User talk:Wwagner/sandbox2

Seems a better place to discuss changes here than my talk page.

Anyway, as I said on my talk, I think having all that extra, very specific, heavily linked info is unnecessary to this article, so I removed it in my latest edit. My opinion is that it makes the article more difficult to read. Looking at some of the other lists of people around, it seems that my opinion on linking is in the minority (see Lists of Americans for plenty of examples). However, on about every list I've seen, the descriptions are extremely short, sometimes only a single word. IMO, we should strive for 2-5 words here: nationality, and at most 3 things that the person does.

I've been going back and forth in my head on the birth year of living people; some of the other lists have (1925-), and some have (b. 1925). Comments?

There are a bunch of H and L names for whom I wasn't able to find reasonable refs. There are a few from B, C, D, E, and M that are unreffed as well. Looks like you found stuff for all the S-Z folks. WP:BLP requires us to cite things about living people, so I guess we're not done here until all the living folks have some sort of citation next to them. Some of those folks' transness is "common knowledge", though, so that might be a struggle. We can probably slide a bit on the fictitious people, though I will be giving it some effort later today.

Reading through the reliable sources section of the BLP policy, it seems that websites are not considered reliable; in fact, the way I read that is that only dead-tree sources are valid. That takes out about 90%+ of what I've added, and probably a good deal of what you've added as well. Well, crap. Theoretically, those entries should be removed from the article, until they can be verified by some dead-tree source. I think that policy is completely unreasonable for what we're doing here; the WWW is a widely used medium for publishing, and there's no reason why we can't source articles from web-only publications. Looks like we're going to have to ignore some rules on this one. &mdash; Wwagner 14:18, 7 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi hi, sorry for thr few days abscence (work, life, easter).
 * A lot of the website references are from paper publications, so that's easy enough.
 * As to websites, there are some which are obviously "official" ones of the people - surely that counts? And it seems unreasonable that BLP relies only on paper publications - none of the FA biographies are purely paper references that i've seen this year.
 * Won;t be working on it this weekend, but this coming week I should have some time.
 * Cheers!  Lauren  ♫/∆ 04:54, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

No problem about your absence; that's what life does, get in the way. I didn't do any work for a few days myself. We'll finish up, eventually.

As far as the references and WP:BLP goes, one of my personal "policies for life" is that nobody is benefitted by pedantry, so if somebody wants to complain about our work in referencing almost every LINE of this article, then they can go find "better" references. We're working hard on this, and doing drudgery that has gone undone for a long time.

I did some copyediting on the lead paragraph, because the language was awfully stilted, and difficult to understand. It's a little better, but it still needs some work. Those links seem kinda glommed on. Not sure whether a see also would be better there, or what. &mdash; Wwagner 05:19, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Looks about done
Hi to whoever's watching (Lauren, are you still out there?). I did some final referencing work today, and also did a bit of cleanup on the lead (with some guidelines about what should be included - whether or not anybody reads 'em, who knows) and I think this is about ready to drop onto the main article. Further comments, additional work, please speak up. I'll hold off a couple days, and then announce my intention to put this in the main wiki article on the article's talk page, and see how that flies. &mdash; Wwagner 02:17, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Hi hi, still watching, and I agree that the article is now up to scratch.
 * Sorry about the lack of additional work on my behalf, but uni's been VERY busy (Old people are complicated), plus real life is travelling along. Cheers!  Lauren  ♫/∆ 06:05, 16 May 2007 (UTC)