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Archive 1Archive 2

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)

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)

{{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)

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)

Tracking Progress

I'm not familiar with Wiki's statistics tools, but I was wondering if there was a way to put a tally on the project page so that we can see how we're progressing? I imagine it's just a question of counting the pages in the article namespace that link to {{Template:Persondata}}. Warrickball (talk) 12:06, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

This number of articles with Persondata is already included in the last sentence of the paragraph What is persondata? on the project page (currently around 24000). It also occurs near the top of the page Wikipedia:Persondata. User:Rajah updated both a few days ago, and also maintains a historical record at User:Rajah/persondata. This number can be obtained as you say; I have a script which which allows you to count the number of articles with a given template (instructions at User talk:Dr pda/generatestats.js). As another measure of tracking progress, the percentage done is shown for each of the sublists at /List of biographies. (At the end of last year I generated a list of all biographies, as tagged by Wikiproject Biography, per the request of the people who started the Persondata Wikiproject, to have a set of articles to systematically add persondata to.) Dr pda (talk) 22:06, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
Hmm... when I open the "/List of biographies one", I get a table almost full with zeros:
1 	4 	Mouchoir le Souris, Rajah
2 	0
3 	0
4 	0
...
44 	0 	
45 	0 	
46 	2 	Mdebets , User:Rajah
Is this correct? Are we at only 6% completed?
In any case, clicking on any of the sections doesn't work either, resulting in an empty page. Good thing the "edit section" trick works. But I think having smaller lists that the server could actually generate would be way less confusing. Better yet then would be lists distributed according to WPBiography's ratings (FA, GA, A, B, C, Start, Stub) so that we might prioritize the best ones rather than go over thousands of stubs with partial info (for example, no place of birth anywhere) that evidently only allow for filling some of the template fields. What do you guys think?
Another suggestion: instead of counting with a script which articles have the template, wouldn't it be simpler to change {{Persondata}} so that it added all articles where it's present to a hidden category, say, Category:Articles with Persondata, then parse the category itself instead? -- alexgieg (talk) 23:54, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
As it happens we are at about 4.5% 'completed' (~24000 articles with Persondata / 523000 articles tagged with WPBiography). The numbers in the table are the percentage of each list which is complete. However these numbers only reflect the proportion of the lists which people have worked through (each percentage corresponds to 100 articles); all the articles with persondata are included in the lists, but have not yet been marked as done. Perhaps if the link to the list was more visible on the project page more people would work through the lists.
With approx 500 000 biographies you're either going to have a thousand lists containing several hundred articles, or a hundred lists containing several thousand articles, or somewhere in between. At the time I generated the lists, each of them could actually be loaded, and the size seemed a reasonable compromise. (Plus I was uploading the lists manually; at 3 minutes each to generate and load it took 2.5 hours to create all 46 lists. If they had been 10x shorter it would probably have taken 10x longer!). Given that list 46 actually opens, and lists ~6000 articles, splitting each of the first 45 lists in half would give lists which load. I don't have the time or inclination to do this at the moment, but feel free to do this if you want. I note that it is actually possible to open the whole article in edit mode (though not to preview it), e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Persondata/List_of_biographies/1&action=edit
Due to the way I created the lists, they are actually in order of the WPBiography ratings, i.e. list 1 goes alphabetically through FA's, then goes alphabetically through A class etc. Thus working through the lists in order would correspond to tackling the best articles first.
Regarding counting the number of articles, I'm not sure if there's any real difference between counting the number of (mainspace) articles in Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Persondata (either manually or via my script), and counting the members of a category. Though I suppose with a category the number of members is then shown at Special:Categories (but this would include non-article pages which use the template). Hidden categories are a reasonably recent development I believe; I would guess that {{Persondata}} doesn't currently include a category as it would involve a metadata category showing up in article space. Dr pda (talk) 01:01, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the above information. It really makes things clearer. It's really great to know the articles are already in order starting from FA. :)
About the lists and the script, I think that doing this through JavaScript maybe is the case of using the wrong tool for the right job. Given that Persondata is an "official" Wikipedia project (at least I think it is; it surely seems to be), I don't think there would be objections to developing a bot to periodically and automatically create these listings, update totals etc. It might, say, process the whole biography articles space once per week at off-hours, and even give us information such as which pages have Persondata but not WPBiography. And given that your code already does the difficult part, I guess adapting it to another language and just adding to the converted code functions to do the editing all by itself would be easy. What do you think? (Please notice I'm not a programmer, so unfortunately I myself wouldn't be able to help developing a bot.)
About a possible hidden category, it's easy to solve the problem of it including non-articles. A simple {{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}xyz|xyz|[[Category:Articles with Persondata|{{BASEPAGENAME}}]]}} would add the category only to actual articles. In fact, we could even have an extra category for, say, user pages, and conditionally fill it with {{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|User|[[Category:Wikipedians with Persondata|{{BASEPAGENAME}}]]}} (this ones is used a lot in userboxes). Articles would fill Category:Articles with Persondata, user pages would fill Category:Wikipedians with Persondata, and everything else would fill nothing. As for making a category hidden for normal viewers, it's just a matter of adding __HIDDENCAT__ to it (see WP:CAT for details). -- alexgieg (talk) 01:54, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
I've split a couple of the lists found on /List of biographies. --Rajah (talk) 14:51, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:Persondata

Resolved
 – Speedily kept.

Template:Persondata has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. Road Wizard (talk) 18:05, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

I should darn well think so speedily kept - I am always prepared to assume good faith but it was a ridiculous nomination in the first place. – ukexpat (talk) 16:18, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
In the interests of clarity for future readers, ukexpat's comments are not aimed at me as I was not the nominator. The record of the discussion can be found at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2008 September 2#Template:Persondata. Regards. Road Wizard (talk) 18:55, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Discussion on gender metadata

Please see comment I made here about obtaining and recording gender (male/female) metadata. Opinions would be welcomed. Thanks. Carcharoth (talk) 02:04, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Penguindata

Do we add the template to biographies of non-human subjects? Sir Nils Olav, to be specific. --Joshua Issac (talk) 01:18, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Biographical articles only, and that I think means bios of real people, not animals or fictional characters. – ukexpat (talk) 01:30, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Best not. The template allows bots to collate data on articles about people. As we have no variable for human=no in the template the animal data would get mixed in with the human data. This could prove problematic if someone later develops a tool to work out the average age of metadata subjects from a particular location or date of birth. Adding a few short lived animals into the mix could create a very freaky result (e.g. average lifespan in a particular area dropping by 20 years).
Potentially you could create a template under a different name to gather the same data for animal biographies, as metadata bots could be set to ignore that template name when collating data. However this would probably benefit from a wider consultation. If there has not been many replies within the next week I would suggest taking this to the Village Pump. Road Wizard (talk) 01:42, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Script-extracted date of birth formatting?

I'm not sure where to ask this but I figure you guys would know. I've been adding persondata to individuals with infoboxes that use Template:Birth date and age using User:Dr pda/persondata.js. The dates are automatically extracted and added to persondata in YYYY-MM-DD form (example). This isn't one of the supported date formats listed at Wikipedia:Persondata#Dates_of_birth_and_death and so I'm wondering if the documentation is incomplete or if the script is doing something it shouldn't. Is it OK to have dates like this? Oren0 (talk) 06:03, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

The script will grab the date in the format it is entered into the article's infobox. In many cases the infobox will have the date stored in YYYY-MM-DD format but display it in another format. When you use the script you need to convert the date to the appropriate format for the page. For example, an article about someone in the USA will need a date format of Month DD, YYYY and an article about someone in the UK will need a date format of DD Month YYYY.
The script is meant to help speed up the addition of Persondata but the reason it needs to be used by a person and not a bot is so that the editor has a chance to correct the date format and any other incorrect details manually. Regards. Road Wizard (talk) 07:43, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
A few months ago an editor rewrote some of the documentation at Wikipedia talk:Persondata to make it clearer. I thought the changes were mainly cosmetic, so I didn't read them in any detail. I now see from your question above that one of the results of this rewriting was to apparently prescribe the formats Month DD, YYYY or DD Month YYYY. Before the changes Wikipedia:Persondata#Dates_of_birth_and_death read

Follow the Manual of Style guidelines when filling both the |DATE OF BIRTH= and |DATE OF DEATH= fields, including the guidelines for linking.

This was changed to

Follow the Manual of Style guidelines on whether to use DD Month YYYY format or the Month DD, YYYY style when filling the |DATE OF BIRTH= and |DATE OF DEATH= fields, and do not link the date.

This is a change in emphasis—the Manual of Style section linked to, Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Dates of birth and death, deals with the cases where either the birth or death date is not known, or only approximately known, not with any preferred format for a given date (though that is covered in the immediately preceding section). The current version seeks to impose the MoS guidelines on date formatting within in the article body to a date in hidden metadata, which is not in my opinion necessary. From the perspective of eventual uses of persondata the format of the date is not important. Any application which makes use of it will need to parse the date fields to extract month, day, year; to do so it will have to cope with many scenarios—full date, year only, month and year, approximate year, century only etc. The impression that Month DD, YYYY or DD Month YYYY are the only "supported" formats is incorrect. (For example have a look at all the cases which are dealt with in Wikipedia:Persondata/transform.pl, which is one of the scripts listed at Wikipedia talk:Persondata for extracting persondata from a database dump.) YYYY-MM-DD is just as easy, if not easier, to parse. On the other hand, since the date has to be parsed anyway there is no harm in making it consistent with the format used in the rest of the article. So if you're adding persondata with my script you can change the date format if you like, but I wouldn't edit an article just to change the persondata date format. Dr pda (talk) 10:50, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Hello

Hi, glad to have discovered this project, I always thought something like this should exist. But is there any reason why it has to be restricted to biographies? Surely similar data could be constructed for all sorts of entities - places, movies, anything really? --Kotniski (talk) 22:07, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

As we are only 6.3% of the way to our goal of adding Persondata to all biographies, I think there is quite enough work left for this project already without adding any more. However, if you can think of an alternative form of metadata that would be suited to more general articles you are quite welcome to set up a new project for that purpose. Road Wizard (talk) 01:34, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
DBpedia has already done a lot of the heavy lifting for articles that contain infoboxes. check it out at: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Datasets --Rajah (talk) 06:51, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Question about bots

Can't we set up a bot that adds |needs-persondata=yes| (or something like it) to the talk page of every biography? That's probably the best way to make more people add Persondata. Evenfiel (talk) 20:47, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

that's a very great idea, i can do it with my bot Saud (talk) 12:53, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
That's great! Evenfiel (talk) 09:38, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia:Persondata, "do not link the date". I'll remove the wikilink markup from the example on this project page. Wipe (talk) 12:37, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Why do some TFA's not have this?

I saw Michael Gomez didn't have Persondata until I added it. Is it not an FA requirement? Spiderone (talk) 16:13, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

It's supposed to be yes. I've brought that up before with the FA people. --Rajah (talk) 14:50, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Date format table

In response to a post in Wikipedia talk:Persondata##Date formats that points out a serious flaw in the instructions for dates, I have added Wikipedia talk:Persondata#Date format table as an initial suggestion. It is adapted from the German Hilfe:Personendaten. It gives accepted formats for many cases of uncertain and incomplete dates in order to simplify the work of metadata extraction. -84user (talk) 03:44, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Tools to help your project with unreferenced Biographies of living people

List of cleanup articles for your project

If you don't already have this and are interested in creating a list of articles which need cleanup for your wikiproject see: Cleanup listings A list of examples is here

Moving unreferenced blp articles to a special "incubation pages"

If you are interested in moving unreferenced blp articles to a special "incubation page", contact me, User talk:Ikip

Watchlisting all unreferenced articles

If you are interested in watchlisting all of the unreferenced articles once you install Cleanup_listings, contact me, User talk:Ikip

Ikip 02:16, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

NFL infobox

Don't know if anyone's seen this before, but when I added the persondata to an article with the NFL player infobox (Norman Hand), the script added the word "infobox" after the text "NFL player" at the top of the page. This then made the infobox disappear, as there is no infobox called "NFL player infobox". Check the edit history of that article for more. Lugnuts (talk) 08:47, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

The template {{Infobox NFL player}} is a special case of an infobox which doesn't have "infobox" in its name. My script therefore temporarily adds the word infobox to the text in order for it to recognise the template as an infobox. This is intended to be internal to the script; I had omitted to restore the correct template name before updating the text in the edit box. If you bypass your cache to pick up the revised version of the script you shouldn't experience this issue any more. Dr pda (talk) 12:22, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks! Lugnuts (talk) 12:53, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

RfC on Microformats

FYI there's an RfC currently happening here that may be of interest. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 20:36, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

AWB functionality

I just thought I would stop by and let you know that functionality has been added to AWB that will populate most of the info on the persondata template. --Kumioko (talk) 19:59, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

How should we handle an article about two people? Two Persondata templates? See André and Magda Trocmé where AWB has added a single definition for "Trocme, Andre And Magda". Mirokado (talk) 07:06, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
I think AWB should not add any persondata. I'll correct the logic. Rjwilmsi 07:29, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. I have now added two records to the article. Mirokado (talk) 17:30, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

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)
It's probably better to just add two persondata templates and if need be, they can be fixed in the future. They are machine readable after all, so it shouldn't be hard. --Rajah (talk) 07:53, 25 July 2008 (UTC)
In the german wikipedia, we only use the persondata template ONCE per article, so there are NO persondata in articles about more than one person. Normally there are redirects from the names of the people to the article of the group, so you can put the persondata into the redirect. --APPER (talk) 12:49, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
I proceeded as Apper suggests in Andy Plummer and Mike Bennett (golf instructor). --Nuares (talk) 15:15, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Review of use

Hello, I'm new to the project from WP:CFB. Can someone please check my application of the template at Muddy Waters (American football)? Here's some of the questions I have:

  1. Should "Coach Lastname" be an alternative name?
  2. Should American football coach be linked in the template?
  3. Should nickanmes be included in the alternative name (such as Bear Bryant)?
  4. What about middle names?

Thanks!--Paul McDonald (talk) 22:49, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

I've taken a look for you, and it looks good to me.

  1. Probably not - titles are normally not included (unless they're titles of nobility, but that's something else). I won't remove it, just in case it's important.
  2. Links are optional; whether you should use them depends on which editor you talk to. You can include them if you want, but be reasonable and avoid long piped links.
  3. Nicknames can be included if they are especially important, but again be reasonable with them; long lists of alternative names aren't much use. See this for more.
  4. Middle names are optional, but I tend to include them just in case several people have the same name.

However, overall it's a good use of the template. Be sure to add/fill out Persondata wherever you find it! 1ForTheMoney (talk) 23:20, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Persondata misapplied to Company

Hi folks. Just noticed that persondata has been applied to Jean Fares Couture, which is a company. I assume this happened because of some bad cats, which I fixed. I would have removed the persondata myself, but I figured someone here could do a proper fix (i.e. so it doesn't show up on your list again!). Thanks, 18:46, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

There's no need for a "proper fix" now that the categories have been corrected, so I've removed the unneeded persondata. Thanks Rjwilmsi 20:12, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
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