Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography
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Suzanne Carrell • Mullá Husayn • John Gilchrist (linguist) • Thomas Brattle •
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Biography article statistics |
The Biography WikiProject concerns the creation, development, and organization of Wikipedia's articles about persons (including but not limited to biographies). It includes only articles about individual persons, not about an organization or group or association, unless a substantial section of the article is a biography of a person related to that organization or group. It includes biographies of only real humans; thus, the project does not cover other animals or fictitious persons (such as pseudonyms) or fictional characters. As of 17 May 2022, there are 1,904,640 articles and 6,781 lists within the scope of WikiProject Biography, of which 1,710 are featured and 7,342 are good articles. As of 1 April 2021 according to WHGI and based on wikidata, only 337,764 of Wikipedia's 1,796,746 biographies are about women, amounting to 18.799%.
- Get this project energized
- Build all core biographies to Good Article status, at a minimum
- What else?
Check out the newsletter archives!
Check out New Article alerts.(no longer delivered)
Structure[edit]
Tips for writing biographies[edit]
Are you starting from scratch and want some guidance on creating a biographical article? Follow these helpful tips! Some of them are also useful for work on articles that have already been started.
- Remember, there are 7 billion people in the world. While all of them have their own story, not all of them warrant a Wikipedia article. See WP:BIO for notability standards.
- Research the available literature to find reliable sources. Read them carefully, taking notes.
- Create a proto-article in a subpage of your own user space.
- Right from the start, cite your sources: it's much easier to do this as you go along than to attempt to do so later.
- See "How to edit a page" to understand the basics of the wiki markup language. Reference the proto-article, especially biographies of living persons.
- Check your sources again. Balance and neutrality are vital.
- At this stage, don't add categories or images. (You'll be able to add them later.)
- Work up the proto-article until it's coherent and at least slightly informative and has had its facts checked. (It does not yet need either to present a rounded picture of the person or to be a good article in any normal sense; it merely has to be sound in what it does say.) The article, no matter how rough, should clearly state why the person is notable enough to be included in this project, see WP:BIO. It is a good idea to make reference to at least one of the notability determinants in the lead paragraph. Failing to clearly show notability may lead to your new article being quickly deleted.
- Create a new article on your subject and paste the content of your proto-article there.
- Read Wikipedia's article title conventions to decide what the page title should be. Also see m:Help:Starting a new page.
- The history of your proto-article up to this point is unlikely to be of interest to anybody other than yourself, and moving it would force you to re-create your user sub-page. Thus copy/pasting makes sense. However, do note that copying and pasting existing articles is frowned upon in Wikipedia; moving makes the edit history easy to find and complies with the licencing policies.
- Add images such as those obtained from Wikimedia Commons, image list, or by posting a request for an image from other editors.
- Add the appropriate categories.
- You may also be able to find suitable categories by looking at related articles, particularly articles about similar people. Failing that, visit the appropriate work groups (which have them listed) or start browsing at Category:People.
- Linking: check that the internal and external links and footnotes in the article go where you want them to go.
- Make sure that some other, relevant articles link to a new article, so that the new one isn't "orphaned".
- Keep working on the article. Chances are that other editors will notice its existence and join you in working on it. If nobody seems to notice it and you'd like one or two to do so, mention the article in the talk page of a relevant "WikiProject" (e.g. Music), or this one, or both.
- You may find that the newcomers will be interested in aspects of the person that don't much interest you, or will relish aspects of editing that you find a bit tiresome. Thus their work will complement rather than compete with your own.
- Consider adding a list of works (bibliography, discography, etc.).
- When you're happy with the article or have done about as much with it as you think you can, consider requesting a peer review by following these instructions.
- Relax! and take a break if you reached this point. You deserve it!
Policies[edit]
Guidelines[edit]
- Wikipedia:Notability (people)
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies)
- Manual of Style (Ethiopia-related biography articles:proper names)
- Manual of Style (Ireland-related biography articles)
- Manual of Style (Islam-related biography articles: honorifics)
- Manual of Style (Japan-related biography articles:Names)
- Manual of Style (Thailand-related biography articles:Names)
- Manual of Style (dates of birth and death)
- Wikipedia:Naming conventions (people)
- Wikipedia:Naming conventions (royalty and nobility)
- Wikipedia:Categorization of people
- Wikipedia:Autobiography
No classification of biographies has been defined. See this example on dividing a topic into a hierarchy.
Templates[edit]
What to type | What it makes | What it's for | |||||||||||||
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The project notice designed to be placed in the talk page of any article that has been or should be edited as part of this Wikiproject. Please see the assessment page for parameters to use in rating articles. | ||||||||||||||
Shows a standardized link to the Biography portal, and may be suitable for the "See also" sections of biographies. | |||||||||||||||
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This can be placed on your user page to show that you are a part of this Wikiproject. | ||||||||||||||
Miscellaneous templates | |||||||||||||||
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To include the ad box on your userpage or talk page, simply edit your page and add | |||||||||||||
Stubs |
Navigate to this category to browse for the appropriate stub | ||||||||||||||
Infoboxes |
Category:People and person infobox templates • List of Infoboxes |
Navigate to this category to browse for the appropriate infobox |
Project organization[edit]
Members[edit]
Generally see Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Members
Admin members[edit]
Below are project members who are also Wikipedia admins (in A-Z order)
- 23skidoo (talk · contribs)
- Avraham (talk · contribs)
- Capitalistroadster (talk · contribs)
- Catfish Jim and the soapdish (talk · contribs)
- Cbrown1023 (talk · contribs)
- Deiz (talk · contribs)
- Dreamy Jazz (talk · contribs) Mainly WikiProject tagging.
- Drilnoth (talk · contribs) • I mainly just do smaller stuff in the course of my other editing
- Dumelow (talk · contribs) I work mainly on biographies of civil engineers
- FloNight (talk · contribs) Interested in WP:BLP issues. Writing biographies for Wikipedia:WikiProject Kentucky, mostly about people in civil war and politicians.
- Ganeshk (talk · contribs)
- Greeves (talk · contribs)
- John Carter (talk · contribs)
- Johntex (talk · contribs)
- Jreferee (talk · contribs) - I've written a bunch of bios and have a soft spot for those people who edit their own biography. Any problems in that area or other biography area, please contact me.
- Kanonkas (talk · contribs) I am giving biographies files. I'm trying to edit them with more information, mainly it'll be about celebrities. I'm also trying to remove unsourced BLP, that may be defamatory or not. I'll be happy to look after a BLP related article, or if you need something (e.g. protection) feel free to ask me.
- kingboyk (talk · contribs)
- MichaelQSchmidt (talk · contribs)
- Nishkid64 (talk · contribs) I want to help out with articles on world leaders and politicians. Also have been helping out with WikiProject Missing regarding U.S. House politicians.
- Philosopher (talk · contribs) - Politics and Government workgroup.
- Plange (talk · contribs)
- Rosiestep (talk · contribs) - Co-founder, WP:WikiProject Women in Red. I've created 1,400 women's biogs. Mostly, I focus on women writers. Also re-assessing.
- Sandstein (talk · contribs) — I'm working my way through a biographical lexicon of jurists and should be done in, say, 2012.
- Scimitar (talk · contribs) - I was the principal editor on the Isaac Brock featured article, and have written around 200 bios and stubs, mostly in the field of Canadian politics and NHL players, although I dabble in anything that catches my eye.
- SoothingR (talk · contribs)
- TKD (talk · contribs) — My work in modern video gaming and science fiction popular culture has led me to work intermittently on related biographies.
- UkPaolo (talk · contribs)
- Vaoverland (talk · contribs) - I mostly work with history, geography and transportation articles related to Virginia and West Virginia, willing to help other project editors with moves, etc., try to avoid controversy, would rather work on content. aka Mark in Historic Triangle of Virginia
- VegaDark (talk · contribs)
- Wizardman (talk · contribs) - General improvement, lots of assessing and tag adding.
- Xdamr (talk · contribs) mostly South African politicians and other notables, 1850-1950.
- Yannismarou (talk · contribs)
Departments[edit]
Assessment[edit]
The assessment department focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's biography articles. While much of the work is done in conjunction with the WP:1.0 program, the article ratings are also used within the project itself to aid in recognizing excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work.
The ratings are done in a distributed fashion through parameters in the {{WPBiography}} project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in a set of categories that serves as the basis for an automatically generated worklist.
Core biographies[edit]
The core biographies department seeks to bring 200 of our most important and visited articles to featured article standard (see also: v1.0 Biographies).
Peer review[edit]
The peer review department conducts peer reviews of articles on request; this helps to obtain ideas for further improvement by having contributors who may not have previously worked on particular articles examine them. Project members are invited to submit articles to the department in lieu of using the generic peer review process.
Unreferenced BLPs[edit]
5 random unreferenced BLPs, updated daily: William F. Downes | Glen MacPherson | 60 | David Bradstreet | Bob Reiss
Inactive departments[edit]
A-class review: A-class review examined articles to ensure they met the A-class standards. Currently, there is a freeze on promotions to A-class.
Collaboration: The collaboration department sought to identify particular articles that would benefit from a significant collaborative effort. A single article was selected as the focus, and the project attempted to improve it, potentially to featured article standard.
Outreach: The outreach department acted as the project's central point of coordination for the recruitment of new members and the production of newsletters.
Work groups[edit]
- Please discuss any proposals for new work groups with the project as a whole before creating them.
Workgroups are informal groups of editors gathered for collaborative work on a particular topic within the field of biography; all project members are encouraged to participate in any that interest them. Also included below are other WikiProjects that fall within our scope.
- Work groups
Comprehensive lists of Women who require Wikipedia biographies are available from the Women in Red WikiProject.
Resources[edit]
Project templates[edit]
- {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Sidebar}} – Project sidebar
- {{CurrentBioCOTW}} – Current Collaboration
- {{BioCOTWnow}} – Current Collaboration winner for article's talk page
- {{WikiProject Biography}} – Talk page project banner
- {{WPBiography Archive}} – archive banner for internal project pages no longer in use.
Barnstars[edit]
- The Biography Barnstar – The Biography Barnstar can be awarded to editors who make significant or outstanding contributions to Wikipedia's biography-related articles.
- The BLP Barnstar – The BLP Barnstar is used to recognize editors who strive to maintain the integrity, sourcing, and neutrality of biography articles, so they adhere to the biographies of living persons policy.
- The Royalty's Barnstar – The Royalty and Nobility Barnstar is awarded to editors who make significant contributions to royalty and nobility related articles that expand Wikipedia’s knowledge about the biographies of people belonging to royalty and/or nobility.
Related WikiProjects[edit]
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Anthroponymy – about human names and naming conventions in various cultures
- WikiProject Succession Boxes
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red – concerned with identifying women for whom biographies are required
- Wikipedia:Women's Classical Committee – concerned with improving and creating biographies for notable classicists who are women
Statistics[edit]
![](http://webcf.waybackmachine.org/web/20220518045349im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f2/Edit-clear.svg/50px-Edit-clear.svg.png)
A list of articles needing cleanup associated with this project is available. See also the tool's wiki page and the index of WikiProjects.