User:Agradman/essay on ticket systems

This is

what do I do when someone dies & their WP biography doesn't yet reflect it?
Kenneth Noland died today, but when I checked his article, that info wasn't there yet.

By the time you read this question, someone else will have properly adjusted his article, so I'm asking a more general query: do we have, say, a ticket system at "WP:current events" so that we can make sure that news articles are getting reflected in WP articles? I mean, if the death had been a somewhat less famous person, and we didn't have such a system, it could be weeks before his/her death was logged.

Since WP:BIO is such a specially rigorous policy, maybe we do need a ticket system for logging deaths?

Andrew Gradman talk/WP:Hornbook 19:11, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
 * On that particular death, at the moment the only source of information is the only reference to his death (and that was posted just under an hour ago).
 * With regard to a ticket system, as the Current Events is (like everything else on Wikipedia) a volunteer thing, an editor would need to know about the event to list it - in which case, they are just as likely to update the article as add it to the list there. With most articles, there are people who have it on their watchlist who would hear about the death and update the article. Your idea is interesting, but I don't think that it would work any differently to how things are currently done. --  Phantom Steve / talk &#124; contribs \ 19:26, 5 January 2010 (UTC)


 * This is the third question today relating to the death of a person featured in an article, and one of them Nicholas A Clemente indeed died seven months ago. But not only is there the issues PhantomSteve mentions, there is also the question of reliable sources, as in . --ColinFine (talk) 19:33, 5 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Phantomsteve, I can see how a ticket system would be self-defeating, in the sense that the effort to update the ticket system just substitutes for the effort to update the article itself. On the assumption, however, that this reasoning would not apply in cases where we can exploit different skills that different Wikipedians bring to the table, I would like to argue that this is one of those cases.  I am a person who browses lots of newspapers; I am always killing time on google reader.  I might want to make this habit useful by logging news articles into the ticket system.  Then, someone else (a more dedicated Wikipedian, or just someone who isn't doing his editing from the workplace!) can devote a solid chunk of thought to actually assimilating individual newspaper articles into Wikipedia articles.
 * As I consider the hurdles, I think such a system would work best by having the tickets go into the articles or talk pages themselves. For example, we currently put Current on certain articles, with the purpose of alerting the reader to the fact that "Information may change rapidly as the event progresses".  Why not reform that template, so that it constitutes the ticket (i.e. auto-populates the page WP:current events/tickets)?  We can also add a new argument to the template, for hyperlinks to newspaper articles; and perhaps another argument for the date of the article, so that readers know how stale the notice is.
 * Example: Ken Noland dies, and I go to his article and add http://nyt.com.[something] .  That adds a ticket to WP:current events/tickets.  Someone visits that page, sees the open ticket, edits the page, and then modifies the template to read  http://nyt.com.[something] .  He doesn't delete the template, however -- we want it to stay there long enough for the event-in-question to get out of the news, so that someone doesn't open a whole new ticket.  That's why the template also has a field for the date.  It sits there until some Wikipedian thinks, "Yeah, that event won't be in the news anymore".  Then he'll delete the template.
 * Andrew Gradman talk/WP:Hornbook 20:19, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
 * An interesting idea, Andrew! However, it begs the question "if you see it in a newspaper, and have time to add a template to the article, wouldn't you have time to add the details?" - you only need to have (for example, assuming it was the example you gave above about Noland) the date of death added and then  - which will take as long as typing the template details above! You could also add a category (e.g. Category:2010 deaths) at the bottom of the article. It just strikes me as creating more work in the short term - others will tidy up the references, and probably add more if required, as well as details of the cause of death etc. Just my 0.02 --  Phantom Steve / talk &#124; contribs \ 20:29, 5 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Actually, I'm warming to Andrew's idea. The problem with your argument is that in some cases the death may require a number of edits distributed through the article: only rarely will these individually be difficult or awkward, but there could be a lot of them. I think a box at the top which says "This person died on .... The article may not yet have been updated to reflect this fact" (with a reference of course) might be helpful. --ColinFine (talk) 20:58, 5 January 2010 (UTC)


 * If Wikipedia ever got a successful ticket system, it would drive Mechanical Turk out of business for all but the poorest users ;) So I think this is worth continued thought.
 * A successful ticket system must meet two conditions: (1) adding the ticket must be more appealing than doing the work without the ticket to some sizable group of people; (2) the existence of the ticket has to create a post-ticket workflow that is more efficient than doing the work without the ticket.
 * Here, I think (2) is uncontroversially a home run, since pages with tickets will be transcluded into a central to-do list, whose items would be popular to work on (in the sense that the work is vegetative but important).
 * The uncertainty surrounds (1), but I also think that is satisfied. Adding tickets is addictive because it's vegetative (thus, attractive to middle school students?). Also, it can be done in assembly-line style just by doing a google news search for "dies".  In fact, we could write an external program that makes adding tickets even easier: it tries to find wikipedia articles that relate to a given newspaper article; it takes the existence of an open ticket into account when deciding whether to present a match; the user just has to click "Create a ticket" or "Ignore".  Also, the program can do the very important work of categorizing biographies with, e.g., Category:2010 deaths. Since Google already includes Wikipedia articles in Google News, it wouldn't be hard to write.
 * On another occasion, I created a ticket system that more obviously meets condition (1). You insert, onto an article's talk page, refideas, which lets you identify encyclopedic, public-domain sources that can be assimilated into that article by someone with no specialized knowledge in the area. The template then transcludes the article to this category, which becomes a watering hole for non-specialists looking for meaningful work. (Here's a fuller explanation.) It still hasn't taken off -- but I think that's because I'm too busy to promote it.
 * I'll collect feedback for a few days, then I'll add a thread on the village pump. Andrew Gradman talk/WP:Hornbook 03:45, 6 January 2010 (UTC)