our largest category by a pretty reasonable margin. --Gmaxwell 16:46, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

  Wow! That was fast. And the page crashed my browser :) Now we just have to find out what we do with it. - Haukur 16:59, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

• Keep unless something better is suggested. There are a number of people whose year of birth is known but year of death unknown so I'm not quite sold on Carbonite's idea :) There are also a number of living people whose year of birth is not public information. - Haukur 15:44, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
  • If the year of death is unknown, let's create a "Year of death unknown" category. We could also have a "Year of birth unknown" category. The Special page would basically just select all articles where the person was born but hasn't died. This is a fairly simple SELECT query and the results could be cached to reduce server load. The majority of biographies are already tagged with birth and death categories, so it makes more sense to use the information we already have than to create a whole new category. Carbonite | Talk 15:50, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Because of the great many articles involved the query is actually fairly time consuming (although it is simple as you say). It took 4 minutes to generate. You're right about the need for the unknown deaths ... Gonna fix some of them? --Gmaxwell 16:59, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep It is an administrative category such as cleanup or unsourced images, and a *very* useful one at that. JIP, this category will be used by recent changes tools to flag edits to these articles for review and by edit filtering bots. So even if the category becomes huge, it will still remain useful. --Gmaxwell 15:53, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Conditional delete: I like Carbonite's second idea about a special page, this seems unmaintainable in its current format. Don't delete until proof-of-concept exists for the auto-categorization scheme, though. -- nae'blis _(talk) 15:57, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete—Yet another patch created for the sole purpose of obscuring the truth: that bureaucratic manipulation of a supposedly open editing system doesn't work. This category was created to hide the fact that the few people controlling content at Misplaced Pages can't keep up with the workload. By shifting our attention to living people, the premise is that dead people won't care as much if their biography is incorrect. This patchwork of obfuscation is coming apart at the seams. Misplaced Pages will work when everyone has equal power to police each other. Editors come in here assuming good faith that their contributions will be judged on content, not Misplaced Pages politics and hierarchy. Category patches like "Living people" just delay the inevitable outcome of lying to these editors. *Peace Inside 16:27, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

  It's not just that dead people "don't care as much". It's also that living people are much more likely to have enemies and trolls inserting libel into their articles. - Haukur 16:41, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

"Enemies and trolls" make up a small percentage of the total Misplaced Pages membership and have a relatively small voice when editors have equal power to police each other. Against the few content controllers in the current system, however, "enemies and trolls" are overwhelming. Also, I'm sure most people would agree that Misplaced Pages bureaucracy creates "enemies and trolls." *Peace Inside 17:15, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

• Keep Very practical solution to an evolving problem. Useful for verifying categories and facts of BLP.--FloNight 16:44, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Speey Keep. Requested by Jimbo. If someone doesn't like the idea, think of another one and implement that as well. Both can work together. — ₀₉₁₈ • 2006-01-19 17:01
• Delete, per Carbonite's reasoning above. If this a requirement then come up with a smart solution using the database and year born / year died dates. Speedy keep because Jimbo says so - oh please... Thanks/wangi 17:04, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

  Or even better: Misplaced Pages:Persondata. Thanks/wangi 17:18, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

• Delete It's just useless category clutter - useless because no one is going to monitor the contents effectively. If it becomes fully populated there will only be a known sensitive article on every other page or so, so they won't be easy to spot in a sea of unfamiliar names, unless you know which articles you are looking for, in which case you can use the search box. No-one has any significant knowledge about more than a fraction of the living people with articles, so clicking on names at random won't be very productive. I don't want to see a link that is such a waste of space on tens of thousands of articles (and it will be hundreds of thousands before long). If we want a useful tool for the stated purpose it should be called something like category:Previously vandalised biographies of living people. CalJW 17:10, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• delete this seems like a real kludge, and its adoption for short-term convenience encourages long-term sloppiness and clutter. the main purpose of categories ought to be to provide further links for readers interested in a general topic. this category is useless in that regard. on the other hand, it is useful to wikipedia editors -- as a type of database entry. perhaps a more elegant & useful solution would be to allow "invisible" database tags on articles. i suppose it's just a matter of aesthetics, but seeing "living people" at the bottom of the page just looks stupid to me -- so do birth/death cats though. why not just keep a list (or lists) of these ... that's about as easy as adding a category tag. Derex 17:26, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

  See Misplaced Pages:Persondata for those "invisible database tags on articles"... Ta/wangi 17:27, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Perfect! adding that template should be no harder than adding a "living persons" category. it's also more generically useful. then, living persons is trivial per carbonite. double-delete this silly category. Derex 17:35, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

This would only be useful for offline analysis, not for flagging recent changes.. for example. --Gmaxwell 18:56, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

• Delete I just saw this on Dubya's article and I thought it was some little kid's prank. I've read all the stuff, and it still seems like some kind of prank. It just has to go. Golfcam 17:51, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete Much too broad and silly. -- MisterHand 17:56, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, one of silliest categories I've seen. Pavel Vozenilek 19:00, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. To interprete Pavel's words in my way, "This category is a shit". - Darwinek 19:13, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, this is a silly idea that won't even accomplish what it's intended to do, it'll just create a big pointless category. I have no clue why Jimbo is involving himself. To deal with vandalism, get more RC patrollers. Radiant_>|< 19:24, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Comment: I reverted the deletion of these comments by Jimbo Wales, thanks/wangi 20:34, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Keep - I'm very warry that this will turn out to be a Bad Idea, but am willing to give it a chance if Jimbo thinks it should be given a chance. - TexasAndroid 20:10, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Comment. Jimbo, Jimbo. Older you are getting, more like führer you act. - Darwinek 20:15, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete We should not defer to Jimbo when he has a bad idea. This vote is our opportunity to correct his mistake. We should start a vote of no confidence if he doesn't relent. His role as a founder doesn't make him perpetual dictator. Misplaced Pages is a registered foundation and there must be laws which allow people to be removed if they are not acting in the interests of the foundation. Choalbaton 20:21, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment. Yeah and btw. imagine for example all thousands of living young sportspeople or actors under this category. This is really silly category, like "Right-handed people". - Darwinek 20:28, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete I agree with the others - this is a terrible idea! WhiteNight 20:33, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete There may be a problem that needs to be addressed, but there is zero chance this will address it effectively. Instead of telling us you are willing to be flexible, how about demonstrating that you are willing to be flexible by actually engaging with the objections and alternatives raised? This is idea is such an obvious dud and will be a massive waste of your time as well as other peoples' time. There could be a million articles in this category in a few years time. It just isn't going to identity sensitive articles in a useful way.Carina22 20:42, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the category's talk page (if any). No further edits should be made to this page.

Year of death missing

I seriously doubt anyone born in 1882 would be alive now. Should it be moved to maybe 1900 or 1920? —  $PЯINGrαgђ  Always loyal! 21:28, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

1920 is far too late; plenty of people born then or before are still with us. 1900 at the latest.--Brownlee 13:42, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

BTW, shouldn't the sentence read: "born before " ? --RCEberwein | Talk 01:15, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

No. Then the sentence would make even less sense. Heroicraptor 07:07, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Anyone that would be older than Jeanne Calment is likely to be dead (122 years and 164 days, i.e. born before 1883 in 2006).

When adding categories by bot, Category:Living people was only added to those born later than 1920, articles about people born between 1910 and 1920 (but not in one of the death categories) were checked after addition.

Category talk:Possibly living people discusses which articles to move to Category:Year of death missing. -- User:Docu —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Docu (talk • contribs) 13:41, 10 December 2006 (UTC).

If there's no news of a person's death

If a person in the living people category dies, but this is not reported in news media, they will remain in this category. Over time, there will be people who become very old for whom there is no recent news about. At what age should we move them to the possibly living people category, do you think?--HisSpaceResearch 14:34, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Change the rules!

I strongly suggest whoever decides Wikipedian policy ought to change the rules so that this category can be subcategorised in some circumstances. Misplaced Pages does not segregate any category into living and dead, but should do so for living supercentenarians as this shows the extremes of age. At present, there is a CFD on this category. Dovea 20:50, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

What is wrong with having living categories that are not sub-categories of this one? A category for living supercentenarians is inherently notable and if they're all also in this category I don't see what the problem is. Timrollpickering 01:24, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Bug in navigation bar

Has anybody else noticed the bug in the fairly new two-letter navigation bar? Even if you click on all twenty-six of them starting with one letter, you will not get all the people whose names start with that letter.

In fact, if you do that under the O's, there will be more than six hundred fifty people that are missed.

That's because both the space and the apostrophe (and any numbers and several other characters), plus all of the capital letters from A to Z as well, have Unicode numbers lower than the Unicode number of "a".

Shouldn't it be fixed so that the single letters are also links? Gene Nygaard 10:14, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Subjective

This is totally subjective though. How do you define when a person is "dead"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.96.249.63 (talk • contribs)

When they are no longer alive. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 19:20, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Undead report updated

Interiot updated the "undead.txt" report on the toolserver. It includes all articles tagged with a birth category but not a death category. As the update of toolserver data from en.wikipedia.org stopped with data from c. 19 January, 2007, articles categorized afterwards aren't included.

Some 6000 articles from the list for birth years 1910-2004 have already been added to Category:Living people.

Articles about people with earlier birth years (born 1909 or earlier), Category:Year_of_birth_unknown or Category:Year_of_birth_missing still need a category for the year of death, Category:Living people, Category:Possibly living people, Category:Year of death missing, Category:Disappeared people, etc. -- User:Docu

Just plain too long to ever be useful

I'd just like to make a point that's probably been made before, but here goes: every single article on Misplaced Pages is about a living person. Therefore, this category is entirely useless. I challenge you to find one article to prove me wrong.

--- I agree - I just saw this Category at the bottom of a page - this category is 100% useless to 99.99999% of the people that use the net - a category like "Architects", "Chefs", etc. have some purpose, and I can see the service it provides. I propose a new Category: "Human" -- Themepark

Additionally, I think we should keep in mind that the existence of a category implies that there should be a Misplaced Pages article about every single entity in that category, as per WP:CATRULE. Consider Category:Footballers, which currently lists everyone alive who has ever played the game. In the case of "living persons", however, I hope we can agree that the over 6 billion of us would single-handedly crash the servers, in addition to being boring to read.— Lenoxus 08:53, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Regarding your second point. Only if we have an article about the person (footballer or not). Garion96 (talk) 21:52, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Not true in the slightest — again, see CATRULE. ${\displaystyle \sim }$ Lenoxus " * " 02:53, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

It was late last night... Garion96 (talk) 05:49, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Heh, totally understandable -- that's when Mrs. O'Leary's cow is up to her tricks. You have no idea how often I've had the same thing happen (like with m:Friends of gays, had to read it twice). Peace! ;) ${\displaystyle \sim }$ Lenoxus " * " 16:25, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

I quote you in saying "every single article on Misplaced Pages is about a living person". If you can excuse me using WP:IAR and make a mild personal attack, that's possibly the most outrageously ridculous statement I've ever read on this website.-h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 20:27, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Missing

You need to add Martin Walsh to the list, as he is more "famous" than some others on the category page. Please comment back, if you add him to the list. Brylcreem2 17:17, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Question

From the page: "Organization: This category should not be sub-categorised. Entries are generally sorted by family name. As of 10 February 2007, there are 162,304 articles in this category."

It used to be that the total number of articles would be updated every month; this has not happened for a while. Any reason?--FeanorStar7 00:38, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

The tally takes more time and there didn't appear to be much demand. Anyways, I updated it and could update it once in a while. 200,000 is close. -- User:Docu

• Category-Class biography pages