Talk:Wikipedia coverage of death

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Fact-checking process revised in 2009 for claims of death and more[edit]

Consider

In 2009, English-language Wikipedia adopted new quality control measures to verify information on the biographies of living people, including claims of death.^[1]

References

^ Cohen, Noam (24 August 2009). "Wikipedia to Limit Changes to Articles on People". The New York Times.

and compare Wikipedia's own telling

BanyanTree (31 August 2009). "Misleading media storm over flagged revisions". The Signpost.

In special:diff/1181405842/1187751802 Graham87 objected to the claim. @Graham87:, what is the issue? It seems to me that in 2009, Wikipedia editors did make a commitment to increased fact-checking for biographical claims, with The New York Times reporting that this includes claims of death. Bluerasberry (talk) 14:17, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Bluerasberry: When I noticed the text, I knew straight away that it was incorrect ... if something that significant had actually happened at that time, I would have absolutely remembered it. What the article refers to is just a proposal for pending changes that ended up being applied to a tiny subset of pages (here's a list of all 3837 of them (huge page!) at time of writing (I can get the exact number from my screen reader, but there are probably other ways). Also notice that Wikipedia:Pending changes#Timeline says very little about 2009 and nothing about August of that year. The only part of that text in the article about death I can find is this: "And on Jan. 20, vandals changed the entries for two ailing senators, Edward M. Kennedy and Robert C. Byrd, to report falsely that they had died. Flagged revisions, advocates say, could offer one more chance to catch such hoaxes and improve the overall accuracy of Wikipedia’s entries." There's nothing concrete there, except perhaps mention of the death hoaxes. hmmm, it turns out we do have a main namespace article called Flagged Revisions, which could be useful here. Graham87 (talk) 14:59, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And I've used that article as a springboard to make this edit. Graham87 (talk) 15:58, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Ivanvector: Re your edit summary here: your assertion that there are more pending-changes-protected articles than semi- and full-protected articles greatly surprised me, and after some investigation, it turns out not to be correct. Category:Wikipedia semi-protected pages, which I assume you had checked (and contains 2,411 pages at the time of writing), does not contain all pages under semi-protection; to say the least Category:Wikipedia indefinitely semi-protected pages contains 8,061 pages and Category:Wikipedia indefinitely semi-protected biographies of living people contains 1,144 pages. I ran a database query to try to answer this question (with code cribbed from Wikipedia:Database reports/Indefinitely semi-protected articles/Configuration) and it coughed up a total of 14,070 articles. Therefore, I've restored the passage about pending changes not being widely used (though I'm open to rewording it), as semi-protection is clearly used far more often. I just don't want to imply that Flagged Revisions/pending changes was Wikipedia's ultimate chosen solution to false death reports because it absolutely wasn't/isn't. Graham87 (talk) 08:48, 2 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for doing that. You're right that I was looking at the categories, but I went back later and was fact-checking the same claim on Flagged Revisions when I realized that's only the top category. According to the list at Wikipedia:Database reports, there are just over 86,000 semiprotected pages only including those with expiries longer than one year. There isn't one there for all semiprotected pages but the true number is probably a lot higher than that. I was going to undo my edit but I fell asleep instead, and woke up to your ping. However, I do think that "not widely used" is a matter of opinion and shouldn't be sourced only to the Signpost. Maybe there's a better way to say that it's not used as often as other protections. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 15:22, 2 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

No worries. Hmmm ... for now I've added a caveat about biographies of living people to make it stick closer to the source. If I find better references or ways of getting around this issue, I'll editthe relevant pages accordingly. Graham87 (talk) 09:13, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Kissinger's death[edit]

Wikipedia culture about deaths in biographies is discussed at

Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Distasteful?_(in_re_death_of_Kissinger)

n the context of User_talk:Asticky noting Henry Kissinger's death, and Depths of Wikipedia posting about this in social media. Bluerasberry (talk) 14:21, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

[1] Cohen, Noam (24 August 2009). "Wikipedia to Limit Changes to Articles on People". The New York Times.

[1]