The World's Oldest People

WikiProject news

News in brief

• Help the Halloween Task Force and WikiProject Horror by improving spooky articles throughout October.
• The Motto Shop is offering help to people or projects who would like their own motto or slogan.
• The October Wikify Drive is underway. Barnstars are waiting for anyone who helps cut down the wikification backlog.
• Wikipedia Loves Libraries micro-conferences inspired by the GLAM WikiProjects and the Great American Wiknic are being held in cities across North America this month. Find one near you!

Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.

This week, we spent some time with WikiProject World's Oldest People, a project dedicated to improving biographies and lists of notable centenarians and supercentenarians. The project got off to a rocky start in March 2008 when its founder, an enthusiast from Yahoo's World's Oldest People discussion board, attempted to affiliate the WikiProject with the Gerontology Research Group. After years of edit warring, hostile debates, deleted page histories, removed images, AfDs, and arbitration, the project finally found peace and has accumulated six Good Articles and one Featured Article. The project supplements the guidelines of its parent, WikiProject Biography, with some notes on notability, sourcing, and the treatment of biographies of living people within the project's scope. We interviewed two project members, SiameseTurtle and David in DC, along with independent contributor The Blade of the Northern Lights.

What motivated you to join WikiProject World's Oldest People?

SiameseTurtle: I was involved in researching the World's oldest people before joining Wikipedia. I got involved because I wanted to help spread the information to the public, as there are many longevity myths that appear even in the most reputable news sources. Wikipedia has a wonderful way of a lot of information in a simple way.

David in DC: I was troubled by the poor sourcing, and dubious notability, of many articles in the longevity suite. It was also - fairly ubiquitously - ignoring, flouting or openly deprecating common Wikipedia norms (only rare edit summaries, WP:WALLEDGARDEN, WP:OWN). I felt it needed input from wikieditors who were not longevity experts and hobbyists, to try to keep the project from turning Wikipedia into a webhosting service for the Gerontology Research Group and the World's Oldest People Yahoo group. As I got more involved, I became fascinated by the topic of human longevity and how the normal human lifespan has increased so radically. Notable long-lived people in Shakespeare's time would have been 50 or 60 years old. Today, that lifespan is remarkable for being short.

The Blade of the Northern Lights: Though I'm not actually a member, I have been very involved with the WikiProject from around November. I saw accusations of a walled garden mentality, and I thought I could help out with them. As I got a little further in, I too became extremely interested in longevity. The main catalyst came when in real life, I started taking a senior-level college class on World War I, and Frank Buckles, the last American veteran from WWI, was close to turning 110; this spurred me on to stay involved in the topic, and I have to this day.

How does the project handle articles about disputed or missing records of a person's longevity?

SiameseTurtle: In the case of missing records, the people's ages will not be validated by an international organisation, such as the Gerontology Research Group. They're unlikely to have an article themselves without substantial news coverage (eg. Sahan Dosova). Without proof, they are treated as claims to longevity. In terms of people who are disputed, this is slightly different. Disputed in this context means that a person's age was originally thought to be valid, but new information casts some level of doubt on that age. Or it may be that the specific date of birth is unknown, perhaps due to lack of historical records (eg. Moses Hardy). Obviously these are sensitive areas, so we state the facts. However to be scientific, we do have to go with the validated date of birth. Shigechiyo Izumi was originally thought to have lived to 120 - the oldest man ever. However Japanese researchers later discovered that he was probably named after an elder sibling who died young. The case was retracted last year.

David in DC: It relies on "experts" who make these decisions off-wiki and self-publish them on a set of Gerontology Research Group web pages.

SiameseTurtle: These tables are also published on a regular basis in the peer-reviewed journal Rejuvenation Research. Due to the dynamic nature of the subject, with birthdays and deaths happening constantly, the tables are also published online so they can be updated more frequently, as David in DC mentions.

How is notability determined for articles about the world's oldest people? How frequently does the project deal with disagreements and misunderstandings about notability?

SiameseTurtle: Notability is usually determined using multiple birthday reports. But it often depends on how much information those articles have. So it can take many years to gather enough information to write an article. And of course, they have to stay alive, which is a big obstacle since around 50% die each year. There are often disputes over what is deemed notable. Some articles might be borderline and might be merged into national lists of supercentenarians (eg. List of British supercentenarians). However, we recently sorted through many articles to see whether they met the general notability guideline or not. In short, it really depends. Sometimes there are many disagreements at once, and at other times very few at all.

David in DC: The sorting is a long-term project. Notability is one issue, but reliable sourcing problems still abound.

The Blade of the Northern Lights: To expand upon what David in DC says, there are a few people who straddle the line of notability. It tends to be a bigger problem with people from smaller countries where less attention is given to longevity, so while an American like Walter Breuning will have a lot written about him, someone from Belgium will probably have less, which has led to a few very contentious AfDs. Last year around November/December, some of the members of the Wikiproject (with some outside assistance) went to cut through the large walled garden that had accumulated, and while most of the debates came to a definitive conclusion there are still a few on which no consensus has developed; these are primarily on people in countries with less consistent coverage on this topic.

The project is home to one Featured Article, one A-class Article, and five Good Articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? What are some challenges to getting an article on a supercentenarian up to FA or GA status?

SiameseTurtle: I have contributed to Henry Allingham and Jeanne Calment's articles. The main challenge is that most supercentenarians are not famous before 110. All the information about them has to be garnered from news articles, which are often quite similar year on year. They generally give patchy information about their past life (where they were born, what their job was, where they lived), and what they do now, and what they believe to be the reason for their longevity. Most of the best articles are of people who served in World War One, because of the amount of press attention they received.

David in DC: I've contributed to many articles. I've dealth with Jeanne Calment on a few lists but I don't know if any stand-alone articles I've contributed to are FA, A or GAs. The longevity tables are shaded with legends for categories like "Verified", "Unverified", and "Disputed". These categories largely mirror the information on the GRG websites.

Are images of the world's oldest people difficult to obtain? What lessons have you learned from acquiring the images currently used in articles?

SiameseTurtle: It's very difficult to obtain uncopyrighted images. The main reason is that very few people get to visit these people. They don't really get out very often, so they are rarely seen publicly. In addition, most photographs come from birthdays and it's mostly just family and the press who are invited. So nearly all of the images of supercentenarians are copyright (and also very recent), which is an issue when trying to get images for Wikipedia.

What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new member help today?

SiameseTurtle: I would say the biggest issue is a lack of detail in Wikipedia articles. The newspaper articles are out there (which may or may not be in another language), but many members do not have the time, or may spend their time on Wikipedia updating the many lists we have. Thanks to the digitisation of many newspapers, it has been possible to lengthen articles such as Margaret Ann Neve and John Mosely Turner, who both died long ago. It really shows to me that articles can be rescued, it often just need a little bit of effort. I would also say that images are a real problem. Studying the World's Oldest People is a very human thing, and it's a shame that we do not have as many images as we would hope.

David in DC: The project needs many more generalist, wikipolicy-wise editors to help it reach consensus about sources and notability.

The Blade of the Northern Lights: I think the project would do good to encourage some more dispassionate editors to get involved in the topic area; notability to extremely passionate people may not jive with Wikipedia's notability guidelines, and the more acrimonious debates tend to occur when the two intersect. Sourcing is also an issue for some (though certainly not all) articles as well. Part of that is simply a lack of diversity in third-party sources reviewing such material (the Gerontology Research Group is the one most frequently used), but at the moment there are too many articles with justified refimprove tags in the topic area.

Anything else you'd like to add?

SiameseTurtle: The WikiProject does not encompass all people who research the World's Oldest People, just those who are regulars on Wikipedia. We do have many people from countries all over the world who help contribute to the work we do here. Fortunately that also means that we have a very broad view on our project as we use articles from everywhere - not just the English-speaking world. I think that makes our group very encompassing and thorough in what we do.

Next week, we'll see where some of the world's oldest people might have lived. Until then, continue to read about the good old days in the archive.

Reader comments

2011-10-10

The weird and the disgusting

Contribute  —  

Share this

•  E-mail
•  Facebook
•  Twitter
•  LinkedIn
•  Reddit
•  Digg

By Tony1 and Dabomb87

From the authors: Well, now we have your attention, yes, one new stomach-turning featured article we could hardly bear to read beyond extracting the blurb; and one new featured picture might just as well have been titled Woman having sex with octopuses—regarded as too lewd even to display on the featured-picture nomination page. We leave it to readers, if they're so inclined, to access these items. Meanwhile, we draw your attention to two new featured portals, which in their quite different ways concern major issues of the day.

This week's "Featured content" covers Sunday 2 – Saturday 8 October

Featured portals

Two portals were promoted to featured status:

* Portal:Renewable energy (nom), which comprises 19 selected articles (3 FAs and 9 GAs), 11 biographies, 17 quotations, 9 DYKs, and 22 selected pictures. Renewable energy comes from natural resources such as sunlight, wind, elevated water, ocean waves, tides, and geothermal heat, which are naturally replenished. About 16% of global final energy consumption comes from renewables, with 10% coming from traditional biomass, which is mainly used for heating, and 3.4% from hydroelectricity. New renewables (small hydro, modern biomass, wind, solar, geothermal, and biofuels) accounted for another 2.8% and are growing rapidly. Elekhh, who nominated the portal with substantial assistance from Johnfos, told The Signpost that it "was born in a moment of enthusiasm for the idea and is the result of group effort. While it was initially put together in a relatively short time, it was continually refined over a longer period. There was a lot of support for creating a renewable-energy task force within WikiProject Energy, but this has yet to be implemented. If anybody is interested in joining the task force, they'd be welcome." picture at top

* Portal:Supreme Court of the United States (nom), the highest judicial body in the United States and leads the judicial branch of the federal government. The justices are nominated by the US president and confirmed with the "advice and consent" of the Senate. The court has a fascinating history in the governance and politics of the US, and some of its judgments, such as Roe v. Wade, have changed the course of American history. An insight into the court's significance, and the philosophical dimensions of writing dissenting judgments, is captured in what Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told National Public Radio in 2002:

"Dissents speak to a future age. It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.' But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow." (picture at right)

(Nominated by Cirt)

Featured articles

Six articles were promoted to featured status:

* McDonnell XF-85 Goblin (nom), an American prototype fighter aircraft conceived during World War II. It was a diminutive jet aircraft featuring a distinctive egg-shaped fuselage and a forked-tail stabilizer design. The prototypes were built and underwent testing and evaluation in 1948. Flight tests showed promise in the design, but the aircraft's performance was inferior to the jet fighters it would have been facing in combat, and there were difficulties in docking. (Nominated by Sp33dyphil)

* Seacology (nom), a non-profit charitable organization headquartered in Berkeley, California, that focuses on preserving island ecosystems and cultures around the globe. (Visionholder)

* Xeromphalina setulipes (nom), is a species of fungus that was first collected in 2005. It was described and named in 2010, and is known only from oak forests in Ciudad Real Province, Spain. (J Milburn)

* HMS Princess Royal (1911) (nom), the second of two Lion-class battlecruisers built for the Royal Navy before World War I. (Sturmvogel 66)

* The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (nom), a 2010 Dutch body horror film that tells the story of a German doctor who kidnaps three tourists and joins them surgically, mouth to anus, forming a "human centipede". It has been described as "the most horrific film ever made", and as "torture porn". (Coolug)

* Heidi Game (nom), a hard fought American football game remembered because the ending was not shown by the TV network, enraging many viewers. Al Davis, who died Saturday, plays a role in the article. (The Writer 2.0 and Wehwalt)

Featured lists

Seven lists were promoted in the past two weeks:

* List of songs in Green Day: Rock Band (nom) (Nominated by Drilnoth.)

* Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster (R) (nom) (Killervogel5.)

* The Simpsons (season 10) (nom) (Theleftorium.)

* 1948 Summer Olympics medal table (nom) (Miyagawa.)

* List of accolades received by the Spider-Man film series (nom) (Crystal Clear x3.)

* List of centuries in women's Test cricket (nom) (SpacemanSpiff.)

* List of Square video games (nom) (PresN.)

Featured pictures

Seven images were promoted. Please click on "nom" to view medium-sized images:

* Canon 5D Mark II (nom; related article), a 21.1-megapixel full-frame CMOS digital single-lens reflex camera made by Canon. It succeeds the EOS 5D and was announced on September 17, 2008. (created by Charles Lanteigne).

* Cape Petrel (nom; related article), in flight, East of the Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania, Australia. Photographer User:JJ Harrison said, "We only have a couple of deep-ocean bird photos featured, and all of them to my knowledge are taken on land near breeding sites. I recently went on a pelagic trip about 25–30 km off the coast of Tasmania to photograph some of them. Because the swell was 2 to 3 meters, which eased in the afternoon, it was often difficult just to keep the subjects in the viewfinder. Fortunately my camera's auto-focus was up to the task!"

* Shy Albatross in Flight (nom; related article), a common seabird of the Southern Ocean. (created by User:JJ Harrison; picture at right)

* Brown fur seal (nom; related article), hauling-out on the Hippolyte Rocks off the east coast of Tasmania, Australia. The species is the largest and most robust fur seal, with a large and broad head with a pointed snout that may be flat or upturned slightly. (created by User:JJ Harrison).

* Nail-clippers-variety (nom; related article), well, they're nail clippers. (Created by Commons editor Evan-Amos, who gives some tips for photo-taking on his user page).

* Tako to Ama (nom; related article), an erotic woodcut of the ukiyo-e genre by the Japanese artist Hokusai. From a three-volume collection of shunga erotic prints first published in 1814, it is the most famous shunga Hokusai ever produced. Playing with themes popular in contemporary Japanese art, it depicts a young ama diver sexually entwined with a pair of octopuses.

* Jeff Dunham and Achmed (nom; related article), American ventriloquist and stand-up comedian with his puppet-character Achmed the Dead Terrorist. Dunham has appeared on numerous television shows. Time magazine has observed of his characters, "All of them are politically incorrect, gratuitously insulting and ill tempered." (created by Richard Mclaren). picture at right

Reader comments

2011-10-10

Senkaku Islands closes; administrators authorized to place articles on discretionary sanctions

Contribute  —  

Share this

•  E-mail
•  Facebook
•  Twitter
•  LinkedIn
•  Reddit
•  Digg

By NuclearWarfare and Jorgenev

The Arbitration Committee closed one case this week, Senkaku Islands. Another case, Abortion, is still pending before the Committee.

Senkaku Islands

Senkaku Islands has closed, a month and a half after it was originally filed by Qwyrxian. Two parties were topic banned, Tenmei indefinitely and Bobthefish2 for a year, and the former was also banned from Wikipedia for a year; Arbitrators cited the editor's past Arbitration sanctions in another topic area in the decision. Unusually, the Committee also considered an indefinite ban for the editor; but while five Arbitrators supported it, they did so only as an less-favored alternative to the 1 year ban. STSC was given a warning.

Standard discretionary sanctions were also authorized for the Senkaku Islands topic area, marking the sixth time in the past twelve months that the Committee has authorized discretionary sanctions. In contrast, from October 10, 2009 to October 10, 2010, the Committee only placed a topic on discretionary sanctions three times. The case also marked the first time the Arbitration Committee has devolved the authority to place discretionary sanctions; any "uninvolved administrator may, after a warning given a month prior, place any set of pages relating to a territorial dispute of islands in East Asia, broadly interpreted, under standard discretionary sanctions for six months if the editing community is unable to reach consensus on the proper names to be used to refer to the disputed islands."^{[nb 1]}

1. ^ Although not specifically stated in the final decision, it appears that at least two Arbitrators' intentions were to exclude the island of Taiwan from this remedy.

Deliberation on checkuser and oversight candidates

Public commenting on the candidates for checkuser and oversight functionaries (see previous Signpost coverage) has concluded, and the Committee is expected to release its decision on who it is appointing by October 15. This deadline has been pushed back several times in previous stages of the appointment process; the decision date was originally to be October 5. The list of candidates that ArbCom is considering is:

• CheckUser: 28bytes • AGK • Courcelles • Elockid • HelloAnnyong • Keegan • Kww • Mentifisto • WilliamH
• Oversight: Courcelles • Fluffernutter • WilliamH

Clarifications and amendments

The Committee also received two requests for clarification, one on WikiProject Conservatism (which was filed as a case request)[1] and the other on the propriety of administrators overturning unblocks by the Arbitration Committee. It closed two other clarification requests, one on the naming of Ireland articles and the other on Eastern Europe. The Committee also continued to consider a request for amendment by William M. Connolley, who had filed a request lifting removal of sanctions imposed on him in Climate change. As of publication, an unusually high number of 24 other editors had commented on the request, most of whom had been previously involved with William M. Connolley or the topic area in some form. The Committee received an additional amendment request from mediator Steven Zhang, who requested that two editors recently topic banned at Arbitration Enforcement be allowed to continue editing a mediation discussion page.

Reader comments

2011-10-10

1.18 deployment and HTTPS switchover completed, but developer help now needed with new projects

Contribute  —  

Share this

•  E-mail
•  Facebook
•  Twitter
•  LinkedIn
•  Reddit
•  Digg

By Jarry1250

1.18 deployed to remaining wikis

With the dust settled from the first two phases of the deployment of MediaWiki version 1.18, on October 4 the full rollout programme began. Since small but technically interesting wikis had been the focus of the first two phases, only 2% of traffic had been routed through MediaWiki 1.18; now, all visitors and editors will be able to take advantage of its new features, which include support for gender-specific user pages and better directionality support for RTL languages. According to a post on the Wikimedia blog, progress with the final phase was slightly slower than anticipated but still good, with the French, Polish and English Wikipedias, along with Wikimedia Commons, having their version of MediaWiki updated within the first four hour window. Other wikis were then transferred during secondary windows on October 5 and 6. The deployment did not go perfectly, however, and a number of bugs have since been discovered with 1.18; as of time of writing, approximately 40 open ones are currently being tracked under the auspices of bugmeister Mark Hershberger, although few are serious. The list of bugs reported but not yet fixed includes problems with the watchlist API (bug #31526), the localisation update system (bug #31559) and the display of <math>...</math> (bug #31442). Responding to the relatively high volume of bugs found despite a recent emphasis on improving Wikimedia and MediaWiki's pre-release test infrastructure, Hershberger appealed for help in writing unit and/or parser tests for key bug fixes to ensure that regressions are spotted more quickly in the future. If this is the case when 1.19 nears deployment (currently scheduled for late this year), the whole process would be likely to pass off "a *lot* smoother", wrote Hershberger (wikitech-l mailing list).

Improved https support comes to Wikimedia wikis

Also announced this week was the https switchover. Writing for the Wikimedia Foundation blog, operations engineer Ryan Lane said that the secure.wikimedia.org domain had been officially deprecated. Lane advised security-conscious visitors to simply change http to https in their URL instead to take advantage of new functionality which has taken months of planning to achieve (including the introduction of protocol-relative URLs). In addition to a noticeable speed improvement over its secure.wikimedia.org forerunner, Lane was clear on the benefits of the switchover to full https functionality:

“

[Unlike with secure.wikimedia.org,] the URLs are exactly the same, just the protocol is different. The SSL servers only do SSL termination, and they do it before our caching layers. This means that this is a transparent addition to our architecture. When we scale other pieces of our architecture, this will scale with it [unlike secure.wikimedia.org] We can remove our CSS, JavaScript, and web server hacks. This simplifies everything, and makes it far less likely we'll have mixed-content issues.

”

The deployment of new https functionality was commended by many commentators; one wrote that "the lack of proper HTTPS" support had in his eyes been a long-standing issue with the site. At time of writing, support for secure browsing on the mobile site has not yet been enabled (bug #31333) – there are no plans to enable mobile support until the mobile and non-mobile sites are fully merged – but the core support for non-mobile devices outlined by Lane in his blogpost at least appears to be working correctly. HTTPS Everywhere, a popular browser add-on designed to make it easier to use the secure version of a website where it exists, is in the process of being updated to take advantage of the new format (wikitech-l mailing list).

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

How you can help

Call for developers

This week, Tomasz Finc, the WMF's Director of Mobile and Special Projects, issued a call for potential app developers for the Google Android operating system, whilst developer Jack Phoenix appealed for help with the Video extension.

• Quick fix turnaround for serious bug: A bug in the JavaScript component of Wikimedia wikis that caused the browser windows of Internet Explorer 8 users to crash has now been fixed. The bug (#31424) was fixed only a day after it was filed, tracked down to a fault in the jQuery library version that MediaWiki 1.18 came packaged with (wikitech-l mailing list). The version of jQuery packaged with MediaWiki has since been upgraded to a version that does not cause the problem and Wikimedia wikis have been updated to reflect the change. In unrelated news, WMF Internalisation team member Gerard Meijssen blogged about bug #31310 as a paradigm for good volunteer involvement in making sure bugs are fixed quickly (it has since been re-opened pending further investigation).
• Discussion over conversion to Git continues: The finer details of a plan floated late last month to convert the MediaWiki repository to Git began this week on the wikitech-l mailing list. Discussion so far has focussed on the most widely acknowledged point of contention, whether MediaWiki should remain as one repository or spin-off extensions and/or localisation files into their own repositories.
• Wikimedia Blog mobile friendly: A special mobile edition of the combined Wikimedia blog was released this week, according to an announcement on the blog itself. Previously, mobile devices had been forced to display the full fixed-width layout that had been designed solely with larger screens in mind.
• $3.6 million grant announced: As reported in more detail in this week's "News and Notes", the Stanton Foundation have announced that they have awarded Wikimedia a $3.6 million grant to support technical projects aimed at making its wikis more newcomer friendly, including work on enabling editing from the new mobile site and the long-awaited visual editor project.
• Bot tasks open: Bot requests for approval are currently open on the English Wikipedia for helping automated Mediation Cabal pages and mass updating instances of a biological infobox. In addition, a BRFA focussed on article creation by Rich Farmbrough is also open.
  
  Reader comments
  

If articles have been updated, you may need to refresh the single-page edition.

Want the latest Signpost delivered to your talk page each month?

Home

About

Archives

Newsroom

Subscribe

Suggestions