Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Bots and gadgets/Revive the death anomalies project

Revive the death anomalies project

  • Problem: When people die we don't always notice and update all language versions of the article on them
  • Who would benefit: All Wikipedias. When this used to run lots of articles were improved.
  • Proposed solution: Revive the death anomalies project. Until the bot operator retired, we had a bot that produced regular lists for 11 language versions of Wikipedia of people who were alive on their version of Wikipedia, but dead according to another language. People would then check sources, usually mark the person as dead in their language, sometimes as not dead in the other language.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: WereSpielChequers (talk) 22:20, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • It seems like this could be done through Wikidata, where the datum about a person being alive or dead could be centrally stored and then displayed in any Wikipedia. Silver hr (talk) 18:04, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, it is technically possible to do this, it just needs programing resource. WereSpielChequers (talk) 06:56, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wikidata is already the necessary ready-4-use no-code solution. Sagivrash (talk) 18:50, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Here is the PetScan query for German Wikipedia, all biographical articles without a death date category but where the Wikidata item has a death date. Some false positives, can be refined further. Categories have to be adjusted for other language editions. --Magnus Manske (talk) 15:53, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • This can be done using Wikidata. Some Wikipedias event have it in the main page. -Theklan (talk) 17:45, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Related: A while ago I noted that a featured article was badly outdated. I updated with more recent scholarship, but there are, as I recall, literally dozens of featured articles on the same subject in other languages. I'd like a way to push a notification that those articles may not be of featured quality anymore, especially if they have no/few references published in the past decade or two. A cross-language way to tag topics as "significant new info in reliable sources published during [timespan]", cited, would work. I expect this problem will become more common as Wikipedia matures. HLHJ (talk) 00:08, 20 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • German Wikipedia is observing mismatches in liveliness at Wikidata, but our investigators will check sources for reliability. A hoax can be made easily on Wikidata, even with fake sources. We will not display automatically what anybody is editing at Wikidata. Wikidata changes without good citation are pointless. If we get a hint that someone might have died we will look for a proof, change German Wikipedia or revert Wikidata. --PerfektesChaos (talk) 13:15, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Voting