Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Persondata

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[edit] Future of this project?

User:Auroranorth who started this project has changed their username and does not appear to be involved with this WikiProject anymore. Does anyone else want to take over running it?

Also, a request was made, again by User:Auroranorth, to generate a list of all biography articles. Do people still want to have this list? I have a script which can make it, but I don't want to spend the time unless the list will be used (there are almost half a million biographies at the moment). Dr pda (talk) 21:47, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I would be quite happy to maintain the project (along with anyone else who would be interested in doing so), if Auroranorth is no longer interested. With regard to the script, how difficult would it be to implement? - if it would be a simple operation, then I would say it would be a good idea, although if it would require significant effort, we could use the existing categories, like "living people" etc. Mouchoir le Souris (talk) 00:06, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. Regarding the script I think the idea was to get a master list which people could systematically work through to add persondata to all biographies. My script is more or less ready to go, it's just that the list would be too long for a single WP page, so I'll need to break it up into chunks of ~10000 or so. I'll try and get to this today or tomorrow. Dr pda (talk) 01:46, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
Ah, I see, that would be rather useful - with everything in one place. It would help speed up proceedings a fair bit, thank you. Mouchoir le Souris (talk) 19:20, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bot to do this work for us?

It seems to me that it would not be too difficult for me to write a bot to scrape pages for born/died categories and add persondata based on that. Would that be a good or bad idea? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Captbaritone (talk • contribs) 18:08, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Seems easy enough. Downsides:
  • would leave many articles without descriptions
  • would also create errors around non-standard names, such as those with leading surnames.
I could imagine some of this being fixed by imposing new standards on the various biography templates, but that might be wagging the dog. / edg ☺ ☭ 20:36, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] {{WPBiography}}

This seems like an interesting project. Is it an "official" subproject of WikiProject Biography? If not, it should become one, since both are strictly connected.

In any case, I've added the following request to the folks responsible for the {{WPBiography}} template:

I suggest a "needs-persondata" parameter to be added to the template, with some appropriate corresponding visual clue, so that people interested are made aware of the Persondata template and the need of adding it. The visual clue could be a message similar to the one that appears when "needs-infobox" is "yes", probably appearing inside that very same box, like in this simple paraphrase:
An appropriate '''[[Wikipedia:Persondata{{!}}persondata]]''' may need to be added to this article, or the current persondata may need to be updated. Please refer to the [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Persondata{{!}}WikiProject Persondata]] for further information.
With an optional empty line separating both texts if both the "needs-infobox" and "needs-persondata" parameters were set to "yes".
I know this would lead to a massive creation of new categories, but it might be worth the effort. What do you think?

You can find the original request (and the answers, if any) here. -- alexgieg (talk) 21:49, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

That sounds like a rather fab idea, as it would be an effective way to generate awareness - a lot of articles lack persondata and I imagine it could help the situation greatly. With regard to the project's status in relation to WikiProject Biography, its project page does make reference to WikiProject Perondata as a "child project" (near the bottom), so I assume that it is a subproject, but I'm not 100% sure. Mouchoir le Souris (talk) 22:02, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
Ah, very nice! Okay, this is what I've done then (as a new section): -- alexgieg (talk) 22:48, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Some Improvements

Since this is a subproject of WikiProject Biography, I've made some small improvement here and there:

  • Since this category didn't exist, I created it too. :-P

I think I did these changes correctly, as it's the first time I edit categories. In a few hours/days we'll discover. :-) -- alexgieg (talk) 22:48, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Fantastic! Its all looking rather good: the categories' set-up and the enhanced user box. They're rather major improvements - some pretty good stuff :) Mouchoir le Souris (talk) 23:14, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] How to deal with "dual biography" articles?

Something to noodle on. How do we add the persondata template to articles that are in effect biographies of two individuals, such as Leopold and Loeb? Each individual has a redirect page to the main article, but I don't think adding the template to the redirect page is correct. So, do we add the template to the main article twice, once for each? Thanks. – ukexpat (talk) 13:55, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi there! That is a good question. I looked at the WP:Persondata talk page, to see if the issue had been brought up there. It has, although no solid solution was given - the advice seems to be to ignore such pages. The post is quite old, but it may be worth taking a look - Wikipedia talk:Persondata#Use_on_pages_listing_multiple_people.... Mouchoir le Souris (talk) 19:34, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the link - I guess we have plenty of pages to work on at the moment without worrying about the dual bio pages!  – ukexpat (talk) 20:06, 21 May 2008 (UTC)