WeRelate talk:Speedy delete

Willing to Serve on the Speedy Delete Committee [20 February 2020]

• Jillaine 14:15, 13 August 2012 (EDT)

Great! I'll add your name to the main page. --Jennifer (JBS66) 09:14, 14 August 2012 (EDT)

• --Amelia 13:00, 16 August 2012 (EDT)

• Please count me in, too. --Pkeegstra 19:51, 8 September 2012 (EDT)

• I am willing to help clear this backlog, as I think I might be responsible for much of it. Thanks. --cos1776 16:06, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Hello I would like to volunteer and help as well.--Djunkins 09:57, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Hi. Thanks for offering to help. The backlog has mostly been cleared but we could use some help in researching outstanding problems. If you are willing, check out the Talk page for Person:Richard Ogden (1) and see if you can identify exactly where the genealogy is fraudulent. I haven't looked at this myself, so I have no idea how hard the task is. If you can identify what needs to be fixed, let me know and I will review it and we can decide how to tackle fixing the problem - it might be as simple as a few edits.

If that is not your speed, take a look at the person and family pages that link to Place:East End of London, London, England and Place:Saint-Laurent, Montréal, Île-de-Montréal, Québec, Canada and see if you can find a better place page for each. These place pages can only be deleted once there are no person or family pages pointing to them. The remaining place page probably just needs to be merged with another one - I haven't got around to that yet.

Thanks--DataAnalyst 13:23, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Let's get started [24 October 2012]

I finished deleting all the pages yesterday. There were hundreds of pages. Could we would out some sort of rotation so this doesn't happen again? I would rather bow out at this point. I am involved in other maintenance. Perhaps you could each agree to take particular times, i.e. Amelia takes the first ten days of each month. Jillaine takes the second and Pkeegstra takes the last 10 days of the month. What do you think? --sq 19:54, 15 October 2012 (EDT)

Thank you Solveig. I thought I had just checked the list... then I realized you did the bulk of the work a couple weeks ago! And for workload purposes I should note that it looks like a good percentage of the ones you deleted had been up for less than 30 days, which is the rule of thumb I use before I start deleting. Do we want to keep waiting 30 days? Does anyone know a way we can tell other than clicking through to look at every page?

I click through and look at the date in the template. I don't know any other way.--sq 08:49, 16 October 2012 (EDT)

I don't know that it has to be done particularly scheduled if we all agree to check every so often. The major people using the speedy-delete template tend to go in spurts, so I'd be afraid one of us would get stuck with a ton all at once. Maybe if we leave a log of when we take a major whack at the list -- there were X entries, I did Y, noticed a bunch will expire next week, etc.--Amelia 20:57, 15 October 2012 (EDT)

You may be right about one of us getting stuck with tons. It took a long time to do the last batch. As a rule of thumb, I give people three days to respond. If they don't care about their page being deleted within three days, I delete it. Maybe that's too harsh. But I don't check the SD that often and I've never had anyone object to their page being deleted. It doesn't matter whether the page was there 3 days or a month. But if the rest of you want to give them a longer, we can. Opinions?

However, I think obviously living pages (Pages with titles like "Living Sanders" or pages that have "living" in the death field)should be deleted immediately--no three days. Posting living data causes identity theft and privacy issues.

So, Jillaine and Pkeegstra, what do you think? We could all check in once a week or so, and do as many as we have time to do. Then we'd know the rest of the committee could pick up the slack if there is a deluge.--sq 08:50, 16 October 2012 (EDT)

We might want to consider giving admin rights to User:Susan Irish and invite her to this conversation. She places many of the living people into speedy delete 1. because she cannot delete them and 2. to give the user the 3 day warning. If we no longer want to give the 3 day warning for living people, then perhaps Susan could just delete them instead of placing them in SD. This would save some work. Also, hopefully we will have a bot written to automatically delete the living people and families that already exist on the site - that will also help in the workload of this patrol. --Jennifer (JBS66) 10:02, 16 October 2012 (EDT)

I agree. Does anyone object to inviting Susan to participate? --sq 00:43, 18 October 2012 (EDT)

If we delete "Living" pages on sight, what about my arch-nemesis, the "Private" pages? Should they get the same treatment? --Pkeegstra 06:28, 18 October 2012 (EDT)

I agree that Living people should be deleted on sight, and same goes for "private", assuming that's because they are living. I also agree that we should ask if Susan can be given admin privileges so as to be able to delete, and asked if she'll help formally. Even without a formal commitment, that will help us a lot.

For non-living pages, 30 days or 3 days? I think 3 days is too short, personally, since I often reserve substantive work for the weekends so I would guess others do to. --Amelia 09:50, 18 October 2012 (EDT)

I agree that 3 days is a bit on the short side. Can we say something like 10 days while using 30 days as our actual practice? --Pkeegstra 14:33, 18 October 2012 (EDT)

I left a message for Susan Irish asking if she is interested in participating and if she'd mind her user status being changed to Admin. --Jennifer (JBS66) 09:44, 22 October 2012 (EDT)

I've changed Susan's user status to admin and explained that she can now delete pages for living people that she comes across. --Jennifer (JBS66) 15:30, 22 October 2012 (EDT)

Sorry for not responding. Was on the road. Happy to sign up for a particular time each week. I will put it in my calendar with a reminder set! :-) Jillaine 11:05, 24 October 2012 (EDT)

How do actually DELETE a page [24 October 2012]

The instructions end with "go ahead and delete the page" but don't say how. I have Admin access, but don't see a Delete command other than "speedy delete". So, um, excuse my denseness, but how do I actually DELETE the page? Jillaine 12:38, 24 October 2012 (EDT)

Hi Jillaine, the delete option is listed under More from the menu on the left. In the Reason for deletion field, we generally put something like "living people not allowed on WR" if it's for living people, or "user requested speedy delete" for others. --Jennifer (JBS66) 12:56, 24 October 2012 (EDT)

Thanks for the pointer. I wouldn't have thought to look there. Jillaine 13:03, 24 October 2012 (EDT)

I just took care of about five more that didn't really need a waiting period (and were also missing the date requested). Jillaine 13:10, 24 October 2012 (EDT)

SD marking/deletion process [6 January 2013]

Many times, a user will mark a "living" Family page for SD, but it is obvious that both spouses are also living (but not marked with SD). Also, users will mark both living spouses with SD, but not mark the associated Family page. Then, when we go through and delete the pages marked with SD - it leaves pages that are harder to locate in the future as needing deletion.

Here is one example:

• Family:Rodolphe Vautour and Dina Gallant (1) (marriage year of 1997) was marked with SD and deleted.
• Person:Dina Gallant (1) was the wife, not marked for SD, and not deleted.
• The two children from that 1997 marriage, Person:Dani Vautour (2) and Person:Dani Vautour (1), not marked for SD, not deleted, are now orphan pages.

Another example:

• Spouses Person:Ronald Scott (1) and Person:Marie Fonder (1) were marked for SD and deleted.
• Family:Ronald Scott and Marie Fonder (1) was not marked and not deleted.

I'm hoping that we can problem solve this and come up with some solutions to streamline this process. --Jennifer (JBS66) 07:39, 6 January 2013 (EST)

Do we think there's some programatic way to detect these pages and mark them? Because otherwise I think it's just on us to check all related pages. I always do that, because I assume that volunteers marking SD are like me and don't want to add the same template umpteen times to make the same point about the same people. Sometimes there are a couple dozen pages related to one SD. This isn't perfect because it's hard to keep track, but I don't know what else we can do. We can't expect people to put SD on all pages - not only is SD usable by the entire user base of varying skill and attention, but it geometrically increases their workload just so we have a nice list to work from, that we won't be able to trust anyway, and we'll have to touch all the same pages again.--Amelia 09:48, 6 January 2013 (EST)

Timeline [9 March 2013]

Can we explicitly talk about the timing please? I really don't think 3 days is long enough, particularly if it does not include a weekend. I have to be one of the most hyper users on here, and I would miss a 3 day window frequently. Since someone just went through and deleted everything more than 8 days old, we are obviously not operating on the same timeline.

I propose:

• Living as a name: Deleted on sight. If you have deletion privileges, no template even required, and we can delete these as soon as they appear in the list.
• Requests to delete one's own pages: Immediate action.
• Anything else, including "possibly living" under other names: 14 days.

Comments?--Amelia 10:56, 9 January 2013 (EST)

The only thing I'd add is a notation that if a person with living as a name was created by a presently active contributor, at the patrol person's discretion the page MAY be handled as option three instead of option one. --Pkeegstra 06:26, 11 January 2013 (EST)

How to find the old pages with Speedy Delete: Search for "speedy delete" and sort by date modified. Or go here! --Amelia 15:25, 9 March 2013 (EST)

Great tip, thanks! --Jennifer (JBS66) 17:23, 9 March 2013 (EST)

When to keep family pages intact [11 November 2013]

During the last Overview Committee meeting, we talked about how the GEDCOM uploader would handle Family pages such as Family:Carl Collins and Living Garrett (1). Dallan said the criteria has been:

• When there is a Family with a living spouse and deceased children, the Family page is kept intact by titling with Unknown for the living person and removing the marriage date.
• If the Family has no deceased children, then the Family page is not created.

It was suggested this same criteria should be used during our cleanup of living pages. --Jennifer (JBS66) 15:43, 15 April 2013 (EDT)

To be precise, as I understood it the policy applies to the case of one living and one non-living parent. (And a corollary is that the "unknown" bridge person should not be connected to parents, as that would leak info about that person's identity.) There is at this point as I understand it no provision for keeping together multiple deceased children of two living parents. --Pkeegstra 23:56, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

I would like to join [25 June 2013]

Since some days I get bored and start to seek out living people pages to tag as SpeedyDelete, I feel I may as well join the project, seeing how I contribute already by increasing the size of the Speedy Delete category.--Daniel Maxwell 11:05, 25 June 2013 (EDT)

Welcome!--Amelia 16:09, 25 June 2013 (EDT)

Hi Daniel, I just changed your status to include Admin rights for your work with the Speedy Delete patrol. This means that you can now delete pages. There are instructions here regarding this. For pages that are titled Living {something} and have no other information entered on the page, these can be deleted without a notice - for example Person:Living Jones (485). For Family pages such as Family:Ruel Knight and Living Unknown (1) where there is a deceased child, these are kept intact, but the marriage date is removed and the page should be retitled to Ruel Knight and Unknown (and the page for Person:Living Unknown (23787) can be deleted). This follows the protocol used during GEDCOM upload.

For other pages suspected of being living, like Person:James Tabor (8), we put the SD notice on the page and wait 14 days before deleting.

Thank you for your help removing these living pages! If you have any questions, don't hesistate to ask :) --Jennifer (JBS66) 16:31, 25 June 2013 (EDT)

Log [25 June 2013]

Since the crew is expanding, I thought this would be useful. The Approx Total is meant to be the total in the category, either eyeballed from the number of pages in the category, or using the search results. Deleted is what you did. Notes can tell the group what's up with the size of the pool and how they are aging. Let me know if you have other suggestions.--Amelia 16:09, 25 June 2013 (EDT)

Is there currently a log or is this a proposal for creating one?--Khaentlahn 16:58, 25 June 2013 (EDT)

There is nothing, just assorted discussions that it would be nice to have some idea of what needs to be done, especially as there get to be more of us.--Amelia 17:13, 25 June 2013 (EDT)

I mentioned to a few people my idea of writing a perl script which could be run on a regular basis to count the number of entries in Speedy Delete. I was hoping the task would be simplified by the "action=raw" switch, but in category pages like Speedy Delete that has the effect of suppressing the entire list. So the perl script will have to screen-scrape the actual pages. --Pkeegstra 17:40, 25 June 2013 (EDT)

Living Unknown [29 June 2013]

I have been going through the 'family name' 'Living' (thanks to the new browse feature on the sidebar), which is now easier, but the sheer number of these - over 2000 with perhaps more - I could use some help. Bottom line - there is no reason that any person on WR should have that name, even in the cases where there is a dead child of otherwise living parents. I have also seen variants of 'Living Living' and 'Unknown Living', but 'Living Unknown' is the most common version. In fact, 'Living Unknown' is the most common name on WR by over 20,000 - I have seen numbers on it as high as the 26,000s. The newest ones I have seen are from 2009, but I think we need a way to prevent these from ever being put back on here.--Daniel Maxwell 16:16, 25 June 2013 (EDT)

I think there are a variety of ways in which programming prevents Living Unknown at this point, but if you find some that are recent, please flag it. I've been whacking at them as well; as I noted in the log and is in the instructions (I think), feel free to delete any of these you see on sight - fewer clicks for everyone! --Amelia 16:27, 25 June 2013 (EDT)

There was some talk a few years ago about preventing usage of the name 'Living' completely, except in a few exceptional cases where 'Living' was a Christian name of a known person. I am not sure if that ever happened, but it would help. One thing that there is an unknown number of on WR are 'stealth' living people - the user leaves the name, but deletes all the dates so you have sometimes more than one generation of people with no birth/death dates. One way to prevent the stealth living people would be to mandate that all people on WR have at least birth dates (though I suspect this would cause some issues with people who are doing WIP people, which even I do sometimes). Daniel Maxwell

I have them down by about 1000, but there are still a little over 2000 left. Sad to say, but almost all of them come from a single user. I will have to propose some ways to prevent this problem from ever coming back at some point. The 'Living' category, when done as a given name instead of a surname, is scary - about 140,000 pages - also probably needs a mechanism to prevent it from happening anymore, but that is probably a project unto itself. Daniel Maxwell 22:15, 26 June 2013 (EDT)

Actually, it seems I had the Living Unknowns sorted incorrectly. I knew 2000 seemed like a low number. The actual number (as far as I can tell) is right about 9000, and this is after I have probably deleted around 1 thousand: http://www.werelate.org/wiki/Special:Search?ns=Person&ecp=e&rows=200&cv=true&watch=wu&g=living&s=unknown&start=0--Daniel Maxwell 11:17, 27 June 2013 (EDT)

As of 12:30pm GMT, the following are the numbers for individuals who are both "living" and on the main Speedy Delete page:

--Khaentlahn 08:33, 29 June 2013 (EDT)

Thanks, that's helpful. Although I have gone through and deleted many of the living unknowns, we probably need something faster. Is there a means of 1) auto deleting the living unknowns and 2) mass tagging of all of the living others? The only ones that might need to be gone through by hand are the living unknown family pages, which might have a dead child so it would be allowed to be renamed 'person (1) and unknown'Daniel Maxwell 12:20, 29 June 2013 (EDT)

To the best of my knowledge, there is not a fast way to tag individuals. On the other side of this coin, there are some uploaded GEDCOMs which tagged an individual as "living unknown" when they had no dates regardless of whether the individual's spouse and children were born in the 1800s and prior. Mass deleting any one particular type of individual without going through them by hand is likely going to produce orphaned or broken families when they aren't necessary.--Khaentlahn 12:30, 29 June 2013 (EDT)

I wasn't aware of such a courtesy extended to living unknowns. As Amelia said above, they can be deleted on sight. I have been deleting them (living unknowns) regardless of the dates (I have only seen a few with dates in the 1800s or before); it is up to the individual user to get the correct names/dates, but obviously I dont do this with the Living Smiths, etc. The vast majority of these users are also inactive. It does seem that a few suffered from perhaps a combination of an older gedcom upload scheme where if they had a name, but no date, it assumed they were living, but the majority have been probably living people (ie parents married 1925). Perhaps making it mandatory to have at least a birth date is one thing I would recommend to prevent this from happening in the future, as well as banning usage of 'living' in either name space unless it is one of the rare cases of 'Living' being used as a first name. Daniel Maxwell 12:44, 29 June 2013 (EDT)

I will go ahead and cease deleting 'questionables' for now, though I think for most of them it will be hard to get any one to come and fix them. Daniel Maxwell 13:02, 29 June 2013 (EDT)

I can't tell what "questionables" you're referring to... I remember one "living unknown" that was clearly a mistake (husband born 1784), but even that still gets deleted on sight unless you want to go find out the name (which I decided to do, just for fun). And I don't think any of these have been created in the last three years or so. If you find any, please flag, but the gedcom system isn't supposed to create or allow any living pages, so far as I know, so people would have to add them by hand, and that should be caught by admin review.--Amelia 16:59, 29 June 2013 (EDT)

Just what you said (ie people born in the 18th or 19th century). I delete those on sight just like you do, though I have tracked down a few using findagrave that were easy to find. Some were not. Others seem to be mistakes (such as 'living unknown and living unknown' as the parents of the final person in a line). But what I mean here is what Khaentlahn says, try to be more careful with ones that will break up a group. If I can find a solution, I change it and add the dates, but if not, I will delete. I have probably deleted about 2000 in the last week, just over 8000 left to go now. I have probably fixed around 25 or so. (EDIT: Just now realized you were replying to him, not I)Daniel Maxwell 17:10, 29 June 2013 (EDT)

Break in line, line ends, etc - what to do with these [29 June 2013]

In the course of my clean up of alot of the living unknowns, I have come across a few like this: Person:Gap In Line (1). Speedy delete with or without tag, or should I leave them?--Daniel Maxwell 17:35, 29 June 2013 (EDT)

I vote leave it. It's a considered and explained gap with what appear to be real people on either side. It could be renamed "Unknown Dalton." If it were a gap in line for the purpose of linking to a royal line or something similar that looks spurious, and it has no good explanation, then I think a Speedy Delete with the problem is in order.--Amelia 17:53, 29 June 2013 (EDT)

Speedy Delete Update [23 August 2013]

As of 3:47pm GMT, the following are the numbers for individuals who are both "living" and on the main Speedy Delete page:

--Khaentlahn 11:47, 2 August 2013 (EDT)

Thanks for the update, I missed this a couple weeks ago. I took a break from the mass deletions for a week or so, but I am back on it now. One other thing that would be a big help is if there was a way to parse the WR system looking for blank pages - or at least, pages with no birth dates, as well as pages that have 'Y' as the death date. Some of those may be fine, but there are an unknown number of livings that are hidden in this way. Daniel Maxwell 13:22, 13 August 2013 (EDT)

Just discovered a new category that should be added to the checklist - 'private'. Search for that in the first name box, and you will see the majority are livings. There are about 1700 of them, some are legit military men with private as a rank, but most are not.--Daniel Maxwell 15:57, 22 August 2013 (EDT)

That is a great discovery. The information will be included in the next updated table. --Khaentlahn 03:48, 23 August 2013 (EDT)

People are still creating living pages - by hand [13 September 2013]

As I knew, a few users are getting around (either intentionally or not) the GEDCOM safegauards by creating the living people pages by hand. User 'Endless' created several of these yesterday, including this one: Person:Living Watson (195). As I said, WR needs to seriously consider my suggesting of blocking the 'living' in a name box or page name to prevent the growth of these things in the future. We have the livings down to almost 100,000, and the living unknowns to just over 1000. We can fix the problem if a few extra steps are taken.--Daniel Maxwell 13:46, 13 September 2013 (EDT)

This is usually a new user thing - I will just delete their pages on sight and leave them a note. They generally apologize and stop.--Amelia 20:18, 13 September 2013 (EDT)

Speedy Delete Update [27 December 2013]

As of 06:18pm GMT, the following are the numbers for individuals who are both "living" and on the main Speedy Delete page:

While it is not perfect, there is also a way to find the private births and deaths by searching for "private" in the keyword space. Not everyone which comes up under the over 33k results have private births or deaths, but they are easier to find within this particular search.--Khaentlahn 18:18, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Something else to track I forgot about - 'Unknown and Unknown' blank family pages. Many of these have no actual parents, and only one child. Right now search is showing about 6000 of them, but not all of them are empty. Daniel Maxwell 11:58, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Bot to remove some Living Person pages [17 December 2013]

Dallan is going to be creating a bot to delete specific Living person pages. Person pages with Living in the name, no data on the page, and who are not connected to a spouse will be removed. People attached to a spouse won't be removed automatically because they require human decisions for renaming, etc. An example would be Person:Living Randolph (44). --Jennifer (JBS66) 11:28, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Excellent. This will save me (and several others) a ton of time. I can't tell you how many hours I have spent deleting pages like that! As you said, going through connected spouse pages is a little tougher, so we will still have our work cut out for us. Daniel Maxwell 11:30, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Further -- would it be possible to have a bot that auto-tags? I can think of a few useful purposes for such a bot, namely 1) tagging the rest of the livings that have connections to spouses 2) perhaps tagging people who have 'private' written in the date field? There are probably more usages I could come up with Daniel Maxwell 14:41, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Some of this can be done with searches. You can search on Families using Living in the husband/wife given name field. Private pages seem to show up more accurately when searching for Private in the Keyword field on Family pages. I would be glad to run this by Dallan at our next meeting in January though. You can list other instances this tagging (or, perhaps, a report instead) would be useful and I'll add this post to the agenda. --Jennifer (JBS66) 17:40, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Yes, though it isn't always efficient to do it that way (you get many people with military ranks). I could make a full report and I shall over the next couple weeks, but here now I will say one of the most important things that the site needs (and this could tie in with tagging or bots) is a way to snoop out invalid dates. Many of the 'privates' would get found and this way and it could be useful for regular users to prevent or warn them from making mistakes in the date field. If such a means were made, via a bot or however, the system could be 'pinged' to find them, and either auto-tagging them or auto-categorizing them. Discussion obviously needs to happen in what would be considered an 'invalid date' (example: some genealogical programs don't like Julian calender dual dates), but I know Dallan already agrees with something like this since I mentioned it to him months ago. Daniel Maxwell 19:21, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Dallan for adding the bot.--Beth 05:27, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Legendary kings and pre 700 AD people [29 December 2013]

I've been considering starting to tag/auto delete people that violate the pre 700 AD rule (IIRC there are a handful of people who can go back slightly farther, about 600 AD, but which family escapes me right now), but I don't want to act without talking it over here first. I just ran into this ancient line which seems to start here: Person:Cambra (1). The legendary kings of Sweden are also all on WR, but again I didn't want to start deleting them without knowing more about the issue first and what the earliest one that could be kept was.--Daniel Maxwell 12:03, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Personally, I think this is a rat's nest that will run into resistance and require making rules we don't have yet. We have more than enough to do while working through other areas without taking it on right now.--Amelia 01:24, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I realized that, which is why I didn't do anything yet. In particular, we would need to note what provable lines there are before 700 AD - Charlemagne's provable line goes back to about 580 AD IIRC, and I think there are a few others that go back to the 7th century. Probably a discussion bigger than Speedy Delete, though. Daniel Maxwell 07:13, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Request for delete privileges [16 March 2014]

I am hesitant about declaring as a committee member, as I am currently volunteering on the duplicates page (and want to get back to my own genealogy soon). But in the process of cleaning up people with multiple parents (part of the duplicates check), I come across living persons. Rather than adding the speedy delete template and making another volunteer do the work, maybe I should have the privilege to simply delete them. If I got the privilege, I promise to use it only as per the speedy delete policy (that is, delete living people immediately and others only after they have been tagged for at least 2 weeks).--DataAnalyst 02:34, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Done. --Pkeegstra 12:44, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

Finding livings will become much easier soon (hopefully) [27 February 2014]

Dallan has said that he is going to begin work on a feature I have requested for a long time, date standardization. One side feature I requested in talking to him was the ability for the system (I don't know if this would be in an admin tab or what) to be able to find 'bad dates' (ie incomplete dates or dates with 'Y' written in yeah column) or 'no dates'. This will make finding the many blank dated but not marked as 'living' person pages much much easier. A conversation now needs to happen, though, on what the system will consider a bad date. Then there is also another idea I had that in the settings you could choose how you want dates to appear to a user on the site - I personally prefer this format - 5 May 1983, but I see others use the long/comma form - May 5, 1983.--Daniel Maxwell 20:23, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Would the date standardization be something run on all pages or something enforced after the fact, do you know? Basically will dates currently in the system still need to be standardized by hand or will they be converted with a script or other program? As a secondary feature, having the ability to find the "Y"s in descriptive fields would definitely be beneficial. As would being able to find individuals with no dates or places, or in other words blank pages (other than names).

Addressing the final idea - Essentially, the dates would all be standardized to the site's basic format of DD MMM YYYY, but have an option in the user's personal setting to have the dates appear in some other format as long as the basic format is followed. Is this correct?--Khaentlahn 22:05, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

Speedy Delete update 25 May 2015 [25 May 2015]

Clearly much progress made on deleting the livings since the late 2013 update, but many of the privates get mixed up with those person pages who have 'private' as a military rank.--Daniel Maxwell 14:27, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Interesting we've managed over 50K living deletions in 18 months, and only 500 "Living Unknown" - did a bot run? I haven't noticed based on what I see still out there, so we must just rock :-) --Amelia 16:06, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

No bot, unless Susan Irish is running a script but I doubt it. Just dedication on her part. Daniel Maxwell 16:08, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Speedy delete ageing [9 November 2015]

I just added some pages to Category:Speedy_Delete then went to that page and noticed there are currently 161 pages marked for deletion. I looked through a few and some of them were quite old. Is there any way of seeing the "ageing" of this category - ie a list of pages within it by the date they were nominated? Many thanks. AndrewRT 22:22, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Run a search for "speedy delete" in the keyword field, then sort by date last modified. It picks up other discussions of the function as well, and is affected by people subsequently editing, but generally sorts by order added to the category. In my experience, most of the really old ones still marked have some sort of issue that makes addressing them complicated. In general, while there's certainly a lag of more than two weeks, the number marked stays pretty stable, so it's cycling through.--Amelia 22:27, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Like this you mean? Great - thanks Amelia! I've had a look through the pages and the "true" backlog - excluding the very old ones - seems to be to 18th August (12 weeks). Have I worked that out right? AndrewRT 22:41, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes, except don't restrict it to the person namespace. There are a lot of times where a family with living children is just marked on the family page rather than editing each child separately. And, yes, the backlog is about August.--Amelia 22:47, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Presumably 12 weeks is a bit longer than we would ideally want it to be. I notice there are six people on the "speedy delete committee" - are they all active or do they need a nudge? AndrewRT 23:14, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Part of the backlog is my fault, I started a new job in late July which has consumed most of my time. I will try and clear the backlog in the next couple of weeks. One problem with the current backlog is that one of the entries (the census one listed) has to be gone through and the links changed, which is a hassle. Also, 160 pages is not a huge backlog all things considered - at one point we had several thousand items in speedy delete. Daniel Maxwell 23:17, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Help is always welcome, but I agree with Daniel that it actually looks good. The number has been stable for months, which means we're cycling through them. I don't think the 12 weeks matters over much so long as things are moving. --Amelia 01:06, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for getting back to me. If the consensus is that 12 weeks is not a problem as a backlog then I'm happy to leave it there. AndrewRT 13:33, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Part of that is that we are supposed to give the users who have had their pages tagged a couple of weeks to respond to them, and to possibly correct them. Usually this doesn't happen, but I have had a couple users reply and indicate the person has died and their death date is then added. Also in my case, I like to be able to check the person pages on my own to see if an obituary, grave, or other death record listed in an online tree can be found before I delete them - this all adds time to the deletion process. Daniel Maxwell 16:51, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Committee Roll Call & Update [17 July 2022]

Hello - I am in the process of updating the information on the status of our admin structure and maintenance committees. The members of this committee are currently listed as:

• Pkeegstra, Liason to the Overview Committee
• Amelia.Gerlicher
• Solveig
• Khaentlahn
• DMaxwell

Please respond here to let us know that you are still active on this committee and whether or not you wish to continue in this capacity. Also, if there are additional users on the committee not listed, please let us know.

To help us quantify the work that is being done, please include a brief list of the tasks that you perform most frequently and an estimate of the average amount of time per month that you currently spend on these tasks.
Thank you in advance for your help, --cos1776 13:54, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

I'm willing to remain as the liason. And help out when a message goes out that the backlog has built up. --pkeegstra 10:02, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

I heard from two people offline. A positive acknowledgement from Amelia, and one negative acknowledgement, whose name has been deleted. --pkeegstra 21:55, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Jul 2022 update: per DataAnalyst, DataAnalyst added ; DMaxwell removed (no longer active) --cos1776 14:30, 17 July 2022 (UTC)