On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 2:04 PM, David Gerard <[email protected]> wrote:
> 2009/3/5 Andrew Gray <[email protected]>:
>
>> A month or two ago, someone wrote to OTRS asking if we had any way of
>> displaying a list of people who'd just been listed as "dead" by
>> Wikipedia. It strikes me that this is quite an interesting idea - on
>> the one hand, there's some interest from reusers about a ticker of
>> "recent obituaries", and on the other hand, it's useful for *us* so we
>> can keep an eye on subtle vandalism and ensure we have cast-iron
>> confirmation of any reported death... it being, of course, quite
>> embarrasing to report someone's dead when they aren't.
>
>
> For confirmed recent deaths: {{Recent death}} is routinely put on
> confirmed recent deaths. No time expiry, but the doc notes "The
> template should be removed once editing has been resumed to a normal
> level."
>
> Would I be right in guessing that vandalism usually just adds claims
> of a death and doesn't add the template or remove [[Category:Living
> people]]?
I would guess so. Vandal edits probably also fail to add the year of
death category.
The simplest and most comprehensive way, IMO, would be to pick up all
edits that include the word "death" and "died", and maybe euphemisms
like "passed away" as well, and common causes of death ("murder",
"killed", "heart attack", "cancer", "accident"). That would pick up
most of the changes (and a lot of noise), except the ones where
someone silently adds in a year of death and nothing else
(unfortunately, these would be the problematic ones, so look for edits
that add in a four digit number to the article that looks like a year
- not just the current year, though special focus should be on those
edits).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemisms_for_death
"...dysphemisms such as worm food, or dead meat..."
Only on Wikipedia would you find something like that!
My favourite was "assumed room temperature".
Carcharoth
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