User:Alvestrand/Find-A-Grave

This page is about Find-A-Grave famous people.

Things I want to keep notes of.. things to do, techniques for getting them done fast:

Techniques

 * I like working on all lists in chunks of 25 or less. Breaking them at 3-letter, or sometimes 4-letter, prefixes makes a lot of progress towards that; if sections remain long, I insert random breaks with intelligent names like "Break 1".
 * Pruning a list takes about 30 seconds per name. Method: Show page in Firefox, use ctrl-click to open Wikipedia entry and F-A-G entry in two different tabs, delete or disambiguate. Then use "close other tabs" to get rid of the tabs. I do them 2 people at a time. Then use the "preview" button to refresh the page, so you don't have to save every edit. I never move things at this stage.
 * findagrave needs defending. It has been deleted at least once. There also used to be Find A Grave, which was be merged using a bot.
 * For researching, I like to append search to the name. Irritation: Have to manually supply + instead of space in the parameter. Then I make a note on the same line on what the person is famous for; this helps sorting. The "search" box has been done by a script for all pages now.
 * Once I have the reason-for-fame in the page, I can do the sorting into "possibly non-notable" in one giant edit. Keeping two browser windows open (one on the "possibly non-notable" section and one on the section under consideration) works, as long as nobody touches the "possibly non-notable" section while working.

Translated articles
Quite a few people have articles on other Wikipedias. Then it's possible to create an extreme stub (fast), and use Expand Spanish or similar to indicate that content exists to be copied. I've tried this on:


 * Pepe Iglesias (Dec 16, 2009)
 * Georg Trexler
 * Georg Thomalla
 * Gunnar Tolnæs
 * Nuria Torray
 * Steve Tracy (had been deleted twice before, for good reasons)

As of May 2012, at least some of them have been signifcantly expanded.

For actors, it's a good idea to add the IMDB link in addition to the Find-A-Grave link.

Opinions

 * Most Civil War officers are not notable. In particular, "brevet general" was a title handed out like candy to anyone who managed to command something for 10 minutes and didn't shoot himself in the foot.
 * I've let myself be overruled by WP:MILMOS: Congressional Medal of Honor awardees are inherently notable. Being brave once and getting noticed doesn't seem like a good criterion for me, but it's the nation's highest decoration, and as such, WP:MIL has asserted inherent notability.
 * If someone's created an article on something I consider non-notable... not a problem, as long as it's sourced.
 * Find-A-Grave is NOT a reliable source, and should not be listed under "sources" in an article. I often add information from it to the article (particularly YOB if it's missing), but that information should be regarded as "not verified". But when I do this, I *always* add F-A-G to "external links". Compromise...

People
Some other people who work on F-A-G:
 * (working as late as April 2009)
 * (last seen at A and B in December 2008)
 * (original creator, Way Back When)
 * (me) (currently working on S)
 * (moving stuff around in Jan 2008)
 * - started working in May 2009
 * (moving stuff around in Jan 2008)
 * - started working in May 2009