User:Mill 1/sandbox3

Round 1: Breaking up the Deaths in Years
Period: September 2018 – October 2020 Articles: Deaths in January 1996 – Deaths in December 2005

The first phase of this project involved transforming the long and unwieldy dpy's into twelve shorter and more manageable dpm's. I began this process on 1 September 2018 by standardizing the format of sections and list entries across all the dpy's. This allowed me to start adding more deceased people ('entries') to the lists. At first, I focused on filling the gaps in the days of death, but later I decided to increase the minimum number of entries per day to two. I also applied these changes to the 24 existing dpm's of 2004 and 2005.

More issues
However, I soon realized that there were other issues that needed to be fixed before I could proceed with the additions. For each dpm, some entries did not have a biography page ('bio') to link to and had to be removed. Moreover, the deceased people were grouped by day sub-sections within each month, and many of them were in the wrong sub-section and had to be moved. The reason for these errors was often that the date of death in the corresponding bio had changed but was not updated in the list.

Adding an actual entry
And this was all before I could even start adding the missing entries. FYI: the Wikitext structure of an entry looks like this: which could be rendered as: So for each entry, I had to find the relevant information in the corresponding bio and add it to the appropriate sub-section.
 * Lesley Cunliffe, 51, American journalist and writer, stomach cancer.

Compiling the list of entry candidates
But before I could even start adding entries, I had to figure out which entries were eligible for addition. Who had died on a given date? I tried using some advanced search queries available in Wikipedia (more info). But this still meant doing the searches manually and handling the results.

To the rescue: Excel
Clearly, this was too much work to do by hand. It was no surprise that these lists were so incomplete and inaccurate. So before I started, I improved the functionality of an Excel tool that could generate most of the wikitext for me.