Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-03/Discussion report

The deprecation of Persondata
Since the dawn of Wikipedia, or at least since 22 December 2005, the template named Persondata has existed. At first, it was an early attempt to incorporate structured metadata. Later it served to provide automatic extraction of key information about people, such as birthnames and dates. However, since the creation and growth of Wikidata the need for this template has become non-existent, since all the functions which it provides, and more, are now offered by Wikidata.

Wikidata allows users to add statements to Wikidata items (which are connected to Wikipedia articles) such as "birthdays", "occupations", "family members" etc. These statements rely on other Wikidata items and are therefore completely internationalized. There is no need to translate a person's occupation into multiple languages, since they are connected already to articles on other language Wikipedias. The template Persondata, however, is not internationalized and only provides services to the English Wikipedia. Therefore, having all this information on Wikidata makes it accessible in multiple languages and it can be used in articles on different wikis in the remote future.

All SHORT DESCRIPTIONs had been copied over to Wikidata by the bot. With that in mind, plus that all other information in the Persondata template had been exported to statements on Wikidata, there is no real need for the template any more. This is at least what was trying to communicate to the community with a proposal to deprecate the template.

The template had been discussed over many months and now an RfC had been created to settle once and for all the question of whether or not anyone was actually using it, or will use it in the future.

During this RfC many viewpoints and opinions were brought up and discussed. "The big problem with WikiData is that its "impossible" to edit and watch changes to articles (from enwiki). […] [H]ow do we suppose editors to figure out how to change any wrong data?"

To this, users responded that it is possible to see all related Wikidata changes on your watchlist if you enable that gadget in your preferences.

Another issue was if usage of Persondata should be replaced with Wikidata, and to that responded: "This would only be true if we were talking about using [use of content from Wikidata on this Wikipedia] to replace [use of content from Persondata on this Wikipedia]. Since the set of articles in which the latter applies appears to be zero (do feel free to correct me), it's irrelevant to the discussion at hand."

There were also questions over how reliable statements moved by bots are, since Wikidata does not support free-text in their data fields, some dates become malformated. To this noted: "Village pump (technical)/Archive 136 indicates that persondata is likely still more reliable than Wikidata. So, still going to have to go with "Wikidata is not stable and ready yet"."

While this link to the technical villlage pump did not have anything to do with humans, it raised an interesting point that all date formats can not be handled on Wikidata.

Users noted that since these data can not be used in infoboxes due to their potential inaccuracy, Persondata should not be deprecated just yet, but to this had a witty while still accurate point: "The reliability (accuracy) of the data and reliability (availability) of the service are two completely different things. (For God's sake, why are people using Module:Wikidata in mainspace? Whoever's said that it's ready for primetime?) Persondata cannot even be used in this manner, so what point are you trying to make?"

Persondata was not in use anywhere and was therefore deprecated with a 32-to-8 !vote. After this consensus had been reached, did not waste any time and requested for approval of his bot 's 24th task: to "Remove Persondata". This has been met with some resistance. asked two questions; if this should wait until AWB (which is a developer of) had been programmed to stop adding the template, and if the policy WP:COSMETICBOT would apply, since it was an edit which wouldn't be visible or noticeable to the readers. The bot had once received permission to add Persondata as its only task and therefore there is precedence of fixing Persondata, despite the policy in question. "We already have consensus for the removal of Persondata. If the addition of Persondata by automated tools hasn't been a breach of COSMETICBOT, then neither should be its removal."

The user was also a bit sceptical to the removal of the template, despite the consensus, stating: "[…] This immediate removal without transfer of new input persondata to Wikidata violates the conditions upon which the RfC was approved. […]"

If a persondata template with a short description has been added after transferred all the current once at the time, this might cause some problems with losing some information added by someone. However: "The outcome of the RfC is "deprecate and remove", not "deprecate and remove with caveats"."

Author's note: The request for permission is currently being discussed while writing this report, hence no conclusion can be written, since it has yet to happen.

RfA – A broken process
After years of granting fewer and fewer users adminship and desysoping more and more of our current admins, you can naturally calculate that we are starting to reach a shortage of admins. At least that's what the current discussion on the Administrators' noticeboard is saying. As a result of this, backlogs on noticeboards such as Administrator intervention against vandalism are bound to happen from time to time.

Users are reporting to feel discouraged to run for adminship, for two major reasons. One being that RfAs are like hell, with the scrutiny so intense you lose interest and want to go and hide somewhere. The other reason being that it is a broken process:

"I know exactly how to become an admin. Stop getting involved in discussions at AN, ANI, RSN, etc., stop mediating at DRN, pick a poor-quality, uncontroversial article that nobody seems to be editing or watching and create high-quality content, withdrawing and moving on if anyone disagrees with me in any way, and repeat that pattern for at least a year. In other words, avoid anything that in any way resembles what an administrator is asked to do. Again, I do want to help but the price is too high."

In briefs

 * Complaints from users on Swedish Wikipedia: Old users on the Swedish Wikipedia such as MagnusA and Innocent bystander have during the last few months started a complaining campaign about the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Sverige (Sweden). This includes multiple discussions about the usage of pop-up advertising, spamming of messages by the MediaWiki message delivery bot, the abuse of using too many sitenotices, and most recently spam e-mails from WMF regarding the recent election.
 * Voter turnout at a new high!: After massive work had been put in to this year's electoral vote of trustees, some happy results can already be revealed. According to the Wikimedia-I mailing list, last year only nine users from the Ukrainian Wikipedia voted. This year over 25% of all eligible voters on uk.wikipedia voted, making up almost one (.99) percent of all global votes. This is great for the Ukrainian community, since their voice will be heard louder than ever. However, around 50-60% of all Wikimedians are American and, according to, American Wikimedias make up around 80% of all money the Foundation makes. Despite this, voter turnout was lower than this ratio, causing this community to have a lesser voice than this ratio might warrant.
 * Is he running?: An old discussion from 2008 has been resurrected on Talk:United States presidential election, 2016, regarding who should be included on the list of people who are running for office, or specifically if candidate Willie Wilson should be included. Wilson has multiple hits on Google News, but no Wikipedia article, only a redirect to another article. The old consensus has been that the person must need to meet normal notability requirements and have their own article in order to be included on the list.
 * The Iron curtain of Germany, No. 2: A proposal to split the article Kingdom of Germany into multiple different articles has been made and discussions are currently ongoing. Events that happened prior to 962 are proposed to be integrated into East Francia, and events afterwards to be integrated into Holy Roman Empire.

Style and naming

 * Album covers dispute (May 31)
 * Should shiplist pages have a common title style and, if so, what is preferred? (May 30)
 * Proposal regarding the format of Japanese personal names (May 28)

Policies and guidelines

 * Reliable sources reliably published (June 3)
 * Edit in Wikidata links (June 3)
 * ''Peculiar question about SYNTHESIS (June 2)
 * New Mexican English: Edit warring? (May 31)

WikiProjects and collaborations

 * ''DYK process improvement 2015 (June 2)