User blog:Robin Patterson/Wikipedia's people pages

We have many pages wholly or partly copied from Wikipedia, mostly from the English language version. We obviously aim (as part of our "genealogy of the world" goal) to have a page for every single individual who has a page on any Wikipedia. We have rudimentary procedures for deciding what languages shall be used, all around the idea that we have just one set of basic data for each individual, even if some of it is in different languages.

Because copying is relatively easy, those individuals should be high on the priorities for those of us who do more than record our own ancestry without ever encountering anyone who's notable enough to be on Wikipedia.

In order to minimise duplication of effort (e.g. someone adding a person from the Dutch Wikipedia and someone else adding the same person from the English Wikipedia), we could give a high priority to the creation of a Familypedia redirect page for every language version of every single individual who has a page on any Wikipedia, the page name being exactly as on Wikipedia. Our redirect page will go to one or other of our actual articles. If there is no article yet, we can copy the whole Wikipedia article as a starter, then move it to our preferred page name form (including actual or estimated birth year as a general minimum, and removing any WP qualifiers - such as "(artist)" - that are unlikely to be needed), then put it into "facts" form. What were Wikipedia's links to other people will now be Familypedia links to existing or future redirects on our wiki. They later can be edited to bypass the redirects (probably by bot, but Autosuggest will help manual editing).

Automatic procedures
It should be possible to do some of the bulky jobs by bot. Something like this:
 * 1) Copy to Familypedia every WP article in whatever categories the bot owner specifies (including all of their subcategories - e.g "People from Ohio" will include every article in "People from Greene County, Ohio" etc). (Copy everything; that includes the interwikis, but comment them out so that they don't display but bots and other editors can use them.)
 * 2) However, flag the operation somehow if Familypedia already has an article (which could be a redirect) with that name (derived from operation "3" below).
 * 3) Add the standard acknowledgment at the bottom of each such article, along with a new hidden Category:WP imports.
 * 4) Create a redirect to each such article using the name as given in each interwiki (discarding duplicates).

Keen improvers of the wiki can then:
 * 1) pick articles out of the WP imports category,
 * 2) look for birth and death years,
 * 3) move the articles to our preferred form, and
 * 4) turn them into facts articles with sensor pages.

Then our double-redirect procedures can get all of the other-language wiki redirects pointing to the new article. Anyone trying manually to import that person from another Wikipedia will see that the page exists and can decide what to do but will not waste time duplicating basic data.