Category talk:Living people/Archive 1

Pointless?

 * I'm sure i'm not the only one & am sure this is an extremely debatable category but it seems to be the most pointless of the 100,000+ categories. If someone is "living" it should be denoted via birth date & death date in the opening dialogue, right? The category is too inspecific & seems to be applied to some & not ALL, where to vote against it? ZlatkoT 16:45, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

This is the appropriate page for discussion of exactly how this category should be named and organized. The existence or non-existence of this category is not optional.--Jimbo Wales 20:49, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

THIS IS NOT A VOTE - this is not a continuation of the vote. THIS IS A NEW DISCUSSION.

To make this a bit more clear, I have blanked the votes. They are in the history if you want to read them. A rational discussion is not a vote. Voting is evil, remember?

Please discuss. &mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jimbo Wales (talk &bull; contribs).

Above (edit conflict) In the old vote page Sumahoy expressed concern that someone could just remove the category and vandalize. Actually, removing it is the best thing we could possibly hope for... We already have content filtering IRC bots that alert on the addition or removal of speedy delete tags. It would be trivial to make something sound the alarm whenever that tag is removed. With only, I'd guess no more than 70,000 living people in Wikipedia the rate of legitimate deaths would be low enough to keep a close watch on that. --Gmaxwell 21:34, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

I admire the sentiment here to keep the articles of living persons clean; I really do. But Categorization by fiat seems an untenable way to go about this. Dozens, if not hundreds, of bio articles are added every day, aren't they? What was so wrong with the suggestions about using metadata (missing death date, etc)? It seems easier to create a system which automatically updates itself, than relying on individual editors to enforce something which is (presumably) aimed at protecting us from lawsuit. -- nae'blis (talk) 22:01, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * See this is the problem with votes.. I explained why very carefully, but no one read it. None of the other proposed ideas allow for automated use of the tagging. For example we can't anywhere near as easily make RecentChanges flag things based on birth and death categories.  I've already produced a report based on the birth and death categories (available here)... it takes over 4 minutes of computation on the Wikipedia databases, which is completely unacceptable for a special page. --Gmaxwell 22:37, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Moving forward
Ok. Jimbo has said it will exist. It has been stated, so it shall be. If people want to create another subtopic for continuing to argue why that's a bad idea, so be it. But I would like to start looking at what needs to be done to actually make this thing work. First off, I think we need a much better idea of exactly what the specific goals are for this thing. What is hoped to be accomplished with it? I know it's intended to be a part of Biographies of living persons, but exactly how is it envisioned that a category like this, however named, will help? If we can get a better idea of what is desired, then we can work together to make a best effort towards actually making this work. - TexasAndroid 21:59, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * There are at least 57,000 articles about living people. As the policy proposal you link to indicates, these are particularly sensitive articles which cause a great deal of administrative hassle.  There are a million ways for us to use categorization to have specialized procedures for watching/cleaning these articles.  Should it be subcategorized?  Absolutely.  Should we have a discussion of how to use it?  Absolutely.  Let's do that now. --Jimbo Wales 23:05, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

How is a category with what will have 200,000 entries going to help anyone? Its not, this is, as most people agree on the page that I can't link to because I will get reverted by jimbo or danny, a bad idea. Martin 22:06, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia is heading straight to hell. :( - Darwinek 22:20, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Relax just a notch or two, ok? Comparing me to Hitler and talking about Hell isn't 'particularly' helpful, although of course your sentiments are most warmly welcomed and I will try to make as much positive use of them as I can. :-)  --Jimbo Wales 23:05, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Quality of Wikipedia bios will decrease and this single decision will serve as precedent for similar unfortunate actions. It is no suprise that people who spent time on improving articles express their emotions seeing their work devalued. Pavel Vozenilek 02:57, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Mark me down as another one who doesn't see how this category can really help. We already consider categories to be problematic if they get to 400 entries without some subcategorization to reduce their size; this one's going to dwarf that by orders of magnitude.

So, if it's mandatory and has to stay, here are a few suggestions for making it more manageable.
 * 1) Subcategorize by first letter of the surname, e.g. Category:Living persons - A, Category:Living persons - B, etc.
 * 2) Subcategorize by nationality, e.g. Category:Living Americans, Category:Living Canadians, Category:Living Britons, etc.

This simply isn't going to work as currently constituted, however. It'll be simply too large to be of any meaningful benefit to anyone. Bearcat 22:31, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Subcategorization? I'm all for it.  That's why I was so adamant that CfD was a huge mistake here.  "This category needs subcategories" is not the same thing as "This category is stupid and should be deleted." --Jimbo Wales 23:05, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * But this Category is stupid and should be deleted. I haven't had to deal with any decision you made before, but I think forbidding the idea this can be deleted is a very bad call. This category is a pretty transparent reaction to the one controversy and it's one of almost shocking inanity. Many of the bios that get vandalized are already categorized. And no matter how many sub-cats you add to this it's still going to be untenable. Because a 100 subcats for 50,000+ people is just going to be a hundred over-large cats. Unless you divide into so many subcats even they became unmanageable to follow. As well as looking stupid on all articles. Hopefully I've just stumbled on one of your more foolish moments and in the future I'll have less reason to criticize.--T. Anthony 01:57, 30 January 2006 (UTC)


 * It's completely unfair and inaccurate to characterize this as a reaction to the press. The fact is that the press brought some attention to a neglected aspect of Wikipedia, the potential for libel in articles about people... and it turns out that when we really dug in and looked at it we found the problem to be FAR worse than we had expected. This is a problem which must be solved for both legal and ethical reasons, and it is not a problem where we can simply wait for the eventual perfection of Wikipedia to solve it on its own. This category is only a tool and we do not expect it to solve the problem, but it is clear that it is helpful. It is almost certainly not the best possible tool, but so far we haven't found anything else which is clearly better. If you have any ideas to help achieve a speedy solution to our difficulty with unsourced criticisms we are all ears. --Gmaxwell 02:49, 30 January 2006 (UTC)


 * We have Category:Suspected hoaxes so just have a tag you can put to make something "Suspected libel." That may not be the best idea, but I wasn't even aware of this until a couple days ago.--T. Anthony 04:06, 30 January 2006 (UTC)


 * As I've said below, subcategorisation makes this more intrusive. it will also make it harder to follow and therefore even less effective. But if there are to be subcategories it should be done by subdividing the existing categories, or we will get a huge messy duplicate of the existing structure. And it probably won't match. Just to adapt one of the examples above, Category:Britons does not exist. If you start subcategorisising category:living people (as opposed to the alternative of dividing the existing categories between the living and the dead), it won't stop and some people will end up in a dozen "living x" categories on top of a dozen standard categories. The category clutter will be hideous. Osomec 00:21, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Try this...Make a template to add two categories to each article, this one, and smaller subcategories. It would have a parameter to specify the subcategory, like . This way you can browse and maintain the living people with subcategories, but keep them in this one for recentchanges use! --Phroziac . o ºO (♥♥♥♥ chocolate!) 23:45, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * 200,000? .. Based on birth and death data it doesn't look like there is more than 70,000 articles right now. We already have categories with far more than that in them. --Gmaxwell 22:42, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Yeah I just scanned the database, its actually only 57,000. Martin 22:45, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I', willing to bet that most biogs don't actually include the xxx births category... wangi 00:25, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm almost willing to take that bet. About a year ago I created an article on an obscure 19th cenury guy (Daniel Freeman) and did not include the birt date and death date categories. They were added within four hours. Dsmdgold 00:40, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Discussion
I suggest moving the discussion and debate to here. I can guarantee that Jimmy will be following it. Danny 22:26, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I was first to post on there, and only one other person has done so (and that not in reply to my comments), while far more have posted here, so I suggest people who want a reply carry on posting on this page. Osomec 00:25, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Examples why this category doesn't work
Richey_James_Edwards: guitar player for the Manic Street Preachers. Disappeared in 1995, hasn't been seen since. Probably dead, but nobody can say for sure. Does he go in this category or not? Who makes the call?

Basically, what happens with people whose "living" status is under dispute? Natalee Holloway has been missing for months, but there's no physical evidence that she's dead. Isn't this just going to encourage edit wars among people who disagree about a person's status?

I only minutes ago learned about this Category after one of the articles I worked on was added to it, and I find this unfathomable. I would very much like to see a detailed explanation as to why this category is necessary. I understand that Jimbo is the one pushing it, but I still would like to hear it out. It doesn't make ANY sense to me. -- ChrisB 22:32, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Philosophically speaking, I don't find this argument particularly persuasive. Don't all categories have borderline cases where inclusion or exclusion can be somewhat problematic?  Should we not have Category:Planets for example?--Jimbo Wales 23:39, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * But it's bigger than that. There's a certain moral issue here.  I mean, if someone disappears, they suddenly have their "living" status revoked?  And, if the issue of this category is to oversee potential libel/vandalism, how does that help?  Are people's articles less likely to be libelled if they disappear or die?  In fairness, the most libelled/vandalized biography I work on is Kurt Cobain (died in 1994), and second place isn't even close.  It seems more worthwhile to monitor all biographies, not just those of living people.  If we're worried about people suing, then we'll also need a Category: Dead people whose estates are likely to sue if their article includes libellous material.  I know, that's kind of harsh, but if that's the reason this category exists, then why not?


 * At the same time, isn't this going to mar the accuracy of the untold number of biographies that aren't regularly monitored? What if someone's death goes unnoticed, and "Living people" remains as a category?  Is that any better or worse than what we have now? -- ChrisB 23:58, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * People are much less likely to be libelled if they die because you can't libel the dead. That doesn't, of course, stop libellous material about someone else being added to an article, and that applies to any article - not even just biographies.


 * If a death goes unnoticed, an article will be inaccurate anyway since it will have a pretty significant omission. --Whouk (talk) 11:07, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Create a new category for people who could be alive or dead, obviously. That took me way less time than it took you to write your post. *thunk* *thunk* silsor 22:33, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * So... We're to have Category:Living people, Category:Dead people and Category:Neither living nor dead people?!? I awaint the rise of the undead :) Thanks/wangi 22:35, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Well it only took me about 4 minutes to scan the XML dump, there are over 57,000 people with a birth cat and no death cat. Stop what you're doing, and get categorising! Martin 22:38, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I put up a list above for people to use generated from the live database.. I'll probably set a cron job to update it to help with this process. --Gmaxwell 23:31, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I suggest Category:People who are in the same state as Schrödinger's cat. Talrias (t | e | c) 22:37, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Simple answer: Category:Missing Persons (not the band ;-)) --malber 22:39, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Wouldn't Category:Missing persons be the correct capitalization? And why don't we have this yet? (goes to check something)... apparently we have Category:Disappeared people instead. -- nae'blis (talk) 23:09, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Wow, if that name isn't awkward. --malber 23:34, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Category:People alive as of 2006, or in the case of someone last known to be alive in 1985 Category:People alive as of 1985. (SEWilco 04:09, 20 January 2006 (UTC))
 * Is Category:People alive in 1492 proper for people that were last known to be alive then and whose death has not been reported? (SEWilco 04:25, 20 January 2006 (UTC))


 * Just as an aside, I can't wait for the POV war someday to erupt over how to categorize Elvis Presley. ;-) All jokes aside, why not just say, "Living people" in the cases where a person is specifically known not to be dead. "Dead people" is redundant if there is a "1958 deaths" category. And for cases where we don't know if they are alive and have good reason to question it... why not just leave it uncategorized? I don't see the harm. --Fastfission 00:07, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * The obvious solution would be to only go by their legal status. If they are considered missing, but legally dead (a death certificate was issued, and not revoked), then they are for all intensive purposes dead, by the date that is noted on the death certificate. Search 4 Lancer  06:02, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * This is such a broad category. What's next? Seperating the biographies to male and female? Do you realize how many THOUSANDS of biographies out there? Who's going to go to each article and add this category respectively? This serves no purpose. -- † Ðy§ep§ion † 06:07, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Perhaps I'm too harsh, I just find it problematic to add this category to the thousands of bios out there. It's a lot of work-- † Ðy§ep§ion † 06:10, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand why asking about people for which living status is uncertain. If this Category purpose is only administative (to tag articles to be watched more carefully), it has not to be applied regarding any semantic issue but only as a technical tool. One category for people needing to be watched is enough. Administrators have just to decide who they want to watch more carefully. Lvr 20:30, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Comments and 2 suggestions
I have started over a hundred biographies of living golfers. Let's say that someone adds a line to one of them saying that he was arrested for possession of child porn at college, but released without charge. Let's also say that all 200,000 or whatever articles have been placed in this category (and it will soon be 2 million). How is this category going to help? Are we expected to believe that there will be enough people monitoring it, and clicking on all the articles regularly, including the most obscure ones, to significantly improve the chances of libels being removed promptly compared to what they are now? These monitor hits will only be a tiny fraction of total hits, and unless the monitors only click on people they have heard of they will know nothing whatsoever about most of the people they have clicked on, so they will have to research every seriously negative comment. It just isn't going to happen.

Another point to take into account is that there are plenty of places to libel someone apart from their biographical article. For example next time I update a golf tournament article with this year's winner's name, I could state that he won despite having spent the Tuesday of tournament helping police with their investigations into a child pornography ring, but was let off without charge. Two alternative suggestions, they aren't very good, but then Jimbo isn't putting forward alternatives to this dud, so someone else will have to try:
 * 1) create Category:Controversial biographies. It will miss some people, but then so will the existing category. Put all American lawyers, journalists and politicians in it as a start.
 * 2) acknowledge the reality that there is no way that all bad edits out of a current rate of around a million edits a week (soon to be ten million no doubt) will be caught. Not only a slim chance; zero chance. If legal issues make this intolerable, instead of making a pointless and annoying gesture, do something concrete and move the servers to an offshore jurisdiction, as PartyGaming operates from Gibraltar due to the dubious legal status of online poker in the U.S.

Osomec 22:43, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * There are far less than 200,000 articles we are talking about. And we will have automated tools helping us, the administrative category Living persons is required and instrumental for those improvements. --Gmaxwell 23:00, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Additionally, "this isn't perfect" is not an argument for "this is useless". Yes, of course, not everything can possibly be caught, but we don't throw up our hands and give up on the entire project.  We accept ambiguity and imperfection and we move forward to try for improvements.  There are at first count 57,000 articles which fit in this category, but of course this automated first pass misses a lot of them.  And then we are also supposed to talking here about how to meaningfully subcategorize so that we have a hope of systmatically working our way through these.--Jimbo Wales 23:44, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * But it is more than imperfect. It will do so little as to be useless. Only the minutest fraction is likely to be caught and it will take up a great deal of time and be highly intrusive. "It might do a minute amount of good" is no reason to go ahead with a major project. Especially when you are yet to disclose the reasons for it. You really should have guessed the response this would get on categories for deletion as it is just the obverse of the classic example of a useless category Category:dead people and there was no explanation as to why it wasn't merely that. When the predicatable objections came there was still no explanation, just an order. Then more objections and again no explanation, just an order. Then the same a third time. Anyway, I have not thrown up my hands, I have made two well meaning suggestions, both of which have been ignored. Osomec 00:07, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * It won't be far less than 200,000 for long. There are a lot of articles without birth dates, and they are less likely to be found in the articles about obscure people that are more likely to cause a problem. But even if the category contains every article, that doesn't mean it will achieve anything. I just don't believe people are going to look at masses of articles about people they have no interest in on the offchance they might uncover a libel. Osomec 23:08, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Who says people will browse the category? We can use the category to identify the articles so they are flagged with bright colors by the RecentChanges screen and the IRC bots. We can also activate more aggressive bad content detection for these articles. Etc. There are a lot of technical reasons why this is a fairly good solution for now. Categories are what we use with the automated tools to tag and ultimately delete unlicensed images... and thats worked to move tens of thousands of images through a complex multistage process. In any case, I don't understand why people who say it can't be done are insisting on standing in the way of the people who are doing it. Would you like a userscript which will make the category invisible to you? That could be easily created. --Gmaxwell 23:27, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The problem you are experiencing is that the vast majority of people think its a bad idea. Bold text won't change their minds. Martin 23:33, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * No, but it might get them to see my words! :) At least I finally got someone to actually discuss my comments after I used it! --Gmaxwell 23:53, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * We don't want to see people wasting their time on a project that just won't achieve its presumed goals (they still haven't actually been disclosed), when there are so many other things that need to be done. Most people would never find out about such a script, and the category will look silly to millions I should think. Osomec 23:47, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I think it is absolutely not true that a vast majority of people think its a bad idea. An extreme minority of people who have not heard the arguments or taken time to discuss or think about it have been noisily agitating for instant transport to the cesspool of AfD, but that's hardly evidence for what a mass majority of people think.  Since the arguments in favor of it are strong, and since the arguments against it are being thought about and favorable suggestions being offered, I think it's safer to say that the vast majority of people are likely to welcome this category as we work forward on making it appropriately useful.  A handful of AfD regulars does not a consensus make.--Jimbo Wales 23:44, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I take no part in afd or tfd or whatever for the reasons you give. But I really don't see how this is beneficial at all, I also can't find it explained rationaly why this is good; what are we expecting people to do with such a vast category? Why couldnt we just flag articles that have birth categories? Why cant we use the NPOV tag? Why can't it be added to the Persondata tag?. In summary; good great idea, terrible execution, terrible implementation, terrible PR. Martin 23:55, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Explain why you can't just flag articles that have the birth category, it would also have the major advantage that a lot of articles already have it, and that people don't hate it. Martin 23:36, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * There is no 'the birth category' ... there are over a thousand birth categories and over a thousand death categories. Plus there are people who are not in any of them (because we don't know when they were born or died). The test "is this article in X" is O(n log n)ish while the test "does it exist in these N and is it equal to any of these X" is a higher order problem which requires reading a lot of the categorylinks table in the case where the person is alive. Basically we can't do the use the birth and death solutions for anything on the wiki in real time. The category plan is *exactly* what categories are made for. We have thousands of nearly-nonsense categories and this one isn't it.. Why all the furvor about this one? --Gmaxwell 23:49, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * The furvor is because most people are of the opinion that the categorization system is primarily, if not totally, a navigation system. That it is a system for the use of the general user and, if a category serves no useful purpose to the general user, then it's not a useful category and is a waste of time and resources.  This was my opinion as well until I started seeing your comments here about the automated tools.  I'm not sure we've ever had a category quite like this.  This is something new, something that hasn't been done before, and something that was not well explained before it popped into existance.  So in the end, while you say this is "exactly what the categories are for", it really does fly in the face of what many of us who work to maintain categories here consider the normal uses of categories.  So new, non-standard use + lack of explanations == opposition.  IMHO that's why things have fallen out like they have. - TexasAndroid 00:02, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * We have lots of categories which are not primarily aimed at readers. This one is not special in that regard.--Jimbo Wales 01:21, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't think there is anything wrong with a category for living people. The problem arises when this category (which is not "aimed at readers") is added to the bottom of the articles. That is where the conflict between the two uses (navigation and administrative) comes to the fore. A reader is not well served by the presence of this category at the bottom of an article - it adds to the noise and thus makes navigation via the other (useful) categories harder to use. I suggest that the style-guide should say that this category should not be added to the bottom of articles. Note that I arrived at this page while wearing my "reader" hat (wondering about the sudden appearance of this useless-to-the-reader category on some pages I was reading) - I don't know the mechanism of categories but I'm assuming that there is a means for categorizing articles without necessarily making it visible to readers. - Hayne 14:38, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, no attempt at proper presentation or persuasion was made at all. Osomec 00:28, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * You're more right than you realize, Osomec. However the "no attempt at proper presentation or persuasion" applies to the CfD in the first place.  That's why I put a stop to it.  You don't have a discussion about something with a vote to delete.  That's preposterous anti-community behavior.--Jimbo Wales 01:19, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I can understand the confusion that results from thinking categories are only for navigation... But the use of non-navigational categories is nothing new. A category is only navigational if it can be reached via the root categories on the main page (mathematics, science, history, etc). All of our navigational cats should be reachable from there and none of the administrative ones should (and aren't, except when someone does something foolish, but I usually fix that pretty quickly). Our largest categories are all currently administrative and not navigational, for example: Category:GFDL_images with almost 80,000 members, Category:Disambiguation with over 40,000 members, Category:Public_domain_images with over 30,000 members, Category:Redirects from US postal abbreviation with about 40,000 entries.  These categories, and the many other administrative categories, are critical to the operation of many behind-the-scenes processes on Wikipedia.  Category:Living people will be no different, even if it does end up somewhat larger. --Gmaxwell 01:31, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

re-indenting Yeah, but why not implement the suggestion above by Hayne? It is frustrating to see a category devised for administrative convenience popping up along with navigation categories. --Gurubrahma 04:29, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree with the above. As more of a reader than an editor, I saw this category at the bottom of an article and had a good laugh, thinking it was an extremely silly category, mainly because I can't possibly think of a situation in which I'd feel the need to browse through a list of all living people. I see it's possible use as an administrative category, but in that case I feel like it doesn't need to be shown at the bottom of an article because of its sheer uselessness to a reader. Lateralus1587 08:32, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Error rate
As a point of comparison for the error rate of automated querying, here is a auto-generated list of people who are marked as having died, but never been born (the "unborn", as it were). It currently lists 5205 people, which is ~8% of the size of gmaxwell's "undead" list. --Interiot 23:40, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Right, never claimed the list was accurate. It's a good starting point for making and accurate category. --Gmaxwell 23:43, 19 January 2006 (UTC) :)
 * Such a large category is always going to have a lot of errors in anycase, I think that's one thing we can all agree on. T/wangi 23:46, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * It seems natural that there are more people where only the year of death is known. BTW the pre-1875 immortals have been cleanup up, many of the seem to be Manitoba MLAs or US academics. The system just needs a bit of maintenance. -- User:Docu

Subcategorization
Subcategorization is mentioned above as one possible way to help with this thing, and Jimbo liked the possibility. IMHO this is important, so I'm giving it it's own topic area.

Okay. If we are going to subcategorize, IMHO we should do so Soon. Very Soon. Before too long someone with a bot is going to start dumping articles in here by the thousands. If we decide to sub-categorize them, IMHO we should do so before the mass categorization begins.


 * I just wanted to make a quick comment about assumptions about how this project works. A bot will not start dumping articles in here by the thousands, because this is not a mobocracy, this is not a democracy, this is Wikipedia.  If someone starts doing that without first going through a real process of dialogue about why it would be a bad idea, the bot will be blocked, the edits rolled back, end of story. --Jimbo Wales 23:47, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Subcategorization by last name, alphabetically, would work well enough. And it would be a lot easier to do then by nationality, IMHO. Nationality is asking for conflicts, multiple categorization, and other similar problems. The vast majority of people have no dispute going about their name. If we went 2-3 levels deep with the subcategorization, we could actually get things near brousable in this thing. I know from Gmaxwell's comments that this is not intended as a set of brousable cateogies, but ones for use more-so by automated tools, but if we can make them even remotely browsable, then IMHO it's all for the better.

So I'm thinking along the lines of Living people - A, Living people - Aa], [[Living people - Aaa, Living people - Aab, etc. Maybe create out the first two levels initially, and only create out the third level if there are names to fit into it. - TexasAndroid 23:40, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Please don't bother. The subcategory names will take up more space in the category links so they will be even more annoying. Osomec 23:43, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what subcats will help.. it will make building tools to work with the category somewhat more complex.. --Gmaxwell 23:44, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I think we can agree that for readers this category is completely useless, so there is little point in cutting it down to make it easier for a pointless category to be browsed by users. Keep it as one stonking big category so it's the most useful, and easiest to use, with automated tools. Could we even add a frig in the code / default style sheet to hide the category for readers? Thanks/wangi 23:48, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Should we also hide the stub cats, the cleanup cats, the copyright related cats, and all the other cats which are pretty much useless to average Joe reader? I don't really have a view there... it would require a low impact change in the database schema to create a reader hidden flag and it might be of some use, I think it's worth discussion but we shouldn't do it just for this one category. --Gmaxwell 23:51, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, hide this thing & any others like it that aren't navigation aids. No, don't use sub-categories.  Part of my opposition is that it looks stupid.  The other part is that it's useless as a browsing tool because it's enormous.  Subcats won't help that.  Anyone who wants to have a go at something this big will be using automated tools or database dumps anyway. Derex 01:28, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I like this idea, and making it extensible to other 'maintenance' categories would allow editors to turn something on in their .css/options to view things line cleanup, NPOV, Category:living persons, without bothering the readership. It might make data dumps/mirrors somewhat of a pain, but they already deal with the existing 'editor' tags that get placed on the main article space, yes? -- nae'blis (talk) 03:10, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't think hiding maintenance categories from readers is a good idea. Readers are potential editors. We may want to make them show separately, though. Zocky | picture popups 04:25, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * This is exactly why I gave it it's own section, to get it attention, pro or con, quickly. I had no intention of actually creating these myself unless I got several "Good Idea" type responses.  Instead, I quickly get several good reasons why it's not the best of ideas.  So don't worry about me going out and creating a buch of subcats for now.  I'll let the idea percolate a bit longer.  And if the idea flops, so be it. - TexasAndroid 23:52, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I do think it is a good idea to hide it from readers. If the purpose of this category is only technical or administrative, it shouldn't be seen. The best is clearly a database flag. It seems to be too resource demanding and it is replaced by this category. This category should therefor not be more visible than if it was a flag. Only semantical categories should appear on the main article page.Lvr 20:37, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Just as a note, couldn't we choose to categorise by multiple criteria? Set a Category:Living people by country, Category:Living people by occupation etc, underneath which we have a set of Category:Living people in and Category:Living ? If we tag the categories properly so that the subcategories make sense, it seems to me that we could put in multiple sorting schemas in place, and all one would need to do is pick the relevant subcategory tag. Admittedly, getting it all set up would be a royal pain, but I don't think the maintenance would be too horrific, even at this massive scale, and has the benefit that cross-referencing would allow browsing on multiple criteria (I don't remember his country, but I do know he's an academic!). Also, don't categories already set up by alphabetical? -- Kirby1024 23:59, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * That would cut across or duplicate all the other categories. If you're going to do that, better to subdivide the existing categories into living and dead people, rather than recreate the whole people categorisation system. But I don't want subcategories at all as one subcategory will be less annoying. And looking at it from the point of view of those who think this might work, it can't be a good idea to move people into categories by nationality the amount of attention the nationalities would be given would likely be very uneven. Osomec 00:16, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure that's a valid argument. It's true that certain nationalities won't have nearly as many entries as we like, but that's not the fault of the categorisation system, the system will simply bring it into sharp relief. If such a thing happens, perhaps it will be easier to identify the areas where others can improve wikipedia's coverage, and give people the impetus to do so. -- Kirby1024 00:44, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Not a list and/or template?
Why is a category the only solution here? Why not a list for example, maybe in conjuction with an template so it can be automatically generated and updated? Kappa 00:08, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Better still, wouldn't adding it to the Persondata tag have all the benefits and non of the negatives? Martin 00:10, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I think a list would indeed be better, because that way one can watch the list and see if articles are wrongly removed from it. It is (to my knowledge) not presently possible to detect when articles are removed from a category. Radiant_ &gt;|&lt; 01:16, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * The roomba suspect edit checking IRC bot already flags on some kinds of category addition and removal. It would be trivial to build tools around working with the category. On the other hand, an autogenerated list of suspected living persons is about 3mb in size... which is completely unacceptable for anything in Wiki which will ever be updated. I think person data is good and we should promote it, at the same time it fails to be completely useful for cases where we don't know when they were born or died but merely know that they are or aren't alive. I think in an ideal world we would have both the flag and the person data, and have robots checking to make sure our data is internally consistent. --Gmaxwell 01:36, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I would be happy to explore options about how Persondata might help. --Jimbo Wales 01:17, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * A category allows all recent changes to all articles about living persons to be displayed simply by clicking the related changes link while in the category page. This in turn allows a watch to be kept for users adding misinformation and libel to articles about living people. We can set up a patrol, like the Recent Changes patrol, to keep an eye on these potentially high risk articles. If we don’t do this Wikipedia will eventually be heading for a libel action? I fully support this approach until someone can suggest a better way of doing it. Lumos3 10:24, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * How about adding one field to Persondata: LIVING?, with a simple "yes", "no", or "unknown" the only viable options? Downside would be that Persondata would become a mandatory addition to bio articles, whereas Category:Living people doesn't affect articles on dead folks. — BrianSmithson 15:09, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * already discussed below. not technically efficient at present. Derex 15:17, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Persondata is the obvious solution. That way it is not a true category but fulfils the administrative requirement. Keeping this category is just another nail in Wikipedia's coffin. User:Noisy | Talk 17:26, 28 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Persondata seems like a much less intrusive solution; adding a living persons category lessens the value of other biographical categories by swamping them out, and it isn't a category that is particularly useful to non-editors. ("Ooh! George W. Bush in Category:Living persons Bo - By.  I wonder who else is.")--ragesoss 05:50, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

It sounds to me like Persondata could really be the way to go, since it's easy to implement and is invisible to regular users. Forgive my ignorance, but would there be something similar to Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living people to help us monitor changes to these pages? Would it just be Special:Recentchangeslinked/Template:Persondata? EWS23 | (Leave me a message!) 04:19, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Can we not have a vote anyway?
Can we not have the vote anyway? My view is that this doesn't meet the end it's aimed at. Categories are good means of navigation but not so good for meta tasks. So you've got a page with everyone who's alive on it. I'm not entirely clear how that prevents vandalism.

Wouldn't a big watchlist do the same thing without disfiguring the pages? It could be a public watchlist, couldn't it? Then not only have you gathered together all the living people (and you don't have to worry about its being enormously accurate, because it's a watchlist not a cat) but you can see when they're edited -- in particular, when they're edited by anons or less trusted users.

Am I missing something? Is there some other compelling reason for this category? If someone else has made this suggestion, I apologise. I couldn't see it on a scan through the page. Grace Note 00:08, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * That sounds like a better idea. Osomec 00:12, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I think another "vote" would be a really bad idea. -- John DO | Speak your mind  [[Image:T-Rex 200.jpg|25px|I doubt it]] 00:17, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Voting is evil. We do not have votes at Wikipedia. We sometimes have polls, but the purpose of a poll is solely to explore community consensus.--Jimbo Wales 01:13, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I completely agree. I rather meant couldn't we have the discussion on whether it was a good idea. We quite often have votes actually, and their purpose is more often than not to thwart any attempt at creating accord. More's the pity. -- Grace Note (sorry, have become logged out for some reason).
 * I actually totally support Jimbo's position on this cat, and now understand his reasoning for it. What strikes me as more ironic is that he is faced by the same problem a lot of users here face - that is, no one actually bothers to digest your arguments before rejecting them. People expect to have every nuance of an idea spelt out for them. Of course Jimbo can use his godlike powers to strike down CfD, but most of us don't have such a luxury. It's a symptom of a wider problem and not one for which I see any easy solution. Soo 10:40, 21 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Okay, let's vote on whether we should have a vote :) Radiant_ &gt;|&lt; 01:22, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it would be completely possible to create a database flag rather than using a category, and it would be perfectly possible to put it all on one giant watchlist. But it would be a lot more time-consuming, for the simple reason that it would require significant developer-side code efforts. An end-user solution is generally better, all things being equal, just because it distributes the workload between the developers (whose work is absolutely necessary for certain tasks, such as a WYSIWYG edit window) and the non-developers (whose work can be used for a more limited range of projects). Developer time is more valuable, therefore non-developer time should be used as much as possible, and categories don't require developer time. &mdash;Simetrical (talk • contribs) 03:55, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Would it not be possible for a bot to maintain the watchlist rather than hard-coding it? Kappa 18:08, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * That's the plan. The thing is, for a bot to efficiently collect a list of people who are living on a regular basis, you need Category:Living people.  No other method in the current MediaWiki software would allow similarly efficient listmaking by an external bot, or so Gmaxwell et al. have said. Of course, I've probably overstated the amount of developer time a software solution would take.  It probably wouldn't be a terribly difficult hack, and the hack could probably be made by someone other than a developer and just plugged in as an extension.  If someone goes ahead and makes such a hack, and demonstrates that it's efficient and bug-free, then we can just mass-remove all Living people categorizations with a bot. &mdash;Simetrical (talk • contribs) 21:21, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The community consensus is that this idea of yours is an annoying waste of time, but you wanted to hide that as much as possible. You insulted the people who disagreed with you by saying that the opinions of a "small group of regulars" of categories for deletion -that is the people who know categories best - was of no value. And the group wasn't that small and it was growing. Choalbaton 22:57, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Category:Year of death missing
This category and this list give us a chance to do something good whether or not you like this category. People who are born before 1875 are dead... and if we don't know when we died we can at least have a marker that categorizes them as dead. My point? Look on the bright side and let's be friends. Personally, I don't particularly care whether we have this or not. gren グレン ? 01:11, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Up to 1875, I went through the list. Some entries had the two birth categories (one with the year of death), others were about 19th century Manitoba MLAs who had their bio written before dying, etc. -- User:Docu

How would this work exactly?
If I understand correctly this is to prevent complaints from living people about the articles about themselves in Wikipedia? I fail to see how having a (very large) category of living people would make those articles "NPOV and properly sourced" (as it says on the cat page). Sure, you can use a bot to check for source sections, and throw the articles that don't have any in Category:Unsourced biographies. That category will have ~10000 articles (at a guesstimate), and a dedicated squad of editors can probably clear that in a couple of months, like Category:Stubs was cleared. But making it NPOV is considerably more trouble than that. Radiant_ &gt;|&lt; 01:21, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * For example, we can highlight changes to articles about living people on recent changes (because they are a more likely magnet for harmful subtle vandalism), we can have the content filtering scripts act more aggressively on such articles (i.e. sound alarms about the word 'pedophile' where we wouldn't alarm on its insertion elsewhere), and we can also use metal based robots to audit for 'negative language' in combination with 'lack of citations' and highlight articles for our massive horde of meat-based robots to actually go fix. Really the hard issue isn't with the first hit of running around fixing them as you point out thats just a matter of a few months work, it's more an issue of the ongoing maintenance. --Gmaxwell 01:41, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Is there a technical reason that "living" isn't just a yes/no field in the persondata template? I'm not trying to re-open the can of worms Jimbo closed. I'm just curious, partly because I'm trying to figure out whether meta-data templates like that would be useful in wikisource (where i've been spending most of my time lately.) Derex 01:51, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * It could be, and possibly should be... But it would not be useful for the proposed applications because there currently is no low computational complexity ways to find articles with yes/no/null in that field. .. Unless you consider reading and parsing the entire current text of Wikipedia to be computationally cheap. :) --Gmaxwell 02:13, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Subcategorization suggestion
I don't like the idea of subcategorizing by initial. It is a practice that is frowned upon in our categorization guidelines (the first example of a bad category name is we mention is Category:Musicians whose first name starts with M). If we are to have these categories, I would suggest making these subcategories of Category:People by nationality under each country there would be something like Category:French people by mortality or hopefully some better word which I can't think of off-hand. This sub-category would have at least two categories: Living French people and Dead French people. Articles so categorized would be in addition to whatever other French people categories the articles belong in. Living French people would be a subdirectory of Living People by Nationality and Dead French people would be a subdirectory of Dead People by Nationality. Both of those (and Missing people?) would be subdirectories of People by mortality, which would be a subdirectory of People. Having this done by nationality might also be useful because the laws of some countries probably require more vigilance than others.

Another possibility if this is a purely administrative category is to have it linked ONLY to the talk page of articles. This is in keeping with other administrative categories. This might be a middle path that would satisfy those of us that don't find this to be a useful encyclopedia category.

One suggestion. Could there be an explanation or link at the top of the page explaining why this is needed. Why are we expecting people to search for this information? It should be at the top of this page. I came to this discussion late, and I still don't understand the issues. Thanks. -- Samuel Wantman 01:57, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I would strongly support subcatting by nationality, because that would allow people from a certain country to easily locate the articles about their countrymen, which arguably they are more knowledgeable about. Radiant_ &gt;|&lt; 01:59, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I think that subcategorizing is a mistake. It'll create lots of little boxes and complicate the effort. Editors will argue whether someone belongs to this or that nationality. It will increase to difficulty of categorizing by an order of magnitiude. The category, like all categories, is sorted alphabetically. That's enough. -Will Beback 02:15, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Plus you'd have arguments about peoples' nationality, so probably a bad idea. In my opinion, this category justs looks odd and is going to cause a lot of head scratching for ordinary readers. I understand that living peoples articles need to be monitored for legal reasons, but is there are not a way of doing that invisibly with software somehow built in that could perhaps search for controversial words? Arniep 03:09, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't the "It may cause controversy, it's a bad idea" argument really holds. Most categorisations are going to be argued about (case in point!). If we make sure we have some rule of thumb for what we consider nationality (ie, whether we're talking about current or of birth), then arguments should be easy to resolve by looking at the rule of thumb. -- Kirby1024 12:57, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I think we're better off (under this schema) going with a supercat that we can hide from general readership, although it will make maintenance somewhat more difficult because your semi-casual editor won't necessarily notice a bio without the cat. See above for options being discussed about this, whether or not they're feasible right now... -- nae'blis (talk) 03:09, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

A template on the talk page
How about a template on the talk page that states the standards for biographies of living people spelled out. It would also automatically categorize the TALK page into an administrative category called "Biographies of living people". I don't see much point in having this linked up to any categories for users to browse through. -- Samuel Wantman 04:42, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I think this makes more sense than a normal category. -Will Beback 05:51, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * genius! Arniep 13:23, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

A downside of my suggestion is that Related changes will not bring up changes to the articles, only changes to the talk pages. Is there some way to get around this? -- Samuel Wantman 20:44, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

More questions and ideas
I'm not pleased with the way this was slammed down upon us—a little tact and a little explanation goes a long way—but I do think it is a good idea, and one that we should explore in more depth.


 * What I think we should be displeased with is the dysfunction of AfD, in which instead of a serious discussion about the right way to do something, a new idea is met with a deletion debate with a rapid fire set of votes with no discussion.--Jimbo Wales 15:06, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * How about some kind of Jury-service type thing to stop the same people hanging round the afd and cfd discussions, i.e. if you don't vote in cfds or afds a certain amount of times a month, you don't get to edit, or some kind of rota system? Maybe there could also be a rule that you need to make a comment of say at least 50 words to discourage no explanation and copy-cat "voting". Arniep 17:59, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree that subcatting is a bad idea, for the same reasons subcatting Category:Disambiguation is a bad idea; it's not meant for browsing; it's easiest to use by automation, and subcatting just makes it harder to do anything that requires affecting every item in a cat. (BTW, in discussing the disambiguation category, I asked Aevar if there's more server load for having many thousands of items in a category -- he said no. It's only harder for human users, not for the machines.)

We get so many new articles every day, and not all editors are going to be aware of this category. Could we use an automated process (bot, special page, periodic report from a dump, whatever) to flag new articles that might belong to this category? Perhaps when an editor adds a category that's somewhere in the tree under Category:People? Then a human editor could check it and see whether it belongs in Category:Living people -- otherwise I just see this getting further and further behind....

Perhaps at some point after it's well-populated, it would be possible to run a report to cross this category with Special:Unwatchedpages, to find out how many of our living-persons bios do not have watchers.

One question is, why don't we put this category on Talk pages, like we do with so much other administrative nonsense? (I mean, not even featured articles are noted on the main article.) I can't think it would make any of the automation we're talking about harder, and it would eliminate a lot of the annoyance of having a category that's not useful to the reader in the category box. Anyway, my 2 cents. &mdash; Catherine\talk 05:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Placement of this category
Shouldn't this category be inserted alphabetically in the category links, not just placed at the end? It appears to be just dropped at the end of the categories in almost all cases.
 * I dropped all the ones I put at the end, just because it didn't feel right to have it in the middle. I'm usually an ABC fanatic, but having "Living People" in the middle of accomplishments just didn't make sense. -- Jjjsixsix (talk)/(contribs) @ 06:14, 21 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Many people have Category:Persons born in xyear. Perhaps Category:Living people should go after this. --malber 15:35, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

scope
where does an article like Bill Frist medical school experiments controversy or John Kerry military service controversy fit in? these are not _biographies_ of living people, but they are _about_ living people. if the point of this category is to prevent libel, then articles about scandals involving living figures are just as likely, or more so, to have defamation than the main biographies. do these get tagged? how about the ten or so Clinton scandal articles? Accusations of rape against U.S. presidents? All of these articles were created to stop the main biographies from being swamped with scandal-mongering. Derex 15:07, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * IMHO, split off sub-articles from a biography article have just as much need for being here as full biography articles. In a way, they are still part of the original article, but just cut out for space/organizational reasons.  And you are right, they are subject to nasty vandalism. - TexasAndroid 16:39, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Good point. I agree that these subarticles need to be included in the category.  --Aude ( talk | contribs ) 16:58, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living_people
I think Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living_people is very useful for monitoring and paying particular attention to recent changes to these articles. --Aude ( talk | contribs ) 17:16, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Although, if you were clever, you could remove the category in your libel-inserting edit . . . yeah, I know, WP:BEANS. &mdash;Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:34, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I think someone else mentiond that removal of the category is exactly something that can be easily flagged for by the behind the scenes bots. So if such a flag/alert is set up, then removing the category actually becomes one of the best things a would-be vandal could do, as that would bring instant attention to the article. - TexasAndroid 14:40, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
 * This makes no sense to me. If we can flag things 'behind the scenes' for vandalism, why are we even trying to implement this 'administrative category'? Use the Persondata to tell which articles need to be 'vetted' after changes, and be done with it...yes? No? -- nae'blis (talk) 15:38, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Position of cat
Looking at the link above reveals that at least two people are sorting this cat into different positions. Since this cat will be widely spread, it seems, even to me, that there is a case for uniformity here, to make future edits easier.

The two choices are The latter choice seems ingenious, and easy for future maintenance; but we ought to have a discussion of suggested placement, at least. Septentrionalis 17:44, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Alphabetical, under L.
 * Second, where the death cat will eventually go.


 * The birth and death cats (e.g. 1612 births | 1672 deaths) are in alphabetical order, though coincidentally usually are the first listed. I'm inserting them alphabetically, though a random spot check shows most are just inserting the cat last in the list, while I found some that put it first (regardless of any alphabetical or other order).  --Aude ( talk | contribs ) 17:55, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Define Administrative Category
I think there should be a notice or banner at the top of this Talk page which labels this as an Administrative Category and explains (or links to) what that means. It has been mentioned that's what this category is, but no explanation of that. (SEWilco 19:15, 20 January 2006 (UTC))
 * I've thrown an HTML comment in for now to stop the kneejerk CfDs, but a template of this sort might be useful (see also Category:GFDL images, etc). -- nae'blis (talk) 20:38, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The comment only repeats there is an administrative purpose. What is this purpose, and how are editors supposed to help accomplish the purpose?  Without knowing the purpose I also don't know here whether to suggest division into people who have already been confirmed to be alive this year or those who live on certain continents.  (SEWilco 07:36, 22 January 2006 (UTC))
 * Search through Gmaxwell's comments on this talk page. He appears to understand the intents the best.  Basically he talked about things like using the contents as a source list for a number of background processes.  He said that the Recent changes page could flag changes to entries in this category to appear differently.  That allerts could be sent to certain people when certain terms were used on one of these pages.  (Pedophile, fraud, etc.)  I think he mentioned one or two other possible uses, but first they need a single central listing of all the people to flag/watch/etc, and the category system apparently will give them that. - TexasAndroid 16:36, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Renaming the category
Jimbo has stated that he's not locked into the name of the cat, just the cat itself. The idea of a different name has been kinda dropped in the last 24 hours, but I wanted to at least discuss the possibility, even if only to get the idea shot down once and for all. Or maybe a perfect alternate name will be proposed. Who knows? :)

So does anyone have any thoughts on the name of this thing? Should we leave it named as is, or is there a good alternative that is less confusing to the casual obsever and/or more clear that this is not something that can be used for navigation?

I don't have any brilliant ideas myself, and in absence of a good alternative, I think we will need to live with the current name. But I wanted to at least make a community effort to see if there was a better name to be had. - TexasAndroid 21:32, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I would be open to the idea of another name for the category, but can't think of anything better either. But, if I were notable enough to have an article written about me, not sure I'd like to see it tagged with "Living people". (as opposed to "Dead people"?)  Alternatively, would it be somehow possible to hide the category (possibly also other administrative categories) on the article page, with some variation of class="hiddenStructure" in monobook.css?  Though maybe it's too complicated and preferable anyway to have the category visible, for us to maintain them and know which articles need the cat added, without having to look at the wiki code.  --Aude ( talk | contribs ) 21:52, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * What is so insulting about "Living people?" Seems like a statement of fact ("I'm not dead yet!") --malber 22:02, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Call it Category:* or some other symbol, it's short and doesn't make any assertions. Kappa 22:15, 20 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, the category is administratively very useful and it's indeed fact. Though, the category name makes me think (maybe it's just me) of "Dying for Dollars" (now "You Bet Their Life") - a celebrity dead pool, and sounds slightly awkward with the way it's worded. --Aude ( talk | contribs ) 22:24, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Parent Category
I have not seen support for this as a normal category. Its purpose, as stated by Jimbo is for monitoring biographies of people who are alive. As such, I was bold, and moved it to be a subcategory of Category:Wikipedia administration. I don't think this is a controversial move, or am I missing something? -- Samuel Wantman 02:01, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Purpose, will it work, importance of biographies, subcategory suggestions
From what I've gathered on the current talk page and the deleted "voting" version, the sole, or at least overriding, purpose of the category is to flag articles on recent changes so that vandalism/errors can be more effectively noticed. I'm not sure that the category would accomplish this. Vandalism is a problem on almost all types of articles (some science/technology articles are frequently vandalized). People watching recent changes (hopefully) will look at all suspicious edits, not just ones that were made to biographies of living people. If those people do concentrate on such articles, we are more likely to miss vandalism on other articles because there are a limited number of people watching recent changes and not all edits, even suspicious edits, are checked.

Are biographies of living people more important than articles about science, cities or history? Why do they get special treatment? Do they really attract that much more vandalism than other types of articles? Also, why are dead people excluded? They are also a vandalism target. People against Columbus Day may vandalize the Columbus article, a proponent of southern rights may vandalize the Abraham Lincoln article (which is currently protected because of vandalism). A "biography" category that includes the living and dead would make more sense. For those already tagged as biography stubs, couldn't such a category be added automatically?

I suspect that vandalism is not so focused on biographies of living people as to justify this category. I think that it is being created because living people are more likely to complain or threaten/file lawsuits about such articles, and that vandalism/errors on these pages are more likely to be found by outsiders looking to criticize Wikipedia. If this is the case, it should be admitted. If not, the true purpose should be given.

As for subcategorizing, I would think by the letter of the last/only name, by year of birth, by date (month and day) of birth, by occupation or by nationality would be some logical choices. As for disagreements on whether someone belongs in a certain subcategory, the person could be added to more than one if there is a justification for it. People that have an unknown date or year of birth would be added to an unknown subcategory. Also, we should decide whether or not it should be subcategorized, as some are advocating that it should not.

If we want an easy way to identify potential vandalism, there should be a recent changes page that lists only edits by anonymous users, or edits by anonymous users with no edit summary. No offense is meant to anonymous users. They make many good contributions, and most editors were anonymous at first. It's just that a higher proportion of such edits are vandalism. -- Kjkolb 04:09, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The point about monitoring biographies is not just that the subjects are likely to complain, they are also real people who can be hurt by misinformation about them. Kappa 04:14, 21 January 2006 (UTC)


 * When I monitor RC, I'll mainly look for edits by anons. (especially those with blue talk page, indicating possible past vandalism or spam warnings). I'll also look at edits by accounts with red user page links, suggesting they are perhaps new accounts.  When I'm watching RC-living people, I will scrutinize each edit more (anon., red user page, or not) and more critically consider the factuality and verifiability of the edits.
 * I will still patrol for general RC, and RC on my vandalism watchlists which includes more than just living people. Of course, if there was a way to improve the recent changes system, such as hiding vandalism edits that have alreadt been reverted, I'm all for it. --Aude ( talk | contribs ) 04:19, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

So does this mean...
We have to add cat:living people to EVERY SINGLE person? Imagine the task for current sportsmen/women, who are all alive. Rogerthat 08:23, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes. Radiant_ &gt;|&lt; 12:02, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Thereby performing wikipedia's major secondary function: Giving people useless tasks to fill their day that don't cause any harm. (Sort of like what I'm doing right now, come to think of it.)- DavidWBrooks 17:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Surely they could do something else tedious like starting up stubs for WP:AFL - if you want to do that, feel free. But this is just a waste of time, and boosts people's edit counts.  R o  gerthat  Talk 09:32, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Man, oh man, after categorizing the entire Oakland Athletics roster under living people, I flat out gave up. I'll wait for a bot to do it, thank you much. -- Jjjsixsix (talk)/(contribs) @ 04:25, 26 January 2006 (UTC)


 * When I saw someone add this to a page, I had to say out loud: "What the heck, this category is BAD" - Stoph 22:35, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
 * To be candid, I reverted the category on one article on my watchlist the first time I saw it because I thought it was vandalism. 23skidoo 21:19, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Is the name ok?
Just wondering if I may start adding entries by bot? -- User:Docu


 * I suggest care. Up in the subcategorization section, Jimbo said that using a bot to fill the category needed discussion first.  I have no idea what discussion needs to take place, and he was responding to my offhand comment that someone would at some point launch a bot to fill the category.  I made that comment because it seemed the logical next step towards filling the category.  But Jimbo made his response, so he appears to think there is some other concerns that need to be discussed before a bot launches on this effort. - TexasAndroid 16:27, 22 January 2006 (UTC)


 * The naming of the category seems to be set and the category already has taken quite a scope. Well, but I suppose I can wait ;-) Anyways, people born 1875-1920 probably need manual checking anyways. -- User:Docu

I'm still alive
Just sayin'Kalmia 10:03, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I was worried. Is everyone else alive? If so, please add yourself to this category. -- Kjkolb 01:37, 22 January 2006 (UTC)


 * You may be alive, but you're not encyclopedic. Sorry.  —Michael Z. 2006-01-30 10:10 Z 

People lost at sea
People lost at sea are disappeared. Are they dead or possibly living? --User:Carie 15:46, 22 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I think the suggestion above is the one to follow, i.e. follow the person's legal status. --Whouk (talk) 16:14, 22 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I wouldn't include them similar to "disappeared people".- -- User:Docu


 * Beneath this stone lies John Mound / Lost at sea and never found. :) Wahkeenah 05:33, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
 * What if they were lost at sea as a 19-year-old 100 years ago? Technically they could still be alive.  R o  gerthat  Talk 09:42, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Perhaps there should be a "presumed dead" category?
 * The "Living people" category may be contentious for some missing in action soldiers and airmen (though few have articles), for some religious figures who purportedly never died (Rajneesh, et al.), and for Elvis Presley. On the other hand, it gives Wikipedia a way of indicating that Francisco Franco is still dead.


 * While Wikipedia has scooped the world on reporting deaths before, other biographies will surely linger for months, even years (if WP lasts that long) with the "Living people" designation. Perhaps we should also create an "obit-watch", a team of editors who review the daily obituary to make updates to articles. I think "Living people" is too assertive. What we really mean is "presumed  living", "alive at last word", or "not known to be dead".  How about "People who might be alive"? -Will Beback 10:22, 25 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Again - what's their legal status? In the UK, for example, after seven years (I think) a family can apply for a missing relative to be declared legally dead. Exceptions were made so that the families of victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami could do this sooner. I would imagine (although I'd welcome a lawyer's correction) that "the person defamed was legally dead at the time" is a reasonable defence against a charge of libel. --Whouk (talk) 10:05, 25 January 2006 (UTC)


 * There is already a category titled Category:Possibly living people. Personally I think it's appropriate for some of the 1890-1910 where the article doesn't state the person is dead and there hasn't been any recent news, e.g.
 * Otis_Barton Category:1899_births
 * Hugo_Bleicher Category:1899_births
 * Zacharie_Mayani Category:1899_births
 * Clara_Muhammad Category:1899_births
 * Roy_Oxley Category:1899_births
 * As "Dorothy_C._Stratton" mentions in "2004", I'd add it to Category:Living people. It's moot now, as she died September 17, 2006 at the age of 107.
 * For Category:People lost at sea, neither Category:Living people nor Category:Possibly living people should probably be applied.
 * Those missing in action, could probably be categorized as Category:Disappeared people. -- User:Docu

Subcategories A-L, M-Z
As they were empty, and, IMHO unsuitable given the category feature allowing to select all entries starting with a given letter (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Living_people&from=L ), I deleted them. -- User:Docu

tagging categories
I've noticed several categories get tagged for the Living People category. Ex: Category:Current national leaders. Does this serve any useful purpose? I mean from the standpooint of those like Gmaxwell who appear to fully understand the intended admin uses of this cat. - TexasAndroid 16:32, 22 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Personally, I wouldn't add these as subcategories, unless articles are add to both categories. Otherwise it would split out a small set of 200 articles. -- User:Docu

LastChecked template
I haven't read all of the above discussion, so maybe someone has proposed this already. Since the main purpose of this category is so that people can systematically examine "high risk" biographies (people who are alive or those who are otherwise likely to be vandalized) set up a template on the talk page saying "This biography was last checked on Month Year". By putting (or updating) this template on the talk page you are asserting that you've read the biography and there are 1) no pontentially hurtfull claims on the page or 2) any potentially hurtfull claims on the page are properly cited and have a NPOV wording. This allows people to check articles that haven't been checked in a long time, and subdivides (by last checked date) the large number of pages into smaller, more manageable chunks. You would also, of course, need a "NeverChecked" version of the template. That's just my opinion of the most logical, usefull, and unobtrusive manner of dealing with this issue. Matt 16:58, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Categorization
As I have seen no rationale for making this anything other than an administrative category, I have removed this category (once again) from being a subcategory of Category:People. I have done this because I don't want any user who comes across this category to have the idea that this category is for browsing, and thereby encourage the creation of any other huge categories. If subcategories are to be added to this category, they should also be purely administrative categories. Otherwise, it may confuse the user as to what this category is about. I'm hoping one or two things can happen to this category: Would there be any objections if this were brought up for RENAMING at CfD? If not, what do peopel think the best name would be, and should it be the article or the talk page? :-- Samuel Wantman 20:09, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) It gets renamed to some thing like Category:* so that it does not look like a browsing category on article pages. If this is unacceptable, perhaps it could be something like Category:Wikibio or Category:Watched bio.
 * 2) It can be moved to the talk page. Perhaps a bot could be created to assemble a list of watched bios from the categories on the talk page.
 * The style of the name Category:Articles lacking sources - which suggests it is for editors rather than readers - tempts me with Category:Articles about living people, but that does still make it look like a category for editors to browse. --Whouk (talk) 22:47, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Category:* is by far the best suggestion. The more this dreadful innovation can be obscured the better. Choalbaton 22:53, 23 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, by that logic surely you'd want Category:​. If you added it before or after any other categories, it would just add an extra pipe and nothing else.  That is, unless you use IE, in which case it may be a box or question mark, but still not particularly obtrusive. (For techy sorts, the category name is a zero-width space, U+200B.) &mdash;Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:33, 24 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Ugh. Adding a stray clickable character to the list would not at all be acceptable from a user interface perspective. And what of the dozens of other administrative categories? Should every article have a bottom that looks like *!@$%^&(, etc? If you really think it needs to be hidden, feel free to file a feature request to hide membership on article pages... although I wouldn't support such a feature at this time. --Gmaxwell 21:04, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Bands (multiple people, musical groups)
There are several bands in which all of its members are alive. Include them? --User:Carie 15:42, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I would say no. This is strictly an administrative category. It should only contain articles about individuals.  If the members of the band that are still alive are notable enough to merit their own articles, then those articles (about the individuals) should be included, but not the article about the band.  --rogerd 17:26, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
 * So we don't need to worry about band members' reputations if they are not notable enough for their own articles? Kappa 17:49, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I'd say that the category should be used. It might be misleading to readers if some of the band have died, but certainly if all members are alive, and especially if there aren't separate articles for the individual members on their own. --Whouk (talk) 19:26, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Per the discussion above about 'controversy' or 'event' articles about living people, I'd say it should probably be added. But we haven't really nailed down the scope of this category yet... I'm beginning to prefer Category:Crap that could get us sued. -- nae'blis (talk) 15:48, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

There is Category:Multiple people. Musical groups could be listed there. --malber 17:05, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
 * That kinda defeats the point of having one big watchlist. Kappa 17:08, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

A task for the a-nones
Instead of allowing them to vandalize randomly, users consisting only of an IP address should be restricted to the task of adding this category to those 70,000 articles or whatever it is. That should keep those imps busy for a decade or so. >:) Wahkeenah 00:11, 24 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Hmm. You need to pick a harder task for them.. this will be mostly done in a couple of months. :) --Gmaxwell 21:05, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Stupidest list ever
Anybody ever thought that this list is so useless? Why not include all 8 billions of people in the world in this list? Why not include ourselves (since we're living too, AFAIK). If only famous people are to be included, what does it take to be famous? 1 appearance on TV? 2? Damn! --Eadl 13:08, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
 * This category isn't intended for use by readers, only editors. The idea is that we have to watch those articles more closely to prevent these people having inappropriate things written about them. The category only includes people who already have article, and for guidelines on which people get to have articles, see WP:BIO. Kappa 13:20, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
 * So this category is created for legal reasons, because dead people can't be libelled? Ughh, I'm feeling sick to my stomach.  -- Cyde Weys  06:41, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Well you aren't the person on the receiving end of any legal action, Jimbo is. But certainly misinformation about recently-dead people could cause a great deal of emotional damage to relatives etc, that's why I believe that we should increase it's scope so that these people can be watched as well. Kappa 07:21, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Actually, nobody's on the receiving end of any legal action, as far as I understand it, because Wikipedia is basically a webhost. It could be subpoena'd to provide info about people who made libellous edits, but I'm pretty sure it could only be sued if it failed to promptly take down the libel when informed of it.  Likewise, Geocities isn't responsible for everything some idiot puts up there.  They'd go broke otherwise.  The issue, therefore, is more Wikipedia's reputation than its wallet. &mdash;Simetrical (talk • contribs) 03:49, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry, the above excuse makes zero sense and IMO all this has done is made it extremely difficult for us to AFD listcruft. Incidentally, if people insist on contributing names to this silliness could they please remember to fill in the edit summaries? Thanks. 23skidoo 12:50, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm so glad this category exists. If only there was a category for "people with names" as well, that way everything would be clear to me.  Just looking at the first sentence of every bio is just too difficult - e.g. Gunnar Malmquist (21 February 1893 – 27 June 1982) was a Swedish astronomer. Is he dead or alive? it's all so difficult!  /// Slumgum 21:55, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Well for me I have now seen the light. I'm now in favor of loading Wikipedia with the most useless information possible. Let's get those servers busting at the seams. A year a go an article like List of films with unexposed contents (I'm not making that one up) would have been darn near speedied. Now it's winning an AFD. I also had a pure crystal ball article up for AFD and people seem to unanimously want to keep that. And we have this category. I think we should restrict deletion to only those articles of the grossest libel and let things run rampant for awhile. 23skidoo 16:21, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
 * What do you have against unexposed contents (i.e. MacGuffins)? That's certainly a valid article and is in no way comparable to this silly category.  -- Cyde Weys  20:36, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Worst category ever. How does this supposed to help (nobody is going to search through the massice list to check all the edits) and it certainly doesnt help similar articles. Just get rid of it. Im sick of seeing it listed on the bottom every page.

Articles to be added to category
All articles in Category:Births by year (1910-2006) except those also in category: Please suggest more. -- User:Docu
 * (1) Category:Deaths by year (and subcategories)
 * (2) Category:Possibly living people
 * (3) Category:Disappeared people
 * (4) Category:People lost at sea
 * Category:Deaths by cause (some of the subcategories)


 * I did some extensive testing adding the category to subcategories of Category:1990s births and 2000s births. Before addition, the presence of (1-4) was checked. Afterwards, I used the catscan tool to check for any overlap with "Deaths by cause" (which didn't show any overlap, except one article that is to go in both).


 * If someone would review the additions and suggest improvements, I'd be glad. Once a decision on renaming is made, we may want to proceed with Category:1980s births. -- User:Docu

Corporations and Companies can also sue
My understanding of the law says that Corporations and Companies are legal entities and can also sue for libel or defamation. Is this true and should'nt we have a similar category like Existing legal entity? Lumos3 13:40, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

nominate for inclusion in
Category:Very large categories possible solutions, no don't go there! :: Kevinalewis  :  (Talk Page)  14:27, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

oppose. it's more underpopulated than overpopulated, IMO. -User:Carie


 * I was being facetious - certainly has that potential though - will go the way of overpopulation very soon!. :: Kevinalewis  :  (Talk Page)  17:46, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
 * It's not overpopulated if it's performing the function that is intended. See discussion above about why it would be unhelpful to split this into subcategories. -- nae'blis (talk) 16:17, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

The point?

 *  " Its purpose is to help Wikipedia editors improve the quality of biographies of living persons (WP:BLP), to ensure they remain neutral (WP:NPOV) and maintain factual accuracy (WP:AD)." 

Do we not wish to also improve all other articles in this way? What is the point of this category? Living persons will die at a higher rate than we will be able to remove this category from their biographies. Eventually this will be renamed category:dead people whose category hasn't been updated yet. —Michael Z. 2006-01-28 16:45 Z 


 * The point is that the people who are the subjects may suffer personal harm from innapropriate information, so we should watch their articles more carefully than a pokemon article or an album. Kappa 17:33, 28 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Nice in theory. Do you think there are enough administrative people to watch 57,000 articles with any kind of regularity? Because some loser could add libellous things to almost anyone's article the way it works.--T. Anthony 09:32, 31 January 2006 (UTC)


 * That sounds very reasonable. Will you update the description to make this clear?  —Michael Z. 2006-01-28 17:53 Z 


 * OK it now says " for the sake of the subjects, it is particularly important to ensure that articles are NPOV and properly sourced". Kappa 18:30, 28 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I've rewritten it so it more explicitly states this purpose. —Michael Z. 2006-01-29 20:40 Z 
 * It's obviously important that all articles are well-sourced and verifiable. It also makes complete sense that if we're going to go through them checking for it, this is a good place to start. Demi T/C 06:24, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Bad category
This category is no good -- too big, and thus useless. Badagnani 18:57, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Useless
I think this cat. is useless... Go to quick deletation... fizzerbear 20:03, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Agreed. This is possibly the most worthless category EVER! --CFIF 20:16, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Updated list
Today I updated the list of people who have been born but (based on categories) do not appear to be dead. I'm now including things like 'year of death missing' as dead, so the list is somewhat shorter. On the next update I will also exclude people who are already tagged as living.. but right now there are not enough tagged for it to matter much. --Gmaxwell 20:57, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Category rename
I think it's outrageous to propose renaming the category to * in the interest of user friendlyness, and I have a very hard time believing that someone seriously thinks that would work. If you are concerned about a category with is less than completely useful for reader navigation (as opposed to editor work), then you can create a bugzilla ticket for a mediawiki feature which will hide such categorylinks from the articles. However, I would strongly opposed activating such a feature on Wikipedia because we expect a good number of user readers are also editors, and things like cleanup or stub categories are a way we can help rope people in. I doubt anyone is going to be shocked if they click 'living people' and get a huge list. --Gmaxwell 20:57, 29 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I think what you did was inappropriate. Although the suggested rename was stupid it likely would've failed on its own merits.--T. Anthony 01:03, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The point of any of our polls areas is to have a discussion... But we've already been having a discussion here. The 'vote' style of the pages doesn't encourage much discussion, but in most cases it's fine. In this case, it's insufficent because the decisions on this matter are strongly influenced by an often mistaken first impression (like a misunderstanding of the complete scope of the category namespace). By opening that 'vote' the conversation was shifted from the ongoing location (here) to a location which is less productive (because people giving 'votes' rather than talking), where more uninformed people participate, and less informed people participate. In short, the creation of that nomination completely subverted the ongoing discussion. I welcome a discussion on the category name here, but until consensus is formed here we will not be making any such changes.--Gmaxwell 01:24, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The aim is not so much to avoid shocking people as to avoid cluttering the list of categories on each page. Note that a category named "*" would still have the effect of roping in editors, it just wouldn't be in regular users' faces so much. Kappa 01:13, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
 * As far as I can guess hyperlinked * would only cause "what the hecks" from users as they click on it expecting access to the secret cabal page, yet they get this seemingly random list of articles. ... And how are we to get editors to remember that the [[Category:*]] isn't some oddball form of vandalism? .. Also did you read my arguments against this above?  We have many internal use categories... Will the bottoms of our articles eventually look like *!@$%^&(, etc? --Gmaxwell 01:24, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I kind of doubt this category would prevent libel. A huge number of names is unlikely to be monitored that thoroughly Especially as lesser known people, the ones where libellous statements won't get reviewed much, might not even be added. Plus I've heard of suits on behalf of dead people about defaming them. If an article says Leland Hayward was involved in the Kennedy assassination that could also be problemattic. I thought maybe this could have a purpose as "surviving people", old celebrities many think are dead but who are alive, but to deal with libel I think it'd be pointless. Most of the discussion here and there is "this is pointless, but the bosses want it."--T. Anthony 01:39, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
 * It's been working some so far... As pointed out in previous discussions, it's quite useful for focusing our automated as well as human resources. As far as the recently dead, we can (and do) use the '200x deaths' categories for those, since there are only a few we need to worry about. Recently dead is something of a concern but they tend to gather a little less libel from what we can tell.. In anycase, 'I don't think it will work' isn't much of an argument when you've got almost every person who works on Wikipedia full-time saying that it will be useful. :) --Gmaxwell 01:54, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The mass of people can be wrong. And if you check I'm among the most active "new" users. Still even the mass argument doesn't work because I don't see most everyone who works here saying it will be useful. I see Jimbo, you, and a few others. A great deal of the discussion here is people thinking it's dumb. A few of the supporters even just seem to say "Jimbo thinks it is good and Jimbo knows best" which isn't a valid endorsement but an argument from a fallible authority.--T. Anthony 02:04, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
 * If you look carefully, I'm not talking about the 'masses' I'm talking about the group of a couple of people for whom this project is their full time job. These are the people who believe we need the category, and are some of the people who are already using it. As far as the 'argument from authority' goes, the fact of the matter is that Wikipedia is one of the most important things in Jimbo life, probably coming in just shy of his family and such... and we can count on him to be around a decade from now, still struggling with the challenges here, long after most of the newish users who oppose this have grown bored with this project or burned out. Alone that would be enough to give his perspective extra credibility. Once we combine that with his long tenure and his history of good judgement, there can be no excuse for simply dismissing his position offhand. In any case, there are quite a few people other than Jimbo who support this category and whom are already making use of it. --Gmaxwell 02:41, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
 * And do you honestly think that the people who work here is as a full time job will inspect 57,000 names on any kind of regular or semi-regular basis? That "it's worked so far", gee a whole ten days, proves nothing. That a few people concur with Jimbo is even less meaningful. Jimbo is the guy who has a whole Category:Wikipedians who trust Jimbo devoted to him. He is the creator and deserving of respect for that, but for him to get consenting voices is unlikely to be too hard.--T. Anthony 03:32, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The renaming discussion is merely an indication of the wide dissatisfaction of many about the prospect of a purely administrative category being visible on article pages. I strongly believe that the article pages should be optimized for readers - not for editors or administrators, since the vast majority of people will be reading, not editing. Thus things like this "living people" category should not appear on article pages for most readers. As I said above, I don't know the mechanism of categories, but if it is necessary for a category to be visible on the article page in order for it to exist, then I submit that some other mechanism must be found for the administrative purposes that this category was created for. I.e. it is untenable to have categories serving both an administrative and a navigation aid if categories that are useless for navigation are going to be introduced. - Hayne 02:56, 30 January 2006 (UTC)


 * The category is less useless for navigation than many other categories we have, even some which are intended for navigation. We have a great many administrative cats such as disambig, the various stubs, several forms of cleanup, controversial topics, and many others. At least no english speaker would ever be surprised by what they get when the click 'living people'. Your post makes it sound like your believe that this category causes serious navigation problems compared to the rest of the category issues... If thats the case you would be mistaken, because we have much more serious problems. For example, almost every article is reachable from most of out top level category subject, it's meaningless to ask users to select history vs technology if they get to the same articles either way. --Gmaxwell 23:14, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
 * My position applies equally to all those other categories as well - they are not something that aids the reader. Hence they should not appear at the bottom of articles, otherwise they add noise to that section of the page which should be reserved for links that aid the reader in getting to related articles. You keep referring to the top-level categories, but I don't care all that much about them. I am (at least at the moment) concerned only with the reader who has come to the bottom of an article and now is looking at the categories there as signposts to guide them to where they might want to go next. I think this whole thing is bringing to a head the problems with trying to make categories serve two masters (administrative purposes & navigation). It seems that two separate mechanisms are needed for these two quite different needs. - Hayne 03:26, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I think administrative cats (disambig, copyedit, wikify, etc) do cause confusion for readers, it's just that none of those others are on 14,000 highly-trafficked articles. This matter has brought the matter to a head in a very visible way, and if the developers can find it in their hearts to provide a user Preference for enabling/disabling "administrative categories", which should be in a separate section of the article (and disabled for non-logged-in users), that would alleviate a lot of the tension over this. I know zilch about Bugzilla or I'd file the request myself; also, maybe somebody already has. -- nae'blis (talk) 15:55, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to point out that it was Jimbo who said we could discuss renaming this category if we wanted, and the discussion started on this page. I don't understand why the process was short-circuited. This unilateral action only has the effect of making the discussion more contentious. I see no reason why this category could not be renamed. -- Samuel Wantman 06:39, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I too want to know why it was short circuted. Someone on this page suggested * someone else said okay and then it was taken off this page to a vote. Thats what I call short circuted. As far as a rename, Sure lets discuss... No one has yet countered my point about * being more confusing to both readers, reviewers, and editors and that *!@$%^&( at the bottom of pages would simply be unacceptable. --Gmaxwell 23:14, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

The discussion is on Categories_for_deletion/Log/2006_January_23. Please don't remove the notice from the category until the discussion on CfD is closed, nor delete the discussion there. -- User:Docu
 * Docu, there is almost no discussion there.. most people there are not even bothering to read the points made there, much less the discussion over here. Its utter nonsense. Mass hysteria != consensus --Gmaxwell 03:24, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * You can't make your opinion law. Added to that most are opposing the rename and few are supporting any kind of delete. (I am and reading the stuff here only made me stronger in doing so, but few others are)--T. Anthony 03:27, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * What do you mean? --Gmaxwell 03:41, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * That the rename vote was going to fail anyway so your crossing out votes was unnecessary pettiness. This is in fact correct. The rename vote has failed, strongly so, and your crossing out votes was unnecessary. On another issue I'm wondering what categories are here that have 14436+ articles with 57,000 planned. Still as it will stay, and stay with this name, there's nothing to do but wait until it gets replaced with a more plausible/sensible idea. Personally I think that'll happen pretty soon, maybe in less than a month, but I'm not for certain when. (There is no "if" on this matter)--T. Anthony 14:49, 31 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I support renaming the category and I believe that * would be less confusing. My reasons are (1) a single symbol is less noticable, so will gather less interest (2) A symbol gives us the opportunity to redefinte the meaning to something like "Articles that carry a high risk of libel". That would be a productive change because we run the substantial risk of libel from any article is substantially about a controversial person, not just their main biography article.  We could also consider adding the same symbol to other high vandalism articles, such as those linked from the main page, or those mentioned in a slashdot article, or an article about another topic with highly controversial figures.  We are no less at risk for libel if Kenneth Lay is libeled at the Enron page than at his own page. (3) A symbol is less likely to encourage people to attempt to add subcategories.  As to claims that a single character will create confusion - I think that is easily dispelled as soon as they follow the link and see the explanation about why the symbol is there. As to the argument by Gmaxwell about multiple single character categories - you are making a slippery slope argument.  Until/unless someone is proposing a lot of other single character categories, I am not sure it is productive to spend much time worrying about that problem.  For the record though, my opinion is that if we ever need more single-character categories for administrative reasons, we could still add them without unduly confusing the reader.  Perhaps in the medium term a software solution would make this cleaner, by allowing something like a "Cat-Admin:*" which would not show up on screen. Johntex\talk 02:07, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
 * May a libel suit legally be brought only by a living person? What about by a relative or other  party acting on behalf of a deceased person?  If a libel liability is not limited to situations involving the living, the category might have to be re-thought.logologist|Talk 02:52, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
 * According to the Wikipedia article on "libel," it may be "a malicious defamation... tending to blacken the memory of one who is dead." (My emphasis.)  logologist|Talk 03:28, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
 * The fact that a libel suit may be brought by the estate of a deceased person (and someone else here has said perhaps even by a corporation) is one of the reasons that watching a category that consists of articles about living people may not be our most productive course of action. We may want to include a few deceased people whose pages may still be vandalized, like Martin Luther King, Jr..  We may want to include controversial companies, such as Enron, or even controversial institutions that contain a lot of information about prominent people, such as Supreme Court of the United States.  Conversely, we may NOT want to include all living people.  That is why a single character name for the chategory gives us more flexibility. Johntex\talk 03:50, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Number of articles

 * As per January 30, 2006, 10:56 AM UTC, this category includes 14436 articles. J I P  | Talk 10:56, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

People already flagged as living people
Can GMaxwell please amend his excellent list to remove those already in Category:Living people? 20.138.246.89 16:26, 30 January 2006 (UTC)


 * One might want to focus on people born before 1910. For those, I'm currently not assigning categories based on the birth catgory. BTW I flagged living people in Category:Centenarians (1896-1905) and Category:Supercentenarians (born before 1896). -- User:Docu
 * Sure. I'll update it tonight with the tagged people removed. I'm pleased to see we have enough tagged to make this worthwhile. :) --Gmaxwell 23:00, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Great Idea
Hey lets make a Category:Wikipedia Article page. That way we can make sure there is no vandalism by checking all the pages all the time! Zzz345zzz
 * We already can do that, see the recent changes button on the left. The problem is that vandalism isn't equally damaging in all articles. --Gmaxwell 03:19, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The only reason this would be useless is if it weren't going to be put to use. I don't know about you, but I'm guessing Jimbo is the kind of guy who can get an improvement effort off the ground. Demi T/C 06:35, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

The wrong solution to the problem
I gather Mr Wales's justification for his ukase that this category must exist is to prevent a repetition of the defamation debacle involving the guy whose name I forget, the one who did not kill President Kennedy. I am reminded of the Satirewire piece about the US solving the Middle East crisis by parachuting cats into Belgium - there is no visible connection between the problem and the solution. If Wikipedia wants to prevent irresponsible, crank and defamatory edits to articles about living people, it ought set some standards about who can be a Wikipedia editor and enforce them. Wikipedia is infested with cranks and cultists of all kinds, and does nothing to protect the work of serious editors against them. The only surprise is that it's taken this long for someone to seriously sue us. Mr Wales ought to be directing his mind to Wikipedia's findamental structural weakness, rather than devising absurdities like a list of 50,000 people. Adam 04:18, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The aggrieved party was John Seigenthaler Sr.. logologist|Talk 03:05, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Thankyou. Of all the hundreds of people (possibly thousands by now) who did kill President Kennedy, we had to name someone who didn't. Adam 05:33, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Use a template instead?
User:Jhs at Categories for deletion/Log/2006 January 23 suggested that we use a(n empty) template instead of a category, and monitor the template's Recentchangeslinked. This seems to be a better solution than categorization, since it just doesn't look as weird. It would only show up to editors. &mdash;Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:46, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) Is there any problem with doing this instead?
 * 2) If not, why didn't I think of it?  Good grief.
 * Could a potential template be at Persondata as suggested above in the section Not a list and/or template?, or would we want to create an entirely new template? EWS23 | (Leave me a message!) 06:06, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Subdivisions
The category pages now roughly go as follows:

1: A'Hern - Alanaseva 2: Afanassiev - Alexandre 3: Aleandro - Anderson 4: Anderson - Arbuthnott 5: Arbuthnott - Attenborough 6: Attwood - Baker 7: Baker - Barrie 8: Barrie - Bećković 9: Beckwith - Berger 10: Berger - Biolay 11: Birch - Böhmer 12: Boehrs - Bourdon 13: Bourdon - Bridge 14: Bridges - Bryant 15: Brychczy - Buttafuoco 16: Butterfield - Cantwell 17: Cânu - Castiglione 18: Castillejo - Chesnais 19: Chesney - Cleese 20: Clegg - Conran 21: Conran - Crawford 22: Crawford - Dainelli 23: Daire - de la Garza 24: de la Hoya - Devon 25: Devon - Domínguez 26: Domínguez - Dunlop 27: Dunlop - Elder 28: Eldritch - Ewald 29: Ewell - Fernández de Kirchner 30: Fernández - Folta 31: Fonda - Frieda 32: Friedeberg - Garcia 33: Garcia - Giertych 34: Gies - Goodale 35: Goodall - Green 36: Green - Gutović 37: Gutteridge - Handzuš 38: Hanegem - Haugen 39: Haughey - Herndon 40: Hernández Enriquez - Holden 41: Holden - Hudson 42: Hudson - Inglethorpe 43: Inglewood - James 44: James - Johansson 45: Johjima - Joubert 46: Jourdan - Kastor 47: Kasugi - Key 48: Key - Klaschka 49: Klasnić - Krahmer 50: Krajicek - LaGrossa 51: LaHara - Larsen 52: Larsen - Lee 53: Lee - Lichtsteiner 54: Licko - Lomberger 55: Lombi - Lynch 56: Lynch - Maharaj 57: Maharishi - Marion 58: Marioni - Matisoff 59: Mato Adrover - McGrath 60: McGrath - Merchant 61: Mechant - Milutinović 62: Miluţ - Moore 63: Moore - Müller 64: Muller - Naughtie 65: Naumann - Nilson 66: Nilssen-Love - O'Mara 67: O'Marra - Opala 68: Opdal - Pálffy 69: Pálfi - Paulón 70: Păunescu - Peterson 71: Peterson - Plant 72: Plante - Preysler 73: Price - Rafferty 74: Rafko - Reiher 75: Reid - Rinnan 76: Rinpoche - Rolland 77: Rollins - Ruiz 78: Ruiz - Samonte 79: Samp - Scheer 80: Scheffler - Sell 81: Sellers - Shimizu 82: Shimizu - Sivek 83: Sives - Soames 84: Soares Cameiro - Stadnik 85: Staff - Stoll 86: Stoll - Sutton 87: Sutton - Tankary 88: Tanneberger - Thiessen 89: Thijs - Tommasi 90: Tomosaka - Turner 91: Turner - Vandereycken 92: Vanderlyde - Violetta 93: Virdee - Wamsley 94: Wan-ju - Weld 95: Weldon - Wiles 96: Wilford - Wogan 97: Wohlin - Yazel 98: Yazov - Zigomanis 99: Žiljak - Zyuganov

If we make, for example, five subcategories, then they would go roughly like this:
 * 1) Aaa - Con
 * 2) Coo - Hol
 * 3) Hom - Mer
 * 4) Mes - Sel
 * 5) Sem - Zzz

Or, even more roughly, like this:
 * 1) A - C
 * 2) D - H
 * 3) I - M
 * 4) N - S
 * 5) T - Z

J I P | Talk 15:54, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * What would this achieve? Kappa 16:07, 31 January 2006 (UTC)


 * How would this work? More people are going to be added to this category, some of which may be in a cusp. -User:Carie
 * Hmm... A wiki-tool would be much more usefull. Categories can be reomved from articles quite easily. -- Cool CatTalk 16:27, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
 * As I understand it, the rationale behind this category is to provide a single place where changes to these articles can be monitored (through Special:Recentchangeslinked). By that logic, subcategorizing is counterproductive, since it means that, instead of monitoring one category, we would need to monitor five. Beyond that, subcategorization doesn't address the fundamental problem of throwing in an administrative-use-only category amidst navigational categories, and I personally would rather we keep the number of these messy kludge categories as limited as possible. – Seancdaug 18:24, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Working Really Well!!!
Ya, I've noticed like 5 pages already that had blatant vandalsim on it that got the living person stub on it after the vandalism. Great job solving the problem!