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This is where I archive threads that are mainly about Wikipedia:Database reports/Living people on EN wiki who are dead on other wikis.

Death anomalies - the power of Signpost

The Slovene Wikipedia has also joined the project, as can be evidenced from my conversation with Merlissimo. Several members of the community have joined the project just after I've left a message at their Village pump today. The list is available at sl:Wikipedija:Biografije živečih oseb/Domnevno umrli. --Eleassar ^{my talk} 16:42, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Eleassar, that's good to hear - I hope you find it as useful as we are finding it on EN wiki. I've added you to the proposed signpost article, the next issue comes out next week so lets hope they can find space for it. ϢereSpielChequers 17:06, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Massive structure changes in many wikis because of a single bot script

I am very susprised of the consesquestes of the death anomalies table project. Data of some wikis could not be used for our project because articles in some languages had no born and death categories. Now fiwiki has started a community vote to introduce death and born cats only because of the profit my bot could give to the project. Since one week many people there are initially categorising every article about person. Today i have seen that ptwiki is also creating a death category tree but without any articles yet. Merlissimo 23:33, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Wow, who would have thought that this would have such repercussions! However as long as this is Wikis choosing to reorganise to participate in this then I think this is a big positive. Certainly there are lots of articles here on EN wiki and elsewhere that have been improved as a result of this project, and as more wikis join in there will be other anomalies we find here, and it would be great to have other wikis benefit as well. Can you give me links to the discussions on pt and fi as I think a signpost article may be in order. ϢereSpielChequers 00:20, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

• fiwiki: wikiproject/talk/vote
• ptwiki: talk/vote

I also added a new feature [1]. My bot is getting this data as byproduct while running the report scripts. Merlissimo 02:25, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks that's really useful, but you could probably make it 117 not 150 as 117 is the age of the oldest person. ϢereSpielChequers 10:38, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Death anomalies

Hi, I tried checking out one or two of the death anomalies, and was able to shed some light (but not resolve) only one: Eric Gimpel. Actually, I have been creating more work with Eliezer Cadet who was still alive in 1960. The others I checked out seemed to be remorselessly elusive. I'll give it another crack from time to time.Harrypotter (talk) 11:50, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Harrypotter. I think we are probably close to a practical minima, but it does bring up interesting characters like Cadet, along with a steady trickle of resolvable ones. ϢereSpielChequers 11:58, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Death Anomalies

Was just having a look at Wikipedia:Database reports/Living people on EN wiki who are dead on other wikis, and have a few queries, which I thought you might be able to help with.

1. How up to date is the report? IE how likely is it that the problem will have been already fixed?
2. If there is a source on the other language, I'll move it across and update the category, but if there is no source and I can't find one? What then? Should I be updating the other wikipedia - I don't feel confident on that.

I'll do my best, moving through languages given my level of comprehension. I can cope with most Latin and Greek based languages (low level qualifications and a bit of thinking) but I'm not sure how I'd cope with Eastern languages or Cyrillic. Worm 09:39, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi Worm and welcome to the death anomalies project!

Normally it is updated daily. But unusually the bot hasn't run for two days. If I fix one from the very top of the list I sometimes remove it from there as you can get multiple people looking there, but rarely from elsewhere, however I may do so till the bot returns.

If there is no source and I can't find one then I sometimes amend the foreign language article, but only if looking at the other edits I'm confident it is vandalism or a mistake, or I've got a source indicating that the individual was alive after the purported date of death. Many of the ones currently left are ones I've looked at, seen that the person is old enough for it to probably be true and left for a proper sourcing attempt. ϢereSpielChequers 10:01, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Right, I might remove any I've managed to deal with, just to help me keep track. One example is Abdul Ghani Beradar, who was arrested last January and has been the subject of much speculation since - unlikely he died in 2007... so I'm happy to edit that one. But what about Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, who was "killed" in 2009. I agree it's a reliable source for that too, but en.wikipedia has "proof" he's still alive in the form of a youtube video, is the associated presstv article enough information to alter the russian wikipedia? Worm 10:09, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Youtube videos sound a bit doubtful to me. If there are secondary sources reporting it then it could be that that is the "official channel" of the organisation and counts as a primary source. But I'd hope that a journalist would have looked into it. I'm loathe to amend other languages unless I have a reliable source or I'm very sure of myself. For example if someone creates an article and puts a different death date in the article and the category then I'm happy to assume that one is in error. ϢereSpielChequers 10:27, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

So I guess we're going to always have issues then. I wouldn't be happy removing the source from our article, nor adding it to the other. I also can't seem to find any further sources. Ah well, I'll do what I can - every little helps! Worm 10:31, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Interestingly I was looking at that page yesterday. The Russian article is sparse on sources and the controversy about the death is not mentioned compared to the sources in the English version which include pressTV as well as youtube. The death category should be removed on the basis of the controversy and looking at the sources that report his death they appear just as speculative (based rumours of a secret burial) as the report of him being alive (based on lobbyist claims). Perhaps the starting point should be raising the question (in English if needed) on the :ru talk page? Fæ (talk) 10:37, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

That would make sense, or you could ask an EN wiki editor who is active on RU wiki. ϢereSpielChequers 10:45, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Note added to the :en talk page. Fæ (talk) 11:13, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Yes it is the classic many eyes scenario. Sometimes when I get a build up in a particular language I put a not on the relevant wiki project and ask for help. I'm also hoping to enlist an editor who has access to JSTOR et al. When we launched this we had 650 anomalies, we've since had various other languages added and a lot of work elsewhere - there was a big rush of Swedes when they had a categorisation blitz. So the total anomalies would probably be much more than a thousand if there hadn't been this project, but the residue are hard to fix. Though usually there are a dozen new ones a week that are easy to do. One thing it highlights is that different projects have taken different decisions as to how old you need to be to be assumed dead, or how long you need to be missing for. Lord Lucan for example. ϢereSpielChequers 10:45, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps the bot could go that one step further and automatically add a note to talk pages for articles with this inter-wiki dead/alive problem? If a notice appeared on one of my favourite topics with "The Spanish wiki article for this person categorizes him as dead" I would certainly want to scrutinise their sources and copy them into the English article if they looked credible or double check for better English sources. Even if this only happened on the English side it would result in far less dependence on specialist backlog initiatives for this tricky area. Fæ (talk) 11:08, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

That's not a half bad idea, I'd certainly support it. It might only help a little bit due to the fact that many of these are not watched, but it's not a lot more work for a bot and would help a bit Worm 11:19, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

The risk of this project is that we are using other Wikipedias to indicate that there is a problem, but we don't want people to use those Wikipedias as a source. I'm concerned that if we send such a complex message to lots of pages some people will simply use the other language wiki as a source. I think a safer option would be to notify the relevant wikiproject of any articles that have been on the report for more than a fortnight. We did something like this with the unreferenced BLP project, and my experience is that most bios are of interest to at least two projects, one geographic and the other occupational. That would require a bot request, but there have been precedents for that, Tim1357 has something similar and might be persuaded to do this. It would also need someone to trawl the talkpages and make sure the article were project tagged for relevant projects, but I could easily do that - I project tagged much larger numbers of articles for the uBLP project. ϢereSpielChequers 13:30, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Sounds like some good ideas to move it forward. Personally, due to my lack of language skills I find researching these to an appropriate level hard work and they are probably better handled by folks that have an appropriate level of multi-language ability. Flagging for attention in some form in the specific non-English Wikipedia is far more likely to find people with those appropriate skills and who will probably enjoy fixing the issue (and make me feel less guilty for not fixing it). Fæ (talk) 13:58, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

I was thinking more along the lines of notifying wikiprojects like Tennis, New York etc, that would just take a bot that could run on EN wiki. Notifying different language versions of Wikipedia would require a different bot request on each language, or someone on that project to request a report. One possibility would be to expand the existing reports to show anomalies both ways, but I'd be loathe to do this to the EN wiki report for more than DE and the other four languages that are working on the their reports. My preference instead is to publicise this and try and recruit more languages - hence this submission. ϢereSpielChequers 14:14, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Cool. Remote presenting sounds interesting. If things go in that direction, perhaps a few of the London based folks could get in a conference room as a remote-but-live audience for a couple of presentations... Fæ (talk) 14:57, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

I had a go at this alive-or-dead project when WSC first launched it. However, although I can read most western European Germanic and Romance languages with reasonable fluency, I more or less gave up after understanding that we cannot use the other language Wikis to update the DoB/DoD of en.Wiki BIOs - It was taking too much time away from other BLP related projects that I am involved with, and produced a very low return on results to find other sources, even after scouring web pages in all the other languages I can read. Nevertheless, I'm quite happy to chime in on some particularly difficult sources in my repertoire of other languages, including Thai, (which I have done before for the uBLP backlog project). Just ask on my tp. Kudpung (talk) 07:34, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Kudpung, I only do a few of these myself, but among other ones I fix I tend to do the removal of intrawiki links when we have, as in lastnights example two different people, one with articles on five projects and one just on one project. All six articles need amending to avoid the bots reinstating the wiki links. Would you mind running your I over the list every few weeks, I'm sure we'll have some awkward ones in your languages with that sort of interval. ϢereSpielChequers 13:19, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Rastrojo is here...

...and ready to try your bot at es.wp. I hope that you returned perfectly to London. Best ^^ Rastrojo _(D•ES) 00:42, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Hi Rastrojo, welcome to the death anomalies project! Where on ES wiki would you like the report to appear? If you give me a redlink I'll get things setup. ϢereSpellCheckers 16:13, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Hey, let's try it in my userpage namespace: es:User:Rastrojo/Vivos-muertos. Best ^^ Rastrojo _(D•ES) 15:07, 13 August 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, creating this report for eswiki is not possible for the same reason why eswiki is not part of the wikis that are checked for dead people. On es wiki there is no way to identify which people are living or died by using the local category tree. es:Category:Fallecidos por siglo does not contain only people that are dead but all people that are "related" to dead people. It is the same with the born category which does also contain university an so on because the are named after a person.

Lets give you an example es:Félix Ismael Rodríguez is contained in a subcategory of es:Category:Fallecidos por siglo although he is still alive (he is related to Che Guevara who is dead). In the past i talked to eswiki users multiple times to solve this problems but other users reverted this again. So before i can add eswiki to the checked wiki again and/or create this report the local born/dead category trees needs to be cleaned up first, so that they contain people only and people in a subcategory of es:Category:Fallecidos por siglo must really be dead.

The second smaller problem is that i won't create this report in user namespace. Creating this report costs toolserver performance and i think if this report i part of a wiki project or in project namespace more people will use it. Merlissimo 22:18, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Hey, I can't see where es:Félix Ismael Rodríguez is contained in a subcategory of es:Category:Fallecidos por siglo as you have said. WereSpielChequers just told me that the only thing that the bot needed was a category of Living people (es:Categoría:Personas vivas) and we have it. You can put it on my user namespace and I'll move it to a subpage of Wiki Project Biographies (es:Wikiproyecto:Biografías). Does this solve the problems? :( Best, Rastrojo _(D•ES) 17:59, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

As you can see on this report version many still living eswiki people were reported. The root of the problem is caused by es:Plantilla_discusión:BD#born/death categories on category pages, i think.

At the moment i have some problems creating this report on all wikis. The toolserver database was split, so my script has to completely recreate its cache which takes several hours. The problem is that these databases are switched to readonly status many times a day because of some instability. So creating my needed cache fails. After the script is running again, i'll check how many false positive matches eswiki is causing again. Then you could try to solve this and i can readd eswiki to the global config. I'll contact you on eswiki at the end of next week. Merlissimo 16:49, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Merlissimo. I didn't know about the toolserver problems, but I did remember that we had a problem with the death category on ES wiki and had had to remove it from the list. However I was hoping that the living category on ES wiki would be clean or at least a different problem. Especially if you just look at the ones who are born in the last 150 years. ϢereSpielChequers 05:55, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

I see living dead people

Hi WSC. That list of half-living kind-of-deadish multilingual people is quite addictive. But it also leads to strange situation and maybe you have good advice. The most typical problem is when another wiki says that person X is dead but bases that statement on some low-quality reference. Now the obvious thing to do with a weak reference is to avoid it and remove information based on it. But in practice this doesn't make sense for date of death information. For instance, I edited Danny Wagner and declared him dead based on the U.S. Social Security Death Index. That's an awful reference since it just claims that some guy named Daniel E Wagner died on that day but doesn't tie the info to the basketball player. However, the birth dates match (though the birth date info is not exactly based on high-quality sources) so let's say I'm 90% sure this is right. In the end, because I can't find a better source of information, I'm adding info (he's dead) which I know full well is potentially incorrect, yet is less likely to be wrong than the current info (he's alive). It seems like a net positive but it feels like such a sin... Pichpich (talk) 20:38, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Hi Pinchpinch, it is indeed, though I've recently been on the equally addictive task of categorising images of churches on Commons. I'm well aware of the issue, and we have quite a few anomalies where another language version of Wikipedia has information that is unsoourced or too poorly sourced for us to use. Sometimes I find a source using Google, and sometimes I leave it as an anomaly. There is some wiggle room in the OR policy for straight addition of facts, so I've asked for guidance on the death anomaly talkpage. ϢereSpielChequers 11:54, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

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