User:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up/Guidelines
This page gives guidelines for the clean-up of 16,104 articles about living people started by User:Sander.v.Ginkel (SvG) and debated at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive941#User:Fram. The decision there was to give one week for rescue attempts followed by bulk deletion. The outcome of the follow-up discussion at User:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up was less drastic:
- All the articles will be moved to draft space
- Over the next 90 days articles will be reviewed, problem articles deleted or turned into redirects, and other articles corrected and promoted back to main space
- At the end of the 90 day period all remaining drafts will be deleted.
Comments on these guidelines should be made at User talk:Aymatth2/SvG clean-up/Guidelines.
Volunteers
Please add your userid to the list below if you plan to help with the clean-up, so you can be notified of project events.
Outline of process
Various lists of subsets of the BLPs are given below.
- Select one of the lists of subjects that interest you,
- Pick an entry and review it
- Either flag it for deletion, turn it into a redirect, or correct it and move it to main space.
- Pick another entry.
Types of problem
Any biography of a living person should reflect what reliable sources say about the subject, with these sources cited, and with no original research. Most of the articles are reasonably accurate, although SvG sometimes added original research, or information he "knew" was accurate, that was not supported by any source. There were errors in copying information such as birth dates. In some cases it seems that SvG created an article from a source that would not be considered reliable, then added citations to other "sources" to support the article, often without checking these "sources". Sometimes the "source" did not even mention the subject. In a few cases SvG confused one person with a completely different person, giving totally misleading content.
- Unfounded libel: The article asserts that the subject engaged in unacceptable behavior such as doping or fraudulent claims about age or nationality, but the claim is not supported by a reliable source. These are rare, but must be deleted immediately.
- Undue weight: The article gives undue weight to a single documented incident such as doping, with perhaps one sentence of a two-sentence article discussing the incident. The editor may consider toning down or even dropping the incident description and/or expanding the rest of the article to give more balance. This particularly applies to people who are relatively unknown.
- Unsourced information: " ... (born February 14, 1967 in Cheyenne, United States) ... " If the source does not give the birth date and/or birth place, drop it. Some articles contain several paragraphs of plausible but unsourced information added to the original stub. Drop them. A BLP should only contain information supported by reliable sources.
- Poorly sourced information: Blog sites, celebrity gossip sites and so on are not valid sources. Drop any material supported by sources like these.
- Incorrect information: The article disagrees with the source, perhaps due to a transcription error. Correct the article to match the source.
- Incorrect links. Nobody was born in Cheyenne, United States. Fix the link.
- Original research: "is a cyclist" or "is a former cyclist". We have no way of telling the subject is still active as a cyclist – they may have retired yesterday. But if the source does not say they have retired, it is wrong to say "is a former cyclist". They may be proudly competing in the Masters 70+ class. Just say what they did: "competed as a cyclist in the 1967 Tour de France".
Bottom line is that although many of the SvG stubs are entirely accurate, many contain errors. All must be carefully checked to ensure the facts agree with reliable sources. As stated in Wikipedia: Biographies of living persons, "Editors must take particular care when adding information about living persons to any Wikipedia page. ... We must get the article right."
Deletion versus salvage
- Articles must be deleted fast if they contain unfounded or poorly sourced libel, regardless of the notability of the subject. Add {{Db-g10}} to the top of the article.
- Articles should be flagged if they do not seem to meet the notability criteria in Wikipedia:Notability#General notability guideline or Wikipedia:Notability (sports). Add {{Notability|Sport}} to the top of the draft article. This tells other reviewers it may not be worth spending much time trying to salvage the article.
- Consider Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons#Subjects notable only for one event. If an athlete is technically notable according to Wikipedia:Notability (sports), but very little information is available or is likely to become available in the future, and all the information in the stub is in the article on the event, you may:
- Blank the article and replace by
#redirect [[article on the event]]
- Move the article to mainspace
- Blank the article and replace by
- In all other cases, where the article does not contain an unfounded libel and the subject is notable, preferably for more than one event,
- Carefully compare the article to the reliable source(s) and remove any original research, unsourced or poorly sourced information. Do not assume good faith if you cannot access a "source". It may not mention the subject at all.
- Try to correct undue weight, where a single event dominates the article
- Flesh out the article with information from other reliable sources if you have time
- Remember to check the infobox and categories to make sure they agree with the text
- Reactivate categories by removing the colon after the square brackets. For example, change
[[:Category:Living people]]
to[[Category:Living people]]
- Move the article to mainspace
Audit
The results will be audited after a few weeks. This approach will be considered to have failed if a significant percentage of the articles that have been moved to main space turn out to still contain BLP violations and/or to contain information that is not confirmed by a citation to a reliable source. We will then revert to the letter of the close at the ANI discussion. The decision there was to give one week for rescue attempts followed by bulk deletion:
- Editors whose restorations to mainspace were problematic will be banned from participating
- Other editors will be invited to move articles they want to save from main space or draft space to their user space
- After the bulk deletion, these editors may fix the saved user space articles and move them to main space.
Lists
The table that follow gives, in each cell
- A list of articles of a given type that have been recovered to mainspace
- A count of the total number of articles of this type
- A list of all the articles of this type in draft space, with redlinks for recovered articles
- Mainspace Colombian people (162 results) Draft Colombian people
- Mainspace Estonian people (63 results) Draft Estonian people
- MainspaceTanzanian people (3 results) Draft Tanzanian people
Results
- Cisiane Lopes
- Esther Deden
- Kathleen Weiß
- Louisa Lippmann
- Jennifer Geerties
- Eva Lutz
- Aafke Eshuis
- Rigard van Klooster
- Astrid Schop
- Cora Westland
- Lada Kozlíková
- Verena Jooß
- Sanne van Kerkhof
- Matthijs Büchli
- Richard Rozendaal
- Eszter Tomaskovics
- Patricia del Soto
- Alla Jakovleva - one link was dead, all the info was correct, moved to the main space--Ymblanter (talk) 11:14, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
- Ágnes Valkai
- Erzsébet Valkai
- Ioanna Stamatopoulou
- Maria Sora
- Virginia Niarchakou
- Evi Tetzalidou
- Michaela Kalogerakou
- Silia Logotheti
- Nikoleta Eleftheriadou
- Vasiliki Plevritou
- Tamás Dala
- Tihomil Vranješ
- Hanna Solovey - info was correct, one ref to a blog removed--Ymblanter (talk) 20:57, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
- Russ Prior