Category talk:Living people/Archive 2

Old talk: Archive 1 (This archive is incomplete due to page blanking - see also the archive page history)

Please note: This is not a typical category! Read the archived discussion and reasons for its existence before complaining about the "point" of having this new, administrative-style category.

A Good Idea

It would be a great idea to add "You" after "Tina Yothers", because, well, it's true. Maybe this is too philosophical?

The purpose of this category

This category is really big and cumbersome. We know. It's meant solely to ensure better protection of Wikipedia's reputation by letting us keep a closer eye on potential libel. See Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living people for a handy list of all recent changes to biography articles of the kind of person who's most likely to get upset about libel, i.e., the living kind of person. If you still think this category is stupid, please read through the discussion below archived talk page and don't make yet another ==This category is pointless== section. Thank you. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 07:23, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

This category should not be really big and cumbersome. It should be as light and airy as any of several dozen other equally broad categories. This is done appropriately with subcategorization.--Jimbo Wales 11:20, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

No. This category should not be subcategorized. For now I belive it's ok to keep this category as it is. The current category system will be replaced soon enough to make a more appropriate way of dealing with issues like this. 129.241.107.147 18:33, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

• If it's subcategorized we won't have a single "handy list of all recent changes" any more. Kappa 11:57, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

  Or if we do, it will have to be done by bot, and it'll be quite a bit more of a nuisance for the coder to make. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:19, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

  To be honest, I'm not sure I really see the problem here: no one is suggesting that this is category is intended for navigational purposes. In all honesty, the category listing itself strikes me as effectively meaningless. As I understand it, the purpose of this is to allow for a Special:Recentchangeslinked "watchlist," as it were, and, as Kappa says, splitting across dozens of subcategories is self-defeating. If that's not the purpose of this, then there's really no convincing reason for it to exist. As it stands, it's a poorly designed kludge, but one that serves our immediate purpose better than any other option. But, in the longer term, we need to be thinking of ways to handle this problem without polluting the category pool, and our attention should be focused on that goal, not wasted on developing an array of equally silly subcategories which only serve to further entrench what should be a stopgap measure for the long haul. Am I missing something about your reasons, Jimbo? What sort of subcategories did you envision? – Seancdaug 17:06, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

• *splutter* What??? I thought the whole point was to have a single place to watch all changes?!?! I still have yet to see anyone explain why this has to be done with category if we're going to have to do recoding to make things stand out anyway. I know it was explained that developer time is more "valuable" than editor time, but that only feeds the "Wikipedia is busywork" theory. -- nae'blis _(talk) 20:11, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

What kind of community is this when attempts are made to supress dissent like this? It's a dumb idea. It's proponents deserve a lot of criticism. It isn't going to stop being a dumb idea because it isn't going to stop being a worthless waste of time, so there is no reason for the criticism to stop. Osomec 09:13, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand who is going to watch all these articles. If every article on a living person was catergorized correctly, Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living people would become impossible to monitor, as it would have a tremendous amount of changes every few minutes. It would also be very hard to determine if something is the truth or not; I might be okay at detecting libel regarding Peruvian politicians, but I don't know anything about Anglican ministers, for example. That's why I think that the current lay-out, with everyone looking at articles that interest them, is probably the best one for catching libel. No system, however, will be perfect, especially as wikipedia expands. --Descendall 07:18, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for this category. I'm sure it will help me into finding Living Dutchmen, Living Estonians, and (all) Living Americans. That's just the way I'm searching. In fact: I allways search by the thing "People whose article contains the word "and". Any fact is a catagory, innit?. Btw: is'nt that a Big Wikipedian interfering? Could he be sent up the Thames, for a whale? ~This subject is taking a lot of fun out of it. -DePiep 20:41, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

For a list of living Dutchmen (and women): see CategoryIntersect: Dutch people ∩ Living people. -- User:Docu

There should be a better, short explanation, preferably at the top of the page, for the purpose of this category. Please read before just dismissing this. If you learn about this category the way I did, clicking a link at the bottom of some person's page, it is easy for people new to Wikipedia to become confused at current and come off thinking that Wikipedia is an infinitely complicated system that works on levels unfathomable to the common person, or they might just read a bunch and still not understand why this is better than the recent changes page that already exists (incidentally, why is it?). This is not optimal if Wikipedia is to survive as an encyclopedia written by pretty much everyone who can use the internet, sign up for an account, and type. The explanation could just be a few sentences at the top, saying, "This is not a standard category. It is intended to be used to catch libelous editing. This is better than the recent changes page because (x,y,z reasons). If you want to find a specific person, it would be best to use more well-defined search parameters." It would demistify things and make Wikipedia editing seem more accessible.--TelevisedRevolution 01:16, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

I see it is now there. I didn't see it the first time I came, so I will assume it has been added. Thanks.

Please use a wiki-tool not categories

This is the wrong approach. Categories are easy enough to remove from articles. A wiki-tool can keep track of everything --Cool Cat^Talk|@ 16:29, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

• What is a wiki-tool? Kappa 18:16, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
• If you would like to write a wiki-tool of some sort, be our guest. Until then, we have to rely on the built-in mechanisms of the MediaWiki software, and the only real way to do that at present is adding links to another page (which could be a category, template, or anything else). —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:04, 1 February 2006 (UTC)== Wow ==

Wow

When i first saw this catagory on a page I litterally laughed out loud. So I clicked on the link, and after reading this page agree that the catagory is (amazingly) useful. But please find a way to make this invisable on most pages, experienced editors can find it, and new users won't have the bots to scroll through 50,000+ articals. So thats it, keep this little catagory, but please don't make me have to see it on the bottom of every single page --T-rex 06:16, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

While I agree with your logic (and remain a little disgusted that my fellow editors have so little regard for the navigational utility of the category system that they'd advocate polluting it in this manner), from my understanding, the only way to truly make this thing invisible would be through a fairly significant change to the MediaWiki code. And I think that, if we're talking about adding functionality to the system, we'd be better off coming up with something other than categories to do it. I would personally think that something like Special:Watchlist, but designed to be easily accessible by multiple users, would be easier to create, and far less kludgy than adding the ability to "hide" categories (which I think is potentially rife for abuse). But then, I'm not really a programmer, so what do I know? – Seancdaug 17:13, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Allowing categories to be hidden = adding a single simple conditional to the code. Creating a publicly-accessible watchlist = rewriting large sections of the existing watchlist code. But in any case, a template solves this neatly with all parties satisfied, so let's go with that. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:58, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I could live with this category if it was invisible. I feel that could pick any object on my desk and think of 100 potential categories that it is a member of. And maybe even scenarios where this categorization would be useful. But overdoing it could make for ugly and confusing encyclopedia articles. ike9898 14:59, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't favor hiding it in any way. All readers are also editors, and we should allow them to notice if it's wrong, and correct it if necessary. Demi ^T/_C 16:06, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

That's demonstrably not true: all readers are certainly not editors (though they can be, if they so desire). The numbers indicate that there are a great many more people who come to Wikipedia simply to find information, not to participate in the editing process. And while I'm not in favor of hiding it, since I think it would be not much more than a band-aid over the deeper problem, having a category not designed to aid in information navigation thrown in amidst all the categories that are designed for that purpose is a significant problem. So I understand the desire to keep this thing hidden from public view, as its the same basic reason we don't link to Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration (or any number of other administrative-only pages) from the main page. – Seancdaug 16:11, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Does the same argument not apply to categories such as Category:Articles to be split, Category:Articles to be expanded, andCategory:Wikipedia articles needing rewrite? --Whouk (talk) 16:35, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

• Yes, I would say the same argument does apply. Administrative categories should not appear on an article's page. Or, if they do appear, they should be less prominent. There are many ways to do this. For example, administrative categories could be listed in a seperate section of the article page, below the rest of the article. Even better, they could be listed on the discussion page, which is where editors should be looking if they are doing more than minor work on an article. Johntex\^talk 16:42, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
• In principle, yes, it probably does. On the other hand, most other administrative categories are designed to be transitory. An article tagged with Category:Articles to be split will lose that category once the split is completed. Same thing with the various stub categories. Articles in this category, however, while they won't be here forever (no immortals here, right?), are liable to be here for much longer (decades, as opposed to days, weeks, or months). The ideal goal is to make it so that Category:Wikipedia articles needing rewrite is empty (i.e., that there are no articles on Wikipedia in need of a serious rewrite). That is not the case with this: for this category to be at all useful, it's has to stick around for the long haul. – Seancdaug 17:03, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
• Yes, and in the archives you'll see some of us had already mentioned this. ALL article-based administrative templates could/should fall under a different CSS/MediaWiki trick to list them separately from navigational templates, and be (IMO) hidden from unregistered users (readers, primarily) by default. -- nae'blis _(talk) 19:54, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I have to agree with you completely. I just saw this on one of the articles I monitor, and thought it was a sort of vandalism. I understand the utility, but it really destroys the whole concept of catagories as a navigational tool. Please, please, please find a way of doing this either through the talk page, some other back-end method or making the tag invisible to the generic user. PhatJew 09:48, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

This is big. Sorry, I know that's not at all helpful, but yeah. This category is... really... big. -Xastic 12:39, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Then don't browse it. It's not... really... meant to be browsed. --Optichan 19:05, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Template

It has been suggested by several people that we solve this problem with a template. As far as I understand it, this would meet all of the criteria we're trying to accomplish:

• The ability to monitor the pages via Special:Recentchangeslinked/Template:Living people (or whatever the name may be)
• Doesn't pollute the category pool (current category could be deleted)
• Would be invisible to the typical user/reader (provided we made it a blank/invisible template)

The two major suggestions I've heard are using the template at Wikipedia:Persondata or creating our own blank template such as {{Template:Living people}}. The first would give us some additional usefulness, but it would have to be ensured that people place this template only on the pages we want to monitor (e.g.- not on pages of long-deceased people such as Johann Sebastian Bach). Is there anything I'm missing that would make a template unusable or undesirable? EWS23 | (Leave me a message!) 17:38, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say no. There should be no problem with using a template instead of a category for the functionality we want. I would suggest someone get a bot to move all current members of this category to use templates at the top of the article instead (there shouldn't be any objections to using a bot for that, I hope), or people could do it manually. Template:Living person is ready for use. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 03:17, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

As long as you don't add a list of all living people on the page "Template:Living person" Special:Recentchangeslinked/Template:Living person wont work. Currently "Template:Living person" is blank, so Special:Recentchangeslinked/Template:Living person doesn't show anything.

Adding Category:Living people to Template:Living person would accomplish the same the category on the articles, but this doesn't get us much further either. -- User:Docu

After doing a couple of tests on Tim Duncan, I see that Docu is right. Unlike adding the category tag to a page, adding a template tag to a page doesn't result in changes to that page showing up in Special:Recentchangeslinked/Template:Living person. For example, if you look at Special:Recentchangeslinked/Template:Test, you won't find changes to User_talk pages; rather, you'll find changes to Wikipedia:Sandbox, which is one of the places Template:Test links to. I apologize for my ignorance in this technical matter and, unless someone else can think of some kind of work-around, templates might be out of the question. EWS23 | (Leave me a message!) 17:50, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I thought Recentchangeslinked showed recent changes to articles that linked to the specified article, not that were linked from it. D'oh. There goes that idea. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 07:21, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

It would be a good idea to have a Special:Recentchangeslinkedto, though! Combined with invisible templates, it would provide a dynamic way of creating different kinds of watch lists such as this. It does share a problem with the current Category:Living people system: the vandal could just remove the category or template, and the page won't show up on the watch list. This doesn't even have to be intentional: vandalism such as replacing the entire article with "DICK" will be missed. /skagedal^[talk] 11:29, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Renaming

I feel that (as I know at least some others here do as well) that sending the question of renaming this article to a straw-poll vote was a little premature. Additionally, since the discussion on the entire topic got archived today, I am reposting my comment from yesterday in the hopes that further discussion will continue. Support for renaming: I support renaming the category and I believe that * would be less confusing. My reasons are:

1. A single symbol is less noticable, so will gather less interest
2. A symbol gives us the opportunity to redefinte the meaning to something like "Articles that carry a high risk of libel". That would be a productive change because we run the substantial risk of libel from any article is substantially about a controversial person, not just their main biography article. We could also consider adding the same symbol to other high vandalism articles, such as those linked from the main page, or those mentioned in a slashdot article, or an article about another topic with highly controversial figures. We are no less at risk for libel if Kenneth Lay is libeled at the Enron page than at his own page.
3. A symbol is less likely to encourage people to attempt to add subcategories.

As to claims that a single character will create confusion - I think that is easily dispelled as soon as they follow the link and see the explanation about why the symbol is there. As to the argument by Gmaxwell about multiple single character categories - you are making a slippery slope argument. Until/unless someone is proposing a lot of other single character categories, I am not sure it is productive to spend much time worrying about that problem. For the record though, my opinion is that if we ever need more single-character categories for administrative reasons, we could still add them without unduly confusing the reader. Perhaps in the medium term a software solution would make this cleaner, by allowing something like a "Cat-Admin:*" which would not show up on screen. Johntex\^talk 19:35, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Support. This is essential to minimise the damage done by Jimbo's arrogant foisting of this dumb idea on the poor Wikipedia. Osomec 09:18, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Persondata

I have only just (as in within the last hour) become aware of Wikipedia:Persondata and have started to add it to some articles. I think this might be more useful than this category. Thoughts? 23skidoo 00:23, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

• I believe the different between persondata and a plain {{living person}} template is that with persondata a bot would be needed to compile the recent changes watchlist. And according to the archived discussion "The thing is, for a bot to efficiently collect a list of people who are living on a regular basis, you need Category:Living people. No other method in the current MediaWiki software would allow similarly efficient listmaking by an external bot, or so Gmaxwell et al. have said." Kappa 00:49, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

If no other better mechanism exists, something that would work would be a simple convention that any article about a living person should contain an HTML comment at the top indicating that fact. A bot could go through all articles looking for such a comment and add them to a list. This could be done at the time of each edit - that would make it more efficient. A lightweight mechanism like that would have none of the much-discussed problems with using a category to serve this administrative purpose. Most importantly, it would be invisible to the readers of the articles. And if there is no mechanism in the existing MediaWiki software to accomplish the administrative needs, then the software needs to be changed rather than polluting the readers' view with useless categories. - Hayne 02:35, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

This must never be subcategorised

If any subcategories are allowed it will be a road to disaster. Who is to say whether say categorising by nationality or my occupation is better. If either is created, both will have to be. Then it will get split more and more and some people will be in multiple categories in addition to their existing multiple categories. The category links at the bottom of articles will look horrible. Osomec 09:17, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

• Thank you Osemec, for pointing out this important point. I agree with you that this category should not be sub-categorized. Thanks "*", then there will be less temptation to sub-categorize people by gender, politics, nationality, hair color, etc. Johntex\^talk 16:37, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

BTW if you are interested in a list of living golfers, please try CategoryIntersect.php with "Golfers" ∩ "Living people". -- User:Docu

I will not cooperate with this stupid idea

When I create more articles about golfers, which I'm sure I'll be doign plenty of as the season gets into its swing I won't put them in this category. I won't add year of birth categories either. Osomec 09:17, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree 1000%. What's wrong with assuming a person is alive unless there is some confirmation of death. I fail to see any benefit whatsoever in such a category that has a target population of 6 billion people. What's next? Category:Living males and Category:Living females? How about Category:Wikipedians who think the Living people category is a collosal waste of time and resources? At least that category might be slightly smaller than the Living people category. Alansohn 14:15, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

• Assuming someone is alive doesn't put them in a place where their article can be watched. Kappa 14:19, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Watch all articles related to people, unless they're dead. Voila. Now you have ameans to track the subject. Categories are meant for a specific purpose, and there is no reason to create a category that implies a completely unworkable project of tracking any and all changes to any article about any living person. Alansohn 14:46, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

And the target isn't 6 billion anymore than there is a target to have an article on every living person. Co-operation isn't required for this to be useful to those he wish/need to use it, as long as other editors aren't removing the category tag to make a point. --Whouk (talk) 14:50, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

• Um where is the handy link that allows me to watch "all articles related to people, unless they are dead"? Kappa 14:55, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

• The link is here Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living people Lumos3 12:53, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

If the point is Category:Articles which could get the Foundation sued, then this is not the ideal solution by a long-shot. I think that's the larger issue that this fails to address, as most knee-jerk solutions do. -- nae'blis _(talk) 17:54, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

• Renaming the category to * would allow us the type of flexibility we need to repurpose it into "Category:Articles which have a higher than average likelihood of getting the Foundatiuon sued". I think that would be far more valuable. As I say above, libel is lebel even if it is not on a person's biographical article. To included non-controversial living people in this category, while at the same time excluding controversial institutions composed of living people, is not the best use of our watchfulness. Johntex\^talk 18:48, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I think that the idea of renaming the category to "*" or some similar scheme is a good idea too. -Will Beback 17:21, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Logical extension

I'm pretty sure that this category should be a subcategory of Category:Things_that_exist, which itself should be a sub of Category:Things. Am I wrong? Hmm. wonder what is the super category that contaings both Category:Things and Category:Non-Things. Wacky. ike9898 14:52, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

What about Category:Tangible items and Category:Non-tangible items? -_0 --malber 14:13, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

What's happened to GMaxwell?

I just tried to access the GMaxwell list and it won't let me because apparently he's been banned. Throws a bit of a spanner in the works on adding this category, doesn't it? - 204.155.226.9 21:14, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Where was the list located? I might be able to help. --Phroziac _. o º ^{O (♥♥♥♥ chocolate!)} 21:38, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

It's linked fairly prominately on the main category page. Gmaxwell's list - TexasAndroid 21:58, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

As the list is dead, I commented it out on the category page. -- User:Docu

I don't know the precise query Gmaxwell was using, but I posted the output of a similar query [1]. --Interiot 06:18, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Huh?

This is a joke, right?

Surely it could at least be subcategorised, by year of birth perhaps. As is, it stands no justifiable purpose. It's a laughing stock. When I saw someone adding an article to it, I thought it was meant to be a bad joke. BigBlueFish 15:52, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

• Please read the discussion here. There is a good reason not to subcategorize, which is that we want to have a single watch list over these articles. There is also a discussion here about renaming the category so that it will be less confusing to people like yourself who encounter it without knowing the purpose behind it. Johntex\^talk 16:08, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
  • I try to avoid reading through column miles of discussion, because I know that there's enough to spend a lifetime reading, but after a bit more reading up and found the discussions that I didn't think were there, and am appalled. Why? Because there has been a CfD for this category and there is no mention of it on this talk page. Worse is that, when I found the archive of the CfD the discussion had been blanked by Jimbo. How blanking of an archived discussion is of any constructive use is beyond me. Surely it goes against Jimbo's principles. I don't care if as he suggests the category gets preserved only by his top-down intervention but please don't make the mistake of contriving a consensus to something that it isn't. BigBlueFish 16:31, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
    • No one is saying there was consensus to keep in that CfD. Jimbo decreed that this category would stay and that discussion could proceed here as to how it would be implemented (which included the possibility of renaming, and may include the possiblity of another solution, such as Wikipedia:Persondata). There's a difference, but Jimbo has the authority to do so. He is trying to protect the encyclopedia and the project from harm, and other people's reputations as well; I admire that goal, even if I disagree that this category in particular is the best way to do that. -- nae'blis _(talk) 16:38, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
      • Nobody said anything about the actual consensus of the CfD at all. My point—which you missed—is that nobody who reads the current revision of the archive would know what the consensus was at all, except for some suspiciously spaced-out comment timestamps. The label of Archive is also critical. The discussion which took place there has not been properly archived. It has been censored, in the worst sense of the term with respect to freedom of speech. You should probably just forget that I objected to the category initially. I retract that since I now know more about the history of the category. My problem is that it should be nowhere near as difficult to understand the history of the category. I think Jimbo has some explaining to do. BigBlueFish 16:49, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
        • Okay, fair point to you. The archive could probably be cleaner because it's miles long, but that's why somebody archived it, right (I wish they'd been a little less draconian, myself, as I've ended up repeating several points made just in the day or two before the archival). Also indulge me on what you mean by 'suspiciously spaced out timestamps?'? -- nae'blis _(talk) 17:03, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
          • I'm referring to the archive of the CfD. It's there where Jimbo's timestamps are the only thing which made me realise that he hadn't just stepped in as soon as the nomination was made and closed it. That's the archived discussion I was talking about. I agree that it's fruitless putting the usual CfD notice on the talk page right now, but that's because the CfD page is at fault. It claims to be an archive but it is not. Does WP:Verifiability apply to CfD? BigBlueFish 17:10, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
            • I'm goinna try to say this right but somebody older and wiser may correct me; the 'archive' still exists in that none of the discussion edits have been deleted (which is different from blanking, in wiki-parlance). Anyone can still go to Categories_for_deletion/Log/2006_January_19 and view the history of the page and see all edits (even new editors or first-time visitors, if they know how). So that's good. As to your question about verifiability, I think WP:V itself probably doesn't apply to project pages, no, but this is a fairly special case. I'm not at all certain I can write a custom "This CfD was closed by edict" header for this page and have it be neutral, so I'll defer that to someone else for now. My personal view is that that notice should include both the link the final decision which is currently visible, and a diff to the debate. Does that help? -- nae'blis _(talk) 17:17, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
              • I agree with you. WP:V probably doesn't strictly apply by policy because of the namespace, though I don't think if put to the vote, there would be a consensus that misleading information is allowed in such a form. And that is Wikipedia policy (or at least a hypothetically future one!). There's no indication on the page that a discussion was once there and has been blanked. At the very least this should be there if not the whole discussion. Given the revert warring that has already occurred over it and the fact that you're not meant to touch archived discussions, I'm not going to go and put it right. Someone higher up if not Jimbo himself needs to explain why things are how they currently are and what should be done.BigBlueFish 17:26, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
                • I'm not gonna attempt to say which diff over at the CfD log is definitive, so for right now I'ev just included a modified version of the usual CfD notice at the top, with Jimbo's decision spelled out (and linked to). Mentioning the page history as a 'record' is a compromise measure... how does that strike you? -- nae'blis _(talk) 19:43, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
                  • I just noticed Wikipedia talk:Categories for deletion/Log/2006 January 19 in which Jimbo says that he didn't mean to blank it but to move it to the talk page. Clearly he forgot. In light of that, I've copied the discussion from this revision which is when it was first boilerplated, hence making any additional modifications a violation of clear instructions. I updated the pastel box accordingly. I think that now makes it pretty clear the position of the category within the community and under Jimbo Wales. All content in the pastel boxes now at the top of the page should be kept here and not archived. BigBlueFish 12:35, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
                  • Changed to the next revision, a minor spelling correction by closer Haukurth. BigBlueFish 12:39, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
        • Can you point out diffs or sections that have been 'censored', and how? I have no problem with putting a notice at the top of this talk page that says this category has already been through CfD and is not to go again (I was the one who placed the HTML comment in the talk page itself to that effect), it would just look a little different than most, since the decision is all that remains, and the discussion itself has been blanked (repeatedly) and is only available in the history of that page. -- nae'blis _(talk) 17:03, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

The other good reason not to subcategorise is that it wouldn't stop and will lead to hideous category clutter. Osomec 13:39, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

One more category?

One danger is that we miss biographical articles for living people with no Year of birth category because the bots and queries don't know it's a biography. We need another category: Non-biography. Then every article must have one of the following categories:

Non-biography

Year of death

Living person (or possibly living, disappeared).

Any article without any of these would then need investigation.
20.138.246.89 17:58, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

• But "Non-biography" articles are still a threat for libel. What if Steve Jobs sues us over something said about him at Apple Computer, or what if Microsoft sues us because someone posts fraudelent information about their product at Microsoft Windows? That is why the category should be renamed and refocused to a purely administrative "article likely to pose a legal problem for Wikipedia" category. Johntex\^talk 18:02, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Archiving this talk page

I'm the one who did the archiving a couple of days back. I have since seen some complaints about how I did it. Very well. So I'm opening a discussion on how the page *should* be archived, if my methods were not the best.

I used the standard method of archive that I've used on a number of other talk pages without incident, though none of the others were this active at the time, they had just grown large over time. I first did a page move of the talk to the archive page, so that the history would go with the archive, then I replaced the redirect automatically created at the old spot with the start of a new talk page. Then I moved the last couple of discussions back from the archive, and finally built up the headers of both the archive and new talk page.

One key point in all this may be just how many sections/which sections, got moved back to the main talk page. The problem here was that there were lingering discussions all over the page. It would have been hard to find many large discussion sections that had not had comments somewhere in them in the previous 24 hours. But the page as a whole was getting quite large, over 100K. That's 3X the point at which the WP software starts griping about the page being too big. So I felt an archiving was definitely needed, but didn't see how I could easily do so and preserve all sections that had had recent posts on the main page. Add to this a thought that, on those still open topics, discussion could continue on the archive page. Or maybe if someone wanted a specific discussion to continue on the main page, they could/would just pull that piece back out of the archive to the main talk page. In hindsight, not a great thought. Neither happened. People considered my archiving to have been a closing off of the open discussions. Not my intention, but that's the way it played out.

So now we are back to a growing page, and I'm looking forward to how to handle the next archiving. At the current rate of discussion, I figure we have maybe a week or two until archiving becomes urgent again. So what should happen at that point?

If I'm to do the archive again, and I have no real problem with being the one, I will definitely need to handle things a little differently. One possible thought is giving people a little notice. I'm thinking I could start a "archive coming soon" section, giving people warning, 24 hours or so, and specifically asking people which discussion sections they would like to see retained on the main talk page. Does this sound workable? Does anyone else have ideas for other steps to make the next archive go smoother? - TexasAndroid 18:34, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Let's not get too fussed about it, otherwise we will have even more to archive :). If you thought I was criticising the archive job, that's a misunderstanding of what I posted, possibly confused by nae'blis, who did seem to object, although this is the only complaint I can see.

Vis à vis the next archive, I've seen some nice archive jobs that list the important topics that have been discussed. You might like to do that. I suggest you keep sections that have seen recent activity, and any with important information that users might need to know (e.g. Jimbo saying that it should be categorised). The correct CfD history also needs to be mentioned when we've figured out what in Middle Earth is going on with its CfD page (see above). BigBlueFish 19:15, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

People mostly seem to like the way User:Crypticbot does it, I think. One disadvantage of archiving by moving is that cited diffs elsewhere will stop working, which isn't necessarily a critical thing but something to note. Demi ^T/_C 19:45, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Eeep, I certainly didn't object to the need for archival, I just thought you included some discussions that were still going on. On the rare occasion I've done archival, I usually pull out the sections that haven't had any discussion for X days/weeks/months (depending on the page), and leave the ones that have responses/issues still to be resolved. Even if that makes them out-of-order from the original page, refactoring is okay in archival/talk pages from what I understand.

To my knowledge it's not usual form to continue a discussion on an archive page, but I've only been here a few months. If I'd really been upset about it I'd have pulled back out the sections, but by the time I got back here the salient issues had been reopened on this page by interested parties. No blood, no foul. -- nae'blis _(talk) 19:48, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

• Thanks TexasAndroid, for your work in archiving the page. I agree with Bigbluefish that there is no big problem here. I may have confused things by labeling your archive as "partial". I was really referring there to the blanking of page contents, which happended not only at the CfD, but at this Talk page. That was not your fault. I just felt people needed to be warned somehow that going to the archive won't show them all the discussion that has occurred it. As to ongoing discussions, it is certainly difficult to remove content yet preserve so many ongoing discussions. If it seems feasible to do an archive by topic, that would be awesome. I am sure you will try to leave as much of the ongoing discussion here as possible. Johntex\^talk 19:51, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Moving a talk page to create an archive is a technique I am not familiar with. I don't think that is a good practice in general for the following reasons:

1. The history of the archive will contain part of the history of the talk page.
2. The entire talk page should not be moved, only the old inactive discussions.
3. It is not possible to compare the page from before or after the archive.
4. The history of the page gets fragmented into pieces instead of being in one place, especially for ongoing discussions.

I see the purpose of archive pages as a convenience for users which unclutters the talk page so that the entire history can be scanned easily. I don't think the intent of an archive is to REPLACE the history. -- Samuel Wantman 02:47, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

• I agree it seems better to leave the history here and to simply cut-and-paste to create the archive. In addition to the reasons listed by Samuel, Demi makes a good point that moving the history would break any diffs that people have already created. Johntex\^talk 02:51, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Dead People

If there is a category for living people surely there should be a category for dead people. User:slamdac 19.49, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

There are several: subcategories of Category:Deaths by year and Category:Year of death missing. There is also a super-category Category:Dead people (please don't use this one on articles). -- User:Docu

politics

If we are going to closely watch Living People for vandalism, why not do the same for dead people? Doesn't Martin Luther King enjoy the same protection? Just because King is not around to file a lawsuit doesn't mean he deserves less protection than George W. Bush. Obviously, all biographies should be watched closely for vandalism. But if the distinction is made between living and dead, the dead will be more ignored. Bubbachuck 21:32, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

• If you have read the information above, then you know that it is not just about vandalism, it is about the potential for the Wikimedia foundation to be sued for libel. The underlying premise to this category seems to be that the living are more likely to sue than the dead. I think that assumption probably holds most of the time. However, the estates of deceased people are still able to sue for libel. That is one reason I think restricting this cateogry to living people is the wrong approach. This category needs to be about "articles likely to pose a legal threat to Wikipedia". That could include many (maybe not all) living persons, and would also include prominent dead people and prominent companies. Johntex\^talk 22:04, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
  • In at least the US & UK defamation laws do not generally cover the deceased.[2] [3]

• Actually, that first link, which is to a free legal advice website, says "In most states..." That hardly seems conclusive. It also does not address the issue of libel that could occur in an article about another topic. For instance, an article on a specific person may include some information about that person's spouse, which could be libelous. An article about a company could include libel about the president of the company. Johntex\^talk 18:34, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
• The obvious solution that we more or less arrive at is that it's not desirable to have any articles with unreliable content. The only thing we can do about that is get on with working on articles. BigBlueFish 19:24, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

How to prevent libel suits

Disallow articles about anyone living. That should cut down on the libel suits... and save a ton of disc space in the process. :) Wahkeenah 09:45, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Or create 'Wikiography' to corral all biographical articles in a managed area? User:Noisy | Talk 14:52, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

That would not be sufficient - libel could occur at any article, not just an article on the person in question. For example, someone could insert libelous statements about Bill Gates into Microsoft Windows or Internet Explorer or monopoly. Johntex\^talk 01:42, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Category:Living people of South Korea

Category:Living people of South Korea has popped up. I've nominated it for deletion because if subcategories grow spontaneously we may end up with articles in several "living" categories at once. Deletion discussion. Kappa 11:17, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Should Category:Living people be subcategorised?. This category is too large to be navigable and thus useful. Plus, sub categorising would help WP:BLP as it can cater to niche interests. Perhaps a good criteria for a new category would be that it has enough articles otherwise they fall into this main category. Or perhaps, the way the subbing process does it. -- Zondor 12:24, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

No, this is not a good idea. But it would be great if there is the mechanism provided to give the intersection of Living People and Golfers as discussed previously on this talk tage. -- Zondor 13:20, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Category math feature -- Zondor 15:07, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Please put this category LAST

If we must have this ridiculous category which will waste a huge amount of time, annoy a lot of people, make Wikipedia look ridiculous and achieve almost nothing, can it at least be put last on this list of categories in each article, rather than first? First place should go to the category which is most relevant and useful. Osomec 13:37, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

That's a much wider discussion about cat ordering. Many people alphabetise cats, which is, at least, a NPOV way of doing it. —Whouk (talk) 17:19, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

I couldn't agree more... It's completely rediculous category!

fizzerbear 18:52, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

There is no obvious logical category order, so most editors ignore it. Get used to this category being first, middle or last at random, unless you think it a worthwhile mission to start rearranging categories on ten thousand pages. —Michael Z. 2006-02-05 19:07 Z

Toolserver undead list

Regarding my toolserver undead list... [4] I'm amazed out how fast you guys are cranking through that thing. Every time I re-generate it, a couple more years have fallen off the end. I wanted to say though that if there are any suggestions for code changes that will make the job easier, please let me know. It's not always easy to tell which feature requests are super-easy and which are relatively hard (it depends greatly on what columns are in the database, and sometimes on whether they have an index on them), so go ahead and suggest and I'll let you know. For instance, it was trivial to remove pages that are redirects, so I've gone ahead and done that. And if there are any procedural changes (like, should I ping a page somewhere to note that I've re-run the query, and that all the pages at the bottom are fair-game again?), I'm happy to take suggestions on those as well. Keep up the good work. --Interiot 17:52, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

D6 just added the category to a series of composers. The remaining articles should probably processed manually. -- User:Docu

larger contents needed

A much larger contents is needed with quick links to two letters such as Ad, Af etc. It takes a long time to go through each letter as it is now. It should be something like Wikipedia:Quick index -- Astrokey44|talk 08:24, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

The category isn't intended for browsing. The aim is to use Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category talk:Living people to watch changes to articles in the cat. —Whouk (talk) 09:10, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

'Invisible' category?

I can understand having this category (though only barely), but it seems silly to have it show up on the bottom of every page about a living person. Isn't there some way we can let this category exist, but not show up on the pages? I think that would cut down drastically on the number of confused/nay-saying wikipedians also. - Crenner 06:29, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Currently, no, there is not. Personally, I'm ambivalent on the whole topic, since I feel that being to "hide" categories is just invite trollish abuse. But there's been a number of suggestions that this feature be implemented in future versions of the MediaWiki software. – Seancdaug 13:38, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

For what it's worth, if invisible categories were implemented, we could also, to some extent, have semantic relationships between articles (aka metadata, aka Semantic Web). This is because the category's sort key data string is stored in the database, and is easily searched on. So, for instance, Katie Holmes could have in the article [[Category:*EngagedTo|Tom Cruise]] [[Category:*BodyHeight_cm|172]]. If such categories could be hidden, this sort of metadata could proliferate, and toolserver tools could allow users to do queries on the metadata (eg. show me the 10 tallest actresses currently alive). (the only technical hangups that I can see is that cl_sortkey is max 86 characters, and it doesn't have an index on it currently, though an index could be added on the toolserver) --Interiot 18:30, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

This would be nice. Together with an enhanced Wikipedia:Category math feature, one could implement Category:People shot by standing Vice Presidents as [[Category:*ShotBy|x . $x\in$[[Category:Vice Presidents of the United States]] ]]. :-) /skagedal^[talk] 11:45, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Category:Living classical composers

Should these be added to Category:Living people as well ? -- User:Docu

No. As has been said before, Category:Living people is an administrative category. People who want to can use it to browse, but it is not intended for navigation. It is placed within the hierarchy of Category:Wikipedia administration, which is designed not to intersect with navigational categories like Category:Society (or whatever). From the looks of things, Category:Living classical composers is placed firmly within the hierarchy of "navigable" categories, and so it should not be connected to a primarily "administrative" category like this, since we ideally want to reduce the number of non-editors who ever stumble across this particular category listing. – Seancdaug 13:36, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

In fact, my question was if I should add the articles in category:Living composers to category:living people. From your response, I take it that they should be added. -- User:Docu

Yes. Or to put it yet another way: 1) this category should have no subcategories, and 2) it's okay if there are other navigation categories that include only living people, but whenever that occurs, articles must be included in both that other category, and in Category:Living people. (other categories that this applies to include Category:Surviving silent film actors and Category:Current national leaders) --Interiot 20:43, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Ok. I added Living people to the composer biographies with a birth category. -- User:Docu

If it is an administrative category, then why is it described encyclopaedically and the use of {{selfref}}? -- Zondor 12:33, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Probably because Wikipedia is meant to have a transparent administration. People will want to know what the category is for. Most documents in the project namespace are encyclopedically written. Selfrefs are used because the category is not in the project namespace but the category namespace. I suppose really there should be a Wikipedia category: namespace. BigBlueFish 11:50, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Dead people?

Will there be a dead people category or should we assume that anyone that is not in this category isnt alive?--Hypergeometric2F1[a,b,c,x] 05:59, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

There are various categories for dead people and people likely not alive: Category:Deaths by year, Category:Year of death missing, Category:Possibly living people, Category:Disappeared people, Category:People lost at sea. Category:Dead people has a series of other subcategories. -- User:Docu

Every biographical article should have a year of birth (or Category:Year of birth missing) and should also have a year of death or some alternative. - Runcorn 20:10, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

I think the dead people category should exist, but this shouldn't. I mean, most people are either living or dead. There is no alternative state. So if you're not dead, you must be living, right? --HJV 00:18, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

There's also "possibly living". --Phroziac _. o º ^{O (♥♥♥♥ chocolate!)} 16:13, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

• and "fictional" - we have a lot of articles about fictional people. Also "not born yet", but I don't think so many of them have articles. Kappa

Pop Idol articles

These articles keep getting their Category:Living people tags removed by User:ZlatkoT. I can't see why Pop Idol finalists should be exempt from this category. - Runcorn 20:10, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Looks like Runcorn finally got the last ones done. Congrats! .. -- User:Docu

Proposal

If this category is not meant to be browsable, wouldn't it be benificial to somehow hide the link to the category on each living person's page? Some articles are really bloated with categories and it would help a little if this category could somehow be made invisible.  freshgavinΓΛĿЌ  08:28, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

It sure would. This category is a pain in the ass. Golfcam 21:37, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Stub too?

Given the logic of this category, we need a {{Living-bio-stub}}. If you think that's silly, you may well think that the category is, too. - Runcorn 23:13, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

• I don't follow your logic, this category is for monitoring and vetting, not for finding articles to expand. Kappa 23:28, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Such a stub would be a warning to people to take particular care when expanding such a stub, because it is an article about a living person; it would thus be a second line of defence. - Runcorn 21:08, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm don't think such a stub would have much effect as a warning, but even if it did, wouldn't this category do the same? The downside is that it would double the clutter in the articles while adding nothing to the monitoring process. ×Meegs 21:26, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree. Anyone stubbing an article who knows that the subject is living should add this category. An extra stub on every living person stub would be unnecessary clutter. —Whouk (talk) 21:38, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

This category needs deletion, not subdivision. Choalbaton 17:24, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

¿ To include Zapatero's foreign policy ?

¿ Category:Living people to include Zapatero's foreign policy and George W. Bush's first term as President of the United States  ?

Just wondering if this type of article should be included in this category. The other day I created Category:José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero for the first article and series of others which were (are) all included in Category:Living people. Personally I'd only include the main article (i.e. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero). -- User:Docu

I strongly oppose using this category for anything other than the main article. Would the category be appropriate for an article about a book by a living author, or a film where the director or leading actor is still alive? - Runcorn 23:12, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Carson Whitsett

This article shows a gap in our procedures. It is a biography of a living person, and has existed for some time, but was overlooked for Living people because it has only just had a birth category added. Any way round that problem? I did suggest having a category of articles that weren't biographies, so that every single article has to be in one category or another, but it's a bit cumbersome. - Runcorn 23:12, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Another example I've just fixed is John G. Wood - Runcorn 10:10, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

The categories for birth/death years were expanded based on lists of people with birth years (such as List of people by name), other categories with articles already categorized in the same way (frequent other categories) etc. -- User:Docu

This category is full of omissions and I don't care

Based on the categorisation of sports announcers that I'm doing quite a lot of people are missing, but I haven't added them as I don't have time to waste helping out Wikipedia's dumbest project. Choalbaton 17:22, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, boo for Jimbo for this one. If it's an administrative category, it should be handled in some other way than making it a normal category. Oh, and boo for Seigenthaler for being an egotistical drama queen and indirectly causing all of this.

Peter ^Isotalo 22:31, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

It's handled the same way every other administrative category is handled. Why are you not howling on Category:disambiguation? --Gmaxwell 23:02, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Probably because it's not actually applied to real articles. And the rest seem to be quite temporary. And then there's silliness factor...

Peter ^Isotalo 00:02, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, like it or not it seems to be a category that's sticking around. It's hardly onerous to add an extra line to new biographical articles, and to deliberately avoid that seems close to disrupting Wikipedia to make a point to me. I guess it could be considered a protest boycott... Ziggurat 00:10, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm impressed how many entries have already been added. It may transition to another form (template, etc), but that can be handled by a bot when the time comes. -Will Beback 00:24, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

It's a tad militant to consider passive protests in the form of non-action an actual WP:POINT. You can only accuse people for making WP:POINTs if they intentionally (with assumed malice or bitterness) remove categories.

Peter ^Isotalo 01:35, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

That's fair enough, and I'm not trying to make such an accusation here (hence "close to"). I'm just observing that assuming that this category or something similar (such as a template) will remain a part of Wikipedia (and given the discussions above that seems almost certain) deliberately ignoring it is "requir[ing] the vast majority of nonpartisan editors to clean up after the "proof"". Is it active disruption? No, of course not. It just means more work for other editors, especially editors like me who aim for consistency in articles within the guidelines we have. I'd rather be adding content, too. Ziggurat 01:54, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Do I have to insert this category in any article about a living person? --Masssiveego 08:23, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

You don't have to... It would be good if you do, but if you do not someone else eventually will. --Gmaxwell 01:48, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

If you add the category for the year of birth (e.g. Category:1911 births with the appropriate sortkey), we will add category "Living people" by bot. -- User:Docu

The name

The name for this list is really rather silly and I have to admit that I thought it was a joke list when I first saw it at the bottom of a page. Having read the reasoning behind it I think I get why this list is deemed to be necessary (I'm not really an expert on the way the source code works but am I right in thinking that when an article on this list changes it sends a little "red flag" to some sort of "data central" point or something?) so no worries, keep the list. But the name ... oh man, this is a really awkward name. How about "Non-historical Biographies" or "Current Biograhpies" or something like that? Even now, having read the talk page and typed all this out, I have an urge to go through the list and add everyone I know - after all, they are "living people". ... Sorry, just laughed at the title again. --Stenun 21:07, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Silly as it may sound, please add everybody you know. Please keep in mind though that this is a category, not a list. Thus to add to it, there needs to be an article on the people in Wikipedia, only on the article, one can add [[Category:Living people]] with the appropriate sortkey. -- User:Docu

Why do people only read enough to complain, Was:Why this category won't work

Exhibit Zed: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peter_Tomarken&diff=prev&oldid=44200132

He's not living, and yet vandalism to his bio would be particularly sensitive considering his recent demise. Does Jimbo intend us to have a Category:Recently deceased as well?? -- nae'blis _(talk) 16:01, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

We already do effictively. If you'd bothered to read the archive discussion here you'd know that. There are users monitoring changes for people in 2005 deaths and 2006 deaths. Unlike living people (which could only otherwise be accomplished otherwise with an intersection on the unions of thousands of existing cats), the recently dead are easy to find with our pre-existing category. This has previously been discussed. --Gmaxwell 16:23, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

y not have a nonliving persons artical?

huh? then we could list everyperson to ever die, in order by date and time of death. id vie for an artical like that

A list or article would be too long and unnecessary, given that every year has a category listing the significant deaths of that year already (e.g. Category:2002 deaths). Ziggurat 01:20, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

There is: try http://tools.wikimedia.de/~voj/pd/ . Once in an article, click on the English interwiki link. -- User:Docu

We should add Category:Possibly dead people

It would be useful with Paul McCartney. Lapinmies 14:19, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

It comes up in various contexts. -Will Beback 00:42, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Generations are people?

Why are generations added to this category? They aren't really people, but groups of people. I highly doubt that anyone is going to cry libel if we make a mistake in describing their generation (and note that this is coming from a Gen-Xer who thinks the Generation X article is screwed up). -- LGagnon 20:29, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, anything that isn't a single living person or exclusively a living person (some GenXers are dead) shouldn't be in this cat. Ziggurat 20:46, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Similar to "Category:2006 deaths" that includes 2Deaths in 2006", the generation pages are included with an asterisk ("*") as sortkey. The main reason they are in "Living people" and not just in the birth decades, is to avoid having them on suspected_living_people.py. We could remove them from this category and just fix the report. Not that it matters much -- User:Docu

Bio stubs

When going through the Category:Category needed I've found several articles tagged as {{bio-stub}} or a more specific bio-stub (e.g. {{American-bio-stub}}), that are not inlcuded in this category. Perhaps it would be worth people (and/or a bot?) checking articles in the various bio-stub categories to make sure living people are included in category:Living people? As a suggestion, perhaps a bot could produce a finite list of articles in bio-stub categories that are not in either this category or a year-of-death category, for humans to then categorise apropriately? I'm not a bot author so I don't know whether this is even feasable or not, let alone desirable. Thryduulf 00:27, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I keep finding articles like that. One I've just fixed is for the Brazilian footballer Elzo. - Runcorn 08:40, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

What's so special about living people?

RE Purpose: Because living persons may suffer personal harm from inappropriate information, we should watch their articles carefully. This category exists to help Wikipedia editors improve the quality of biographies of living persons by ensuring that the articles maintain a neutral point of view, maintain factual accuracy, and are properly sourced.

Surely the above applies even more to dead people. After all, the living can defend themselves. Or are we suggesting that once someone dies, the quality no longer matters. I hope not. Wallie 12:38, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Dead people can't sue for defamation, nor can we hurt their feelings. -Will Beback 00:41, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Capitalisation problems

Just to let you know that Category:Living People (note the capital P) has got people (or should that be People) in it. I realised this a while back and thought that I'd set it up so that a bot would go and automatically sort it out every so often, but it turns out that the Bot isn't active. When I get a chance I'll move all the articles over but I think that the more people keeping an eye on this the better. RicDod 19:39, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

It's unfortunate in a way that the category exists as it means that the cat link isn't flagged in red if the capitalisation is wrong. Anyway, I've emptied it again. It should be possible to do it with AWB if there are lots of article miscategorised and a bot isn't available. —Whouk (talk) 20:09, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Acting out of Fear is never a good idea

This Category is so incredibly stupid, any attempt to explain its stupidity will let the esplainer feel so stupid, it will render him immediatly unconsious. --John.constantine 19:08, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Fear? What are you talking about? --Gmaxwell 17:16, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Presumably fear of legal retribution. Get over it guys. BigBlueFish 11:49, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

This category damages Wikipedia

I've been adding this category to articles because I've seen it on others, but the more I do the more I think I'm wasting my time. It looks stupid at the bottom of articles and I don't have confidence that it is usable or does the slightest good. It should be scrapped. Chicheley 21:33, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. There are billions of living people, let alone those on Wikipedia. This caregory is too big, can never be fully sorted, and should be deleted.--sonicKAI 14:24, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

Deletion:Yes

At aproxomintly 6.8 billion people in the world...and probably only something like 2 billion on wikipedia.You may as well add people from your workplace and schools in...I WOULD...but I can't edit this article.Jack Dempsey was my great uncle, a few times removed.Centurion Ry

Rename to "Category:Living persons"

This is a more appropriate name, as everyone in the category is a living person; it is a list of individual persons who are alive, not general masses of living people or social or biological matters related to people living. —Centrx→talk • 19:49, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

I second that, 'living persons' would be a far better name. 'Living people' could be a topic on the characteristics of people who are alive, as opposed to...formerly alive. C i d 12:20 1 August 2006 (UTC)

This category..

This category doesn't include Shelly Poole, she should be added. —Preceding unsigned comment added by -Anthony- (talk • contribs)

It sure does, check: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Living_people&from=Poole -- User:Docu

There are articles on living people that have been around for over two years without being categorized here. I don't want to give many examples as I don't want to cause the category to be added to anything I work on, but I will mention Ingrid Mattson. I only edited her once after seeing her on TV. As I saw her on TV a couple weeks ago I'm reasonably certain she's alive and as she's a woman leading a Muslim organization she has "vandalism potential." (In fact the article's been vandalized in least once) Still this category has survived longer than I expected so it must have some utility even I think it is still mostly worthless. John S I don't think sued in the first place and in the second place I don't think there's much hard evidence that vandalism of articles on people is less a problem. I think it's just only slightly better than when I left for a time because, in part anyway, of this category.--T. Anthony 09:24, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Looking I also found an article I created last September on a living writer that's never been categorized as such.--T. Anthony 09:42, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

efficacy

So as Phil Sandifer pointed out elsewhere, how is it possible that even with this busywork category, John Seigenthaler, Sr. spent over a day vandalized with the same old JFK crap? -- nae'blis 17:12, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

This is quite possibly the dumbest idea I've seen to date

The world today consists of about eight billion people. Of those, about maybe 200,000 are worth writing a wikipedia bio on. That's 200,000 pages in a single unsubcategorizable category. Does anyone have the faintest idea how much maintenance this is going to require? I understand there's a good intention behind the purpose, but really, if someone is going to spread dishonorable information, will they really care about your system? Furthermore, you state that "This category exists to help Wikipedia editors improve the quality of biographies of living persons by ensuring that the articles maintain a neutral point of view, maintain factual accuracy, and are properly sourced.", but aren't those already policies on Wikipedia? This system seems nothing more than a waste of time. Xhin 03:32, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

agreed MorrisS 18:29, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. I doubted this from the beginning and I still do. I'm not even sure it can work in theory or practice. I mentioned Ingrid Mattson here two weeks ago and to my surprise she's still not in this category. Even if added this proves little. (As I've now mentioned her here twice) Because even people in this category can still be subject to attack-vandalism as many living people are not of interest to Wikipedians so their articles are ignored as they were before. Further the category is so huge it's unlikely it could be properly policed even if that's the intent.--T. Anthony 07:49, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

T. Anthony, I added your article. In the future, feel free to be bold and categorize articles yourself. It's not hard, and takes about 10 seconds. --84.134.61.186 13:20, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

As I don't believe in this category, and think it won't serve its intended purpose, that would kind of be not worth it for me. Thanks anyway.--T. Anthony 00:38, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

When I first saw this on the footer of the Lilly Allen page, I thought it was a spoof. After all, people are either alive or dead, and the article would verify this. You might as well make a catergory called "people" or "things", or "Wikipedia articles".--80.42.105.233 19:59, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Subcats are not desirable. Looking at the cats directly is not desireable. This is a database issue. The major function of this category is to enable this button. It does help with picking up vandalism to living people. Derex 22:00, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Pages heavily involving a living person

My understanding of this category is that it provides a way to monitor changes to articles about living people, to enforce WP:BLP. Mark Foley scandal is an article about several living people, but primarily about one. Bill Frist medical school experiments controversy is another one. BLP violations happen all the time on those two. There are obviously many such. These are also unusually prone to potentially libelous statements. The description of this category does not include such articles. If the main point is to provide a monitoring mechanism, it seems to me that they should be included. If so, the category description should be broadened. Or, perhaps another category on articles heavily involving living people? Thoughts? Derex 02:48, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Anyone? Derex 20:47, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes. Wholeheartedley agree. Many people are notable only for a single achievement or a single achievement is worthy of an article of its own. For those articles, it is very easy to violate BLP even though the article is not specifically about the person. For articles that detail the achievement or actions of one or a few people, the BLP tag should apply. There are even cases where the person redirects to the article they are notable for. That should be a clearcut case of the BLP tag. --Tbeatty 03:45, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, in a sign of the apocalypse, looks like that makes you and me a consensus T. Suggested criteria for standard tagging: articles containing the name of a living person, or which reasonably could & article with redirects from living people's names (not to be gamed).

In addition, I'd say that any article which has had a flagrant BLP violation can be optionally tagged. After all, this is not a navigational category; Jimbo specifically set it up to help monitor BLP violations. So, if a BLP violation has occurred once, it's likely to again, and it should enter the monitoring system regardless of article name.

However, it is important that we not add the tag simply to all articles involving living people, without a demonstrated need as per above. For example, we shouldn't tag sports teams simply because they have living people. Otherwise, the [magic BLP button would be no more useful than the standard recent changes button. Derex 08:34, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

sounds good to me. It's kind of a nebulous standard but will probably work like the definition of pornography "I know it when I see it." I would say if the article contains "biographical" information it is BLP (biographical information being beyond the newspaper name, age, gender, occupation). Also, I think there should be ways for non-biographies to remove the information that makes them BLP articles. For example, if the Dallas Cowboys has substantial biographical information about Tom Landry, it may be a BLP tag candidate but if it moves that data to a different article (say Tom Landry), it can lose the tag. I'm not sure what the threshold would be though. --Tbeatty 09:01, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

That sounds reasonable. I don't know that we need a real strict line on what qualifies. The important thing is establishing that articles beyond strict traditional biographies can use this tag. They don't necessarily need to be tagged, but can if they attract BLP trouble. I initially posted this after someone through a shit-fit about me tagging the Foley scandal article, which as you can imagine desperately needed it. Derex 11:35, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

LargeCategoryTOC

I've added a new TOC template to this category. There's some discussion about the parent template at Template talk:Navigation bar#CEASE AND DESIST.. If anyone from here has strong opinions about this template, please comment there. Thanks. -- Rick Block (talk) 20:54, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Cat LP piping errors

Many articles in the Cat get the Cat either unpiped, or with a Western name uninverted in the piping -- with the result that those bios get alphabetized by given name. For instance, the Mic page has about 20 people with given name Michael, and a handful of Michels and Michelles. I've just fixed a bunch of other names in Mi, but there's a need for many editors willing to each undertake a small section: e.g., most two-letter prefixes like Mi or Th are likely to be a significant contribution without requiring abandonment of other editing efforts. (There are probably well under 676 substantial-sized pairs: 20x6 consonant-vowel combos, 6x20 vowel-consonant ones, 36 double vowels, and a limited number of double consonants.) Perhaps its worth having page listing two-letter combos, each with a rough count and a date when someone last scanned thru it. Perhaps it should be in "least recently scanned" order rather than alpha, or by the combo's count, or have one alpha, one chrono, and one size index.
--Jerzy•t 07:42, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Year of death missing

Resolved

 – Criteria agreed by consensus; use Category:Possibly living people for unknowns.

"For those with unknown death dates born after 1882…"

I seriously doubt anyone born in 1882 would be alive now. Should it be moved to maybe 1900 or 1920? —  $PЯINGrαgђ  Always loyal! 21:28, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

1920 is far too late; plenty of people born then or before are still with us. 1900 at the latest.--Brownlee 13:42, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

BTW, shouldn't the sentence read: "born before [date]" ? --RCEberwein | Talk 01:15, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

No. Then the sentence would make even less sense. Heroicraptor 07:07, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Anyone that would be older than Jeanne Calment is likely to be dead (122 years and 164 days, i.e. born before 1883 in 2006).

When adding categories by bot, Category:Living people was only added to those born later than 1920, articles about people born between 1910 and 1920 (but not in one of the death categories) were checked after addition.

Category talk:Possibly living people discusses which articles to move to Category:Year of death missing. -- User:Docu —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Docu (talk • contribs) 13:41, 10 December 2006 (UTC).

Marking this topic resolved, because Category:Living people sets the date criteria, and Category:Possibly living people handles the unknowns these days. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 15:32, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

hi please remember hassan tajor

(Rotanalatesex (talk) 15:11, 19 December 2008 (UTC)).

If there's no news of a person's death

Resolved

 – The cut-off date is established at Category:Living people.

If a person in the living people category dies, but this is not reported in news media, they will remain in this category. Over time, there will be people who become very old for whom there is no recent news about. At what age should we move them to the possibly living people category, do you think?--HisSpaceResearch 14:34, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

This is now covered at Category:Living people in its documentation. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 15:32, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Change the rules!

Resolved

 – No consensus to split into subcategories; WP:CFD consensus on topical categories would still apply.

I strongly suggest whoever decides Wikipedian policy ought to change the rules so that this category can be subcategorised in some circumstances. Wikipedia does not segregate any category into living and dead, but should do so for living supercentenarians as this shows the extremes of age. At present, there is a CFD on this category. Dovea 20:50, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

What is wrong with having living categories that are not sub-categories of this one? A category for living supercentenarians is inherently notable and if they're all also in this category I don't see what the problem is. Timrollpickering 01:24, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

There is no consensus to date for such subcategorization of this category, and many proposals for it have been rejected. I believe that some such categories exist, but they are not subcategories of this category, which serves a special WP:BLP purpose. Also, such categories, under the general principles established at WP:CFD, should not include only supercentarians who are still living; we do not remove people from categories (Category:People from Barcelona, Category:Scottish pool players, etc., etc., etc., simply because they have died. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 15:32, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Bug in navigation bar

Resolved

 – Wrong venue.

Has anybody else noticed the bug in the fairly new two-letter navigation bar? Even if you click on all twenty-six of them starting with one letter, you will not get all the people whose names start with that letter.

In fact, if you do that under the O's, there will be more than six hundred fifty people that are missed.

That's because both the space and the apostrophe (and any numbers and several other characters), plus all of the capital letters from A to Z as well, have Unicode numbers lower than the Unicode number of "a".

Shouldn't it be fixed so that the single letters are also links? Gene Nygaard 10:14, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Wrong venue; this should be addressed on the talk page of that TOC template. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 15:32, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Subjective

Resolved

 – Question answered.

This is totally subjective though. How do you define when a person is "dead"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.96.249.63 (talk • contribs)

When they are no longer alive. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 19:20, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

I would have thought that someone rejoicing in your sobriquet might have acquitted himself a touch more imaginatively given this free kick. Myles325a (talk) 01:33, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Nice. Perhaps what the IP user was driving at was ... is Wikipedia using a medical definition to define death or a metaphysical definition? Garth of the Forest (talk) 17:32, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Reliable sources, as always. If there is serious doubt, that is what Category:Possibly living people is for.

i.e. is the Bible considered a reliable source? ;-) Garth of the Forest (talk) 17:32, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Undead report updated

Resolved

 – Self-resolving FYI.

Interiot updated the "undead.txt" report on the toolserver. It includes all articles tagged with a birth category but not a death category. As the update of toolserver data from en.wikipedia.org stopped with data from c. 19 January, 2007, articles categorized afterwards aren't included.

Some 6000 articles from the list for birth years 1910-2004 have already been added to Category:Living people.

Articles about people with earlier birth years (born 1909 or earlier), Category:Year_of_birth_unknown or Category:Year_of_birth_missing still need a category for the year of death, Category:Living people, Category:Possibly living people, Category:Year of death missing, Category:Disappeared people, etc. -- User:Docu

Just plain too long to ever be useful

Resolved

 – Category is not a regular category, but for bot and WP:BIO purposes.

I'd just like to make a point that's probably been made before, but here goes: every single article on Wikipedia is about a living person. Therefore, this category is entirely useless. I challenge you to find one article to prove me wrong.

What about William Shakespeare? Or Pope John Paul II? Hell, Lichen qualifies! --81.23.56.24 (talk) 12:15, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

I agree - I just saw this Category at the bottom of a page - this category is 100% useless to 99.99999% of the people that use the net - a category like "Architects", "Chefs", etc. have some purpose, and I can see the service it provides. I propose a new Category: "Human" -- Themepark

Additionally, I think we should keep in mind that the existence of a category implies that there should be a Wikipedia article about every single entity in that category, as per WP:CATRULE. Consider Category:Footballers, which currently lists everyone alive who has ever played the game. In the case of "living persons", however, I hope we can agree that the over 6 billion of us would single-handedly crash the servers, in addition to being boring to read.— Lenoxus 08:53, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Regarding your second point. Only if we have an article about the person (footballer or not). Garion96 (talk) 21:52, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Not true in the slightest — again, see CATRULE. $\sim$ Lenoxus " * " 02:53, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

It was late last night... Garion96 (talk) 05:49, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Heh, totally understandable -- that's when Mrs. O'Leary's cow is up to her tricks. You have no idea how often I've had the same thing happen (like with m:Friends of gays, had to read it twice). Peace! ;) $\sim$ Lenoxus " * " 16:25, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

I quote you in saying "every single article on Wikipedia is about a living person". If you can excuse me using WP:IAR and make a mild personal attack, that's possibly the most outrageously ridculous statement I've ever read on this website.-h i s s p a c e r e s e a r c h 20:27, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

This is not a usual category, but is for both and WP:BIO needs; the normal reader/editor categories are Category:1925 births, etc., etc., Category:1998 deaths, etc., etc., and the missing/unknown ones Category:Year of death missing, Category:Disappeared people, and so on. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 15:32, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree, this category is useless. Obveously, I wouldn't say that "every single article on wikipedia is about living people" because not all of them are. But still, the world has a population of... I don't know, maybe 1,000,000,000,0000....etc. So yeah, this category is almost like listing the names of the worlds entire population. This category is useless JimboV1 (talk) 06:14, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I think you'll find that the world's human population is projected by [5] — as five seconds of actually consulting a search engine would have told you — to be a mere 6.77*10⁹ people at the time that I write this, so your guesstimate is off by several orders of magnitude and will (hopefully) remain so for centuries to come. --81.23.56.24 (talk) 12:15, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Its rediculous. Living People? Really? Who cares. That's about 100,000,000 different articles. Now, my question is, how do we delete it? --Ragemanchoo (talk) 06:38, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Missing entry

Resolved

 – Wrong venue; just go edit the article or discuss on its talk page.

You need to add Martin Walsh to the list, as he is more "famous" than some others on the category page. Please comment back, if you add him to the list. Brylcreem2 17:17, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Number of articles in this category updating

Resolved

 – Question answered

From the page: "Organization: This category should not be sub-categorised. Entries are generally sorted by family name. As of 10 February 2007, there are 162,304 articles in this category."

It used to be that the total number of articles would be updated every month; this has not happened for a while. Any reason?--FeanorStar7 00:38, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

The tally takes more time and there didn't appear to be much demand. Anyways, I updated it and could update it once in a while. 200,000 is close. -- User:Docu

Thanks for answering and updating the info. Appreciated --FeanorStar7 11:02, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Over 10% of all Wikipedia articles are currently in this category

Total: 1,951,742 Living people: 211,156

--h i s ^{s p a c e} _{r e s e a r c h} 16:35, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

So? I think the interesting comment is that 10% of wikipedia articles are about living people. --Gmaxwell 16:41, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Ahh, but there are over 4 million "living people" in the world. PS how do we know if a wikipedian has died? --[[123Pie|Talk]] 17:36, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

The size of this category is just astonishing. We need to write more articles on anything else! I'm not sure if the size reflects our vanity our lack of curiosity, or merely our referencing abilities. Gareth E Kegg (talk) 13:39, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Useful tool for working with this category

Give cattersect a shot. For example, living English footballers, non-living English footballers. Unfortunately due to the level of excessive sub-categorization and under-categorization on English Wikipedia it's not possible to simple get a list of all living footballers.

If you scroll down to the bottom you'll see a list of categories frequently found in the results. In order to further refine your results, you can click the plus next to a category mandatory, minus to make it forbidden, or equals to start a new search with just that category. --Gmaxwell 16:48, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Kelly Salmon and Duncan Duff

Resolved

Can you please add Kelly Salmon and Duncan Duff to this list as I can't work out how to. Thanks. Jordan5001 19:21, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

You just needed to edit their page, and add Category:Living people to the bottom. the wub "?!" 18:53, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Is this a meaningful category?

I mean, there are (currently) more than 6 billion people in the world. Even if we count only persons of notability, this is a vast amount of people - and the category is not reliable either, for two reasons. 1) It's easy to forget to remove the category when updating an article on a recently deceased person, and 2) Far from all articles on living people use this category. LarRan 11:30, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

See the old discussions. This category isn't really for readers but helps editors to monitor these articles for libel, which could present legal problems for Wikipedia. Obviously it's not perfect, but if you see articles where it needs adding/removing then please do so! the wub "?!" 18:59, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree with LarRan. This list is inane. Anybody who is of any public interest will have their articles monitored without the aid of this list. 72.147.204.127 19:51, 26 September 2007 (UTC)ah3133

I'm no exclusionist, but this list is a bit much! I've seen lists for just about everything, but a list for living people? I suggest the creation of a whole new WikiBiographies. Honestly. Wikitank 01:08, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't see why the living=yes field in the WPBiography template doesn't suffice for the purpose used as rationale for retaining this piece of semantic noise. We even have the blp=yes field for the WikiProjectBannerShell to make sure the WP:BLP concerns are properly advertised. I personally do not perceive how removing this category would result in a sigificant increase in disregard for BLP concerns. __meco 08:03, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

If the list is for bot/admin purposes, why not make it private or something? It's bizarre to scroll down to the end of a page and see 20 links clogging it up, and one of them being the absolutely inane "living people." Why don't we have categories for "Living People With Hair" "Humans That Are Homo Sapiens" and "Dying People" (wherein we also include everyone). Pages on Wikipedia should be meaningful... this one isn't. Pariah23 (talk) 10:54, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree. There is absolutely no point in adding this category. Specifying the person's date of birth and death in the biography is enough to tell whether they are alive or death. If the dates aren't known then they couldn't be classified anyway. And yes, for that matter we could add endless classifications (people without a classification, for instance). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Josuedavila (talk • contribs) 01:32, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Agree. This is a totally inane category and I don't see how it increases the accuracy of biographical info. If it really does then I suggest some hidden category flag instead. Karpouzi (talk) 11:26, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

And again... HOW DO WE DELETE THIS CATEGORY? It serves NO PURPOSE. --Ragemanchoo (talk) 06:39, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

We should have Cadavres category as well. --Tigga en (talk) 02:13, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually not only the category, practically all these pesky biography articles are meaningless. --Mitra (talk) 05:37, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Articles that attempt to identify anything in any concrete way are absolutely pointless. nothing exists, including myself. I AM Mercurywoodrose (talk) 06:48, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Natalee Holloway

I have suggested per the category living persons that she be removed from that category since she is listed under the disappeared persons category. There was BLP concerns about monitoring this article that was discussed. I was told to take it up with the "BLP patrolers" who ever they might be. Can this category please be removed. There seems to be plenty of eyes watching this article to help avoid any BLP issues as well as all other policy and guideline disputes. Thank you.--24.250.59.250 (talk) 19:43, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Lists of people needing categorization by birth or death

I've compiled three lists of people needing categorization by birth or death (as of mid-March 2008):

• User:Dsp13/Living people needing categorization by year of birth (containing about 26,000 individuals)
• User:Dsp13/People needing categorization by year of birth (containing about 11,000 individuals)
• User:Dsp13/People needing categorization as living or by year of death (containing about 18,000 individuals)

Any help gratefully received in adding the appropriate categories to these! Dsp13 (talk) 21:05, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

HIDDENCAT

Should this use the hiddencat keyword, as it's mainly an administrative category? Superm401 - Talk 05:25, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't think so. It's not really an administrative category in the same sense as other hidden categories in that it can't become applicable or need removing as the result of an editorial proces—i.e. it's not to do with the current status of the article. Category:Possibly living people could well need to be hidden though, but I'm not so familiar with its usage. BigBlueFish (talk) 20:18, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

True. But this category is not useful for readers. It serves no navigational purpose. Thus it should be hidden. I had almost added hiddencat immediately (per Be Bold), but this may be hard for the servers so I'll wait a bit for other comments. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 11:01, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

It's not useful to navigate from the category due to size, but I at least use the category list at the bottom of an article as a quick scan of a person's attributes, in which case "living people" is just as useful as "2007 deaths" (which is not useful as a navigation category either, also due to size). --Delirium (talk) 23:21, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

It certainly is useful to navigate from this category, and a whole lot easier to do than in a lot of other categories.

But why was this category hidden? I don't think it should be. Certainly not if you aren't going to hide all the date categories and living and dead people categories. Gene Nygaard (talk) 13:57, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Why this one and not the other ones? I don't come across the others so often,I have no opinion on them, but it certainly wasn't a deliberate choice to not hide them. As for navigating: when you come at the category, how can you usefully navigate it? Yocan go to e.g. the section "Ci", and you still have almost 400 pages. I was goig to count the pages at "St", but at over 1,000 pages, I'm still only at "Sta", so I can't be bothered to continue... If you are trying to look for someone in particular, isn't the search box the more useful and logical option? You certainly woud find Princess Stéphanie of Monaco faster tah tway than through this massive category. Can you give some examples of how the average reader would use this category (so not for maintenance purposes, but to actually look for someone?). For maintenance, you can go to your preferences and mark the "show hidden categories" checkbox, then they all reappear on every page. Fram (talk) 14:31, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

The search box doesn't find them when some fool has created an article about someone with squiggles in name and hasn't made the proper redirects, or when the article name includes titles as in the case of the redirects from Princess Stephanie of Monaco and for Stephanie of Monaco, but if instead you had put in Stéphanie of Monaco you would have been shit out of luck. In that case, trying Living people is probably the fastest way to get you there.

The search box isn't particularly useful when you know the surname and aren't sure about the given name, and might recognize it in a list or check the ones with that surname. Special:All pages isn't any help there, but a category sorted by surnames certainly is. And many of the other categories are so fragmentized as to be useless, where you'd need to know the nationality of the person you are looking for or the subbranch in the field of biology or various other factors in order to find them. There are probably faster ways if you are looking for a Smith, but most names only have a few people with wikipedia entries.

Furthermore, is is really quite simple to go more quickly to the name you are looking for. Click on the link to A in the navigation box, for example. Now look at the url: in your browser--do you see the &from=A at the end? Now just replace the A with the first few letters you are looking for and hit the enter key; it isn't limited to just one or two letters. Realize that you might have to use &Steph to find your princess. Remember, of course, what a crude sorting engine we have, so you have to pay attention to the case of the letters you use. Gene Nygaard (talk) 16:19, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

My real question as to why it was hidden, of course, is that it was in fact under discussion on this talk page. And as far as I can see, there wasn't any consensus of any sort on this talk page. And the person who made that change--namely you, User:Fram--did not even participate in this discussion, not even to say you had made the change once it was a fait accompli.

Now, here's one for your search box magic. Go to that search box and find the Angel Rodriguez who specializes the 100 m sprint. How easy is that? How many pages do you have to go through before you decide you aren't going to find him that way? Is it easier to instead look for him at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Living_people&from=Rodrig using the &from= in the url listing? Gene Nygaard (talk) 16:33, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

The category still exists, you can still use it if you want to. What you are actually saying is that when you have a living person you want to research, you first go to another article of a living person, then scroll to the bottom to find the category "living people", then go to the corresponding page by taking the first two letters (hoping that he will be listed on surname, and not on first name, like many, many are), and then to scroll thropough the hundreds or thousands of pages starting with those two letters... Yep, clearly way faster than using the search box. Let's take one example of yours. I look for "stefanie of monaco", having no clue how to write it. The search box page[6] gives me "Did you mean: stéphanie of monaco"? Clicking that link[7], the first result is the correct page. No problem, and way faster than your solution. If I want to find some Angel Rodriguez, and I note that there are too many people with the same name, I can refine my search, just like in any search engine. This gets me the correct person as the second hit, not as the 150th on a page of living people (where I have no indication that any of the Angel Rodriguez listed there is even the right one). As for discussion about this cat, I started a discussion on Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2008 October 20, where it was very clear that the idea to delete it was rather misguided, but that quite a few people thought that hiding it would be good.

As for this being "under discussion", there were two comments from April, when the search box was still a lot less good, and one comment from November agreeing with hiding it. Not much of a discussion, so I was just WP:BOLD. Fram (talk) 20:31, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

It's not just a matter of boldness, when you are editing a protected page. You have a greater responsibility to use your powers responsibly in that case.

A discussion peripheral to a discussion of deleting the category isn't really that relevant.

Note that when you put in Angel Rodriguez in the box and click on "GO", you don't get any search results. You get sent to an article about some obscure movie. Then, if you click on the hatline at the top of that page to go to the disambiguation page at Ángel Rodríguez, you still have to look through that list that nobody has bothered to fix so the one you are looking for remains hidden away. It is only after that that you might go back and try a another search in a not particularly good search engine, even though it is considerably improved over the crude one we used to have. I still wouldn't even bother to try to use it for any sort of serious, complex searches--even if you did luck out in this particular case.

And no, I wouldn't find some other living person just to find a link to get to this category. But I have often used the category links from an article I was viewing to get here. It is much easier to click on that link than to have to type something into the box first. And having to go to the edit page first, and wait for that to load to be able to click on a link to this category is not an acceptable alternative. Gene Nygaard (talk) 22:15, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

The page was not protected, it was semi-protected, which means that the "greater responsibility" line is largely irrelevant. And I did not "luck out", it is way easier to use the search engine than to use the "living people" cat. In that cat, I have to scroll to the "Ro" section, then clikc "next 200" seven or eight times, just to ind that Angel Rodríguez is a GP racer, not a 100m runner. I can then use the hatnote disambig, to run in the same problems I had when entering Angel Rodriguez immediately into the search box... Anyway, I did easily find your sprinter. And I don't get your "edit page" comment: all hidden categories are always visible if you change your preferences, not only when editing (on the contrary, categories are not visible when editing at all).

Now I want you to find Ángel Rodríguez Lozano, the living journalist. Fram (talk) 11:29, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Another thing you haven't addressed is the effect that hiding the category will have on one of the primary purposes of having a "living people" category in the first place--to prevent the insertion of unfounded, potentially libelous statements into the article. The articles themselves don't have that gaudy, hideous template message which appears on many of the talk pages; but the presence of a Category:Living people at the bottom of the page is one of the clues to an observant editor that the particular article being edited is covered by the rules at Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons. Gene Nygaard (talk) 18:26, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Nothing about this will ever prevent any type of vandalism or libel. The hope is simply that it will be easier to notice and revert. "BLP" is based on the presumption that we can't catch everything but we should always try, and correcting articles about living people is a greater priority. It is not based on the presumption that a different set of content standards should apply. — CharlotteWebb 18:42, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

P.S. I refuse to believe that a user seeking to add libelous statements to a Wikipedia article will be dissuaded by this category, whether it is visible to them (see Special:Preferences) or not. — CharlotteWebb 18:46, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I don't believe that anyone will decide to only vandalize articles on living people. And I believe that the small benefit the category may have for some people being visible does not outweigh the added clutter to often crowded infoboxes. When I see the categories on biographies, I want to see other footballers, politicians, people from city X, perhaps at a stretch people born in the same year: I am not interested in other living people.

And as support for that final point: if it was commonly used in this way (i.e. not only for checkinh changes to BLPs and other editorial stuff, but as a search and information tool), then why don't we place people in the corresponding Category:Dead people? 20:31, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

As it stands now, the many editors who have regularly added the "living people" category to articles in which it is missing are no longer able to see whether or not a living person is included in this category by looking at the page.

That means there will likely be a serious increase in the number of living people who are not included in this category. Nobody is going to bother to routinely check for it, if you need to open up the edit page just to find out whether or not it is included for any particular person. Gene Nygaard (talk) 22:24, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Per Gene, I agreee that this category shouldn't be hidden. Lugnuts (talk) 12:57, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Discussion at Category talk:Year of birth missing (living people)?

I've started a discussion at Category talk:Year of birth missing (living people) about the relation between that category and this one. I've been routinely tagging people with both categories, because that seemed to be mostly what others were doing. However, I have no other reason to feel committed to doing so, and have noticed a few people beginning to avoid duplication of Category:Year of birth missing (living people) with this, its parent, category. What do others feel the current consensus to be? Is it now time to agree to use just the one category, and delete redundant Category:Living people categorizations of people within Category:Year of birth missing (living people)? Comments welcome there. Dsp13 (talk) 12:14, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

This category is a waste of time and disk space.

Keeping track of the living persons will probably turn out to be a waste of time, since there is too much person to track. Unless this job is made by a BOT and that wikipedia as a lot of free space, this section should be destroyed! Acce —Preceding undated comment was added at 15:04, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

I totally agree - although I'm not an administrator, so my opinion counts for very little! Adaircairell (talk) 17:58, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

I disagree. Each bio article should be categorized by both year of birth and that of death, and since the death year of a living person is undetermined, it is quite straightforward to use Category:Living people instead of Category:XXXX deaths. The use of this category makes the categorization of bio articles in wikipedia uniform and consistent. -- Taku (talk) 01:25, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

I disagree too. It's completely plain. Less than 2000 admins wouldn't be able to keep track of the +292,000 people listed here. It'd be much easier an encyclopedical to have this main category with many subcategories, I don't know, maybe by place of birth: "living English people", "living Russian people", or maybe by profession: "living pianists" or "living footballers". That would make this easier to keep and take care of. Think of it at a country with no states. Mexico has 110,000,000 inhabitants. Each state (out of 32) has an average of 3,500,000 people. What would be easier then? --Fluence (talk) 08:44, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

unreferenced pages of living people

there is a page for articles lacking sources (Category:Articles lacking sources) and there is a page for living people (Category:Living people). is there a page for articles about living people that are lacking sources?   — Chris Capoccia ^T⁄_C 13:16, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

There wasn't then, there is now. Category:Unreferenced BLPs is slowly filling up (well, the subpages are). There are now about 850 pages in it, but expectations are that this will raise to way above 10,000 pages (about one in 12 of Category:All articles lacking sources belongs in here, plus a significant number of unsourced but untagged articles). On the plus side, many of these pages have no problems except the lack of sources (they are not negative, and seem to be truthful). On the other hand, I already have had to delete some pages on porn stars and nazi camp guards that were unsourced for two years or more, so it does serve a purpose... Fram (talk) 12:13, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Rick Warren

The article, Rick Warren has been repeatedly vandalized by dozens of unestablished users over the past couple days and needs to have a partial lock added ASAP.

Manutdglory (talk) 23:46, 19 December 2008 (UTC)