On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 9:16 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2008/10/16 Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net:
It just happened again. I went in and edited a biography article, made
some
corrections as to the Date of Birth, and left the month and day unlinked
but
linked the year. One minute later someone else came in and de-linked the year with the edit comments, "(unlink yob per WP:MOSNUM)". Is this the present policy? And if so, how came we change it?
Marc Riddell
Yes it is present MOS and you change it in the normal manner. However this would what be the third time the debate has happened in a few months so I doubt you would get very far. See for the most part what happened in the year of someone's birth is of little interest unless the event dirrectly impacted them. You might be able to make a case for the years where they did whatever makes the noteable but even then a case could be made that you would do better linking to say 1860s in engineering.
-- geni
It seems to me that linking someone's birth year would give a reader easy access to a listing of an individual's contemporaries via the list of people born in that year and adjacent years. Having an idea of the other people who were alive and working at the same time can give a lot of context when reading a person's biography.