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.

This category was nominated for renaming on 2006 January 23. The result of the discussion was keep as is. An archived record of this discussion can be found on this log page.

This category was nominated for deletion on 2006 January 19. The result of the discussion was keep per edict of Jimbo Wales. A longer version of this decision can be found here. The original discussion is recorded below.

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)

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)

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)

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)

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]

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)

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)