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Wikipedia:Unreferenced BLP Rescue/April 2008

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This page documents the Unreferenced BLP Rescue Project's work on eliminating unreferenced BLPs from April 2008

Number of Unreferenced BLPs currently for April 2008: 0

SO I haven't seen as many flagrantly bad AfD nominations lately, and have been dabbling in Category:All unreferenced BLPs and adding sources, sometimes just bare URLs (but real newspaper-type sources nonetheless), to articles tagged as unreferenced BLPS. Then I either remove the tag or replace it with the "BLP refimprove" tag (i.e., it needs more citations, but it does have some).

There are currently 28,870 of these unreferenced BLPs (as of July 1, 2010, down from 43,000 in Feb. 2010, I believe). Anyone interested in joining me on a quest to eliminate one months' listing of these as a start? (The articles are marked according to when they were tagged as unreferenced, not when they were created, oftentimes the article existed for years without being tagged.) I guess this task is not wholly unrelated to Ikip's BLP contest idea, but that didn't get that far and this would be a collaborative team project).

I nominate April 2008 as a start: Category:Unreferenced_BLPs_from_April_2008, which has a manageable 458 articles tagged right now as a start (Now: 0). Who's interested? Also, if you source anything fascinating to you (even if its fascinatingly boring), add commentary as we keep a running tally of how the project is going.

One we close out a month, suitably creative barnstars will be distributed to those deserving!

April 2008! GO!

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Category:Unreferenced_BLPs_from_April_2008

Progress

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Discussion

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I've done all of the Ws except for three, which I can't find any references for. I'm not sure what to do with them now. Should I WP:AFD them, WP:PROD them, leave a note on the talk page saying I'm going to do this, or what? Any thoughts would be welcomed. Hallucegenia (talk) 13:57, 4 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, since they are more than bare stubs, perhaps AFD, because that will draw out sources if any truly exist. Great work!--Milowent (talk) 04:46, 5 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • I made my way through the majority of the 'P's; all that remain are a gaelic hurler who shares a name with a former, more popular gaelic hurler, a couple young members of the Jordanian court, and an article that I sent to AfD. Perhaps someone can take a look at this small handfull remaining to catch what I may have missed? --Jezebel'sPonyoshhh 18:31, 6 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
There are a lot of unreferenced Gaelic hurlers in these lists. (At least, a good fraction of the ones that I have done.) There seem to be a few editors who have spent years writing the entire history of gaelic hurling into Wikipedia without a single reference. What can we do to persuade them to add sources as they do this? Hallucegenia (talk) 08:26, 11 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I have run into a number of these as well - presumably some editor(s) went on a tagging spree of gaelic hurler articles in April 2008 - I haven't checked to see whether the editors who created these article are even still active. If they are, I guess we can notify them.--Milowent (talk) 19:46, 11 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm rather glad I could find a reference to keep this hurler in the encyclopedia. See diff [1]. Hallucegenia (talk) 16:28, 16 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yow! Congratulations! Saving something like that is worth putting up with dozens of self-promotional blurbs.  :) --je deckertalk 16:50, 16 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

References for Hurlers

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Rather than doing all the outstanding hurlers one at a time, I've started to add a reference to the team templates. If you look at Paddy Moran (hurler), he now has a reference contained within the template boxes for each Kilkenny team he played for: you have to "show" the templates to see the reference. I hope to add the equivalent reference to all 55 Kilkenny team templates in Category:Kilkenny Senior Hurling Team navigational boxes by the end of today. This should knock off several hundred completely unreferenced BLPs in one go. :).

But this only works for Kilkenny hurlers. If anyone here has come across similar comprehensive listings for other counties, please add them to the list below. By using them to reference the templates, we could save ourselves an enormous amount of work. Thanks. Hallucegenia (talk) 14:09, 17 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This is really cool. --je deckertalk 22:34, 17 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What's Next?

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(unindent). Awesome finishing up folks! I like the randomness of whats contained in a month myself. I'm all for doing May 2008 next, it is fun to see the numbers drop. I daresay we could even move the project out of my userspace because we seem to have a good thing going? I think I just move this page to Wikipedia:Unreferenced BLP Rescue? Then I'll see about getting our project featured on Signpost?--Milowenttalkblp-r 18:45, 18 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Endorse moving from userspace, but you might want to make this a subproject Wikipedia:Article Rescue Squadron/Unreferenced BLP Rescue - not least as something we can show anyone who thinks rescue is not about improving articles. Also I've created a userbox which anyone involved in this could use:
{{User:WereSpielChequers/Userbox uBLP|N}} (where N = number of uBLPs you've referenced) ϢereSpielChequers 19:09, 18 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I think having a tie to ARS is good, but I'd prefer doing it as a "sister" project rather than a child. They are related but ARS obviously has its primary focus on articles already nominated for deletion. I think it will still reflect well on ARS to the extent people contribute to both.--Milowenttalkblp-r 13:05, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
OK well how about Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/Monthly rescue squad? I know this sounds pedantic, but for example the uBLP cup - Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/Contest was run that way. ϢereSpielChequers 17:56, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I think tying in to WP:URBLP makes sense - the goals are very similar and this group is essentially just parsing the ultimate goal of URBLP in to month-based 'chunks'. --Jezebel'sPonyoshhh 20:25, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
We can't make the name too long, and in case our methods morph over time we don't want to pigeonhole ourselves as doing just monthly projects. I will now move to Wikipedia:Unreferenced BLP Rescue and we'll see how it goes!--Milowenttalkblp-r 21:01, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Neat! (Wish I had a better way to estimate my # of articles ref'd, I should've kept track.  ;) I cut/pasted my contributions through some grep/cut/sort mojo (and went back and subtracted out non-BLPs)... I suppose that's probably close enough... wouldn't be nearly so big if it hadn't been for my multiday "reference the French Assembly" pass, which is nearly half the total. --je deckertalk 20:05, 18 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

(unindent) if people want to stick to whole months, why not take the oldest? Category:Unreferenced BLPs from June 2007 only has 30 left and Category:Unreferenced BLPs from July 2007 130, so you could polish off quite a few months, and in theory the articles that have sat around unreferenced longest are in most need of TLC. Also I've got a little experiment running in later months where I reviewed the project tags of a whole month with a view to seeing how effective that was at getting them fixed - so if you don't mind I'd like to steer you away from that month and its neighbours for a little longer whilst I see how effective that project tagging is. ϢereSpielChequers 14:07, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Well, there's no need to interfere with that information gathering experiment you have going on. July 2007 sounds good as well. I assume when a month goes to zero, it disappears off the list? (this question reminds me of this [2]!) That would a bit sad because I'd like to see the zeros on the list to get people wondering as to why some months have no tagged unreffed BLPs.--Milowenttalkblp-r 14:38, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The Trophy Cabinet should act as a placeholder for now, so that there will always be one page in the April 2008 category. (That is assuming that some po-faced jobsworth doesn't try to delete it.) With any luck, the solitary remaining page will serve to spread the word. Hallucegenia (talk) 15:34, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Very nice!--Milowenttalkblp-r 21:01, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]