WikiProject Biography
General information
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Attention needed New articles Articles up for deletion People Academics and educators Actors and filmmakers Authors Business people Sports people Lists of people Fashion Bands and musicians Fictional characters Women Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of people Requests for comment Suspected policy breaches Discretionary Sanctions apply to biographies
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Arts and entertainment Actors and Filmmakers Musicians Women artists Genealogy Living persons Military Orphaned articles Politics and government Royalty and nobility Peers and Baronetage Science and academia Aerospace Philosophers Sports and games
Things you can do
Write an article Expand an article about: a person an actor an animator an artist a bishop a businessperson a diplomat an educator an engineer a lawyer a military person a musician a photographer a saint a politician a scientist a sportsperson a writer Improve an article by: adding references adding categories Review an article Romano Volta • Suzanne Carrell • Mullá Husayn • John Gilchrist (linguist) • Thomas Brattle • Answer requests for comments Work on the Portal Portal:Biography Assess an article Assessment requests Unassessed articles
Biography article statistics
Biography articles by quality and importance
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The maintenance department of the Biography WikiProject uses various automated and semi-automated methods to perform batch tasks that would be extremely tedious to do manually.

The current scope of the Biography WikiProject is enormous and covers thousands of articles. These articles must be tagged, their infoboxes replaced or deprecated, and so forth. Given the sheer number of articles, it is quite tedious to do these things by hand; therefore, various automated or semi-automated processes must be set up to perform these maintenance tasks.

How to help?

Depending on the nature of the task, it can be either completely automated and run by a bot, or semi-automated via AWB, requiring a user's decision to whether or not implement the changes. Indeed, in order to minimize false positives, some of the operations should be performed by hand.

Rules of thumb:

• If you don't have a bot, don't take up a task that can be automated and involves a great number of articles - you will lose precious time pressing Ctrl-S in AWB.
• Don't create your own bot if there is no need to - a few bots will probably be more than enough.
• If the task is semi-automated only, it is because there are numerous false positives, so check every article before saving.
• Don't forget to uncheck "ignore unexisting pages" in AWB's "Set options" tab when dealing with talk pages!

What is a task?

A task is a maintenance operation that can be executed on a precise set of articles. It can be identified by several parameters:

• Its name
• A description of the initial set of articles on which the operation must be performed and of the unitary operation itself, along with conditional parameters. The initial set can be:
  • A category
  • A list of pages transcluding a template
• Whether or not it can be automated (see above)
• The number of articles in the initial set

Tasks

Stub tagging

For example, all articles in Category:United States military personnel stubs could be tagged with military-work-group=yes and auto-assessed as stubs. There are many such catgories that can be similarly assessed, e.g. Category:African politician stubs could be tagged with politician-work-group=yes and auto-assessed as Stub, etc.

When a task involves tagging articles from a stub tag and automatically rating them as "Stub-Class", the auto parameter in ((WPBiography)) must be set:

((WPBiography
|class=Stub
|auto=yes
...
))

Maintenance backlogs

For example, talk pages in Category:Biography articles needing priority parameter replacement have an active importance= parameter, which needs to be replaced with priority=.

Article tagging

For example, all articles in Category:Living people could be tagged and living=yes added.

Resources

• AutoWikiBrowser page - you can download AutoWikiBrowser there.
• Kingbotk Plugin for AWB - An AutowikiBrowser plugin for WikiProject templating and Wikipedia assessments. Supports ((WPBiography)).
• Pywikipedia - a set of Python scripts to use as bots.