Wikipedia talk:Uncategorized biographies of living people/BLPPotential

false positives
In order to help improve the algorithm for next time, list any unusual false positives here. John Vandenberg (chat) 01:34, 26 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Invalid biographies:
 * Vileevils
 * Villagómez family
 * Vince's Devils
 * Vincent Accardi, redirects to band Brand New
 * Virginia_State_University
 * Virginia Steen-McIntyre, redirects to Hueyatlaco
 * Virtue (musical group)
 * Viscount Rothermere
 * Vital_Signs_(pop_band)


 * Technically, redirects that consist of a living person's name pointing to an article should still be tagged in some way. I thought there was a redirect template dealing with BLP redirects, but maybe there isn't. If not, there should be one. The case of music bands where the people in question are not all dead yet is interesting. They should, theoretically, be tagged in some way, but then where do you stop? Articles about companies and organisations often talk about living people. As a rule of thumb, I think the appearance of a living person's name in the title of a page (whether stage name, redirect, or article) should trigger BLP level concerns for the purposes of tracking and assessment and cleanup (and flagged revisions, for example). Carcharoth (talk) 00:51, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Also, it is a good idea to exclude any articles in "fictional" categories (e.g. Viv Hope). Carcharoth (talk) 12:45, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

False positives
Most of the false positives are coming from two sources: Not sure where the other false positives are coming from. Carcharoth (talk) 19:04, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
 * (1) The use of blp on the talk pages of articles with BLP problems that aren't about specific people. e.g. Perverted-Justice and persistent vegetative state and Middle East Forum.
 * (2) The use of "living=yes" in WPBiography for articles about musics groups. While this is often technically correct, it is not useful for lists like this, unless it is decided to put Category:Living people on what I call "group biographies" (biographical articles about a group of people), when one or more of the people concerned are still living.
 * Yes, the use of doesn't seem to be consistent with the use of Category:Living people, which is very annoying and has led to a number of false positives. Plus, there's the issue of whether redirects that are of living people should be categorized, which seems to be an unknown as well. Because some of these practices aren't clear, application of the talk tag and the category is inconsistent. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:11, 29 March 2009 (UTC)


 * So, what is the current rule on group bios? I felt I should add the category to Nighttime Killers (which has a host of problems, but that's a different issue). There is a living person involved (and the article is a volatile subject), so I went ahead and added it to the cat. I figure having it in the category is better than not having it in there. --Ali'i 16:14, 30 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I have no idea what the current rule is. It seems to me that group biography articles are not put into Category:Living people while group biography talk pages are put classified as |living=yes. The whole situation is rather annoying. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:00, 30 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I've been aiming for some time to try (again) to lay out how to identify and tag the group bios and separate them out from the individual bios. It's a bit tricky, though. Approximately, a search for articles with a single-word title, no birth or death categories, and some music tag on the talk page or music category on the article, would get lots of the group bios that are music groups. Carcharoth (talk) 22:55, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

In the last three days Yobot added blp in all articles located in categories Living people and Possibly living people. I also created a list with articles that are tagged blp and there aren't located in neither of these categories. I did a futher cleanup by removing the articles that contain the string "group_or_band" which appears in all band articles, the ones with " band)" (or purpose like that to include "(American band)" for example or their title. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:30, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Uncertain status
There is a need to weed out articles where the living status is uncertain. For now, I'm putting in Category:Living people, unless they are over 123 (or whatever the cutoff point is). The uncertainty area is summed up here: "Individuals of advanced age (over 90) for whom no documentation has existed for a reasonable number of years, may be removed from this category and transferred to Category:Possibly living people." So someone needs to do a sweep through category "Living people" and extract those with a birth year category that puts them over 90, and those can then be checked and transferred as needed. Personally, I think that if someone's death is not easily found and verifiable, then that says something about their notability, but that is an argument for another time. Those in category living people with no year of birth also need to be found and put in Category:Year of birth missing (living people). Carcharoth (talk) 19:22, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Dead people on the list
Why are so many dead people on this list? It's a bit annoying. Didn't the filter remove any articles with "XXXX deaths"? Sorry if this is a bit terse, but I've just looked at three in a row that were clearly dead. Carcharoth (talk) 18:03, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
 * From an earlier post elsewhere: "The list posted combines a few different methods into a combined list. I looked at pages where the talk page contained, pages that contained Template:Birth date or Template:Birth date and age but do not contain Template:Death date or Template:Death date and age, and pages where the person is in a category like ____ births but not in a category like ____ deaths. And all pages in Category:Living people and Category:Possibly living people were excluded (or at least they should be). As I said above, the hit rate I've found is about 2 out of 3."  --MZMcBride (talk) 20:14, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Still, there are rather a lot that should have been excluded on this basis. Would you like a list? Carcharoth (talk) 20:37, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
 * No, a list isn't necessary. I'm quite capable of generating such a list, though at this point it's rather difficult to batch exclude entries from the current on-wiki lists. I think we'll simply have to live with the false positives. Looking at the methods of list generation, it was clear that two of the methods were going to include quite a few false positives. The method that looked at pages in ___ births but not ___ deaths was probably the most accurate (fewest false positives), but as this list is a combination of the three methods, that's not easy to see from your end. --MZMcBride (talk) 23:20, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Regenerate list?
I can in the next days regenerate the second part of the list (Articles that have blp in their talk pages and they are not in Living people or Possible Living people categories) or you can help me hit the Category:biography articles without living parameter. Tell me what do you prefer. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:35, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

I regenerated the list just now. It's still uncleaned from bands, etc. -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:11, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * If certain articles have already been reviewed, it doesn't make sense to re-review them.... --MZMcBride (talk) 22:18, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't know how to avoid that. Probably compare with the old list taken by the history? This time I just did a very basic cleanup and I kept record for the next time. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:32, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
 * Just to make it clear: All the persons are new. The are still some bands in the list. I'll try to cleanup in the next days. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:55, 7 September 2009 (UTC)