on 10/8/08 7:02 PM, Andrew Gray at shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
2008/10/8 Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net:
Folks,
Would someone help me here? What is the current policy regarding linking dates such as Birth and Death in biography articles?
You're as surprised by it as the rest of us :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:DATES#Date_autoformatting
The old "link all dates" is now deprecated, and we're advised to just write them in a standard form (14 November 2000 or November 14, 2000). It'll be interesting to see if this helps reduce overlinking
The old system was laudable, but really only worked for a small minority of readers, usually active editors themselves. For everyone else, it just got confusing...
Thanks, all, for your input. I do almost all of my editing in biographies and wondered from the beginning why it was necessary. Now, my next question is, when going in to edit an existing Article that has the dates linked, should they be routinely de-linked?
Marc