Hi all.
One of the interesting projects on de.wiki is the idea of Personendata - basically, a set of standard biographical details, appended to individual articles. Name, other common names, a few words of description, date/place of birth, date/place of death. The sort of thing you would find on a disambiguation page, basically.
This is implemented in quite a clever way - the CSS is set up in such a way that the "{{Personendaten}}" template isn't shown, so whilst it remains in the page text it's invisible to the casual reader; it's stored at the bottom of the page along with categories and interwikis and other "housekeeping" text, to avoid editors tripping over it.
Very nice. So what does it do? It allows all sorts of applications - see http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05/Paper-JV2 - and I'm sure you can think of others. Build it, and they will come. One of the smart ideas there was to tie it into the Deutsche Bibliotek authority records (the files cataloguers use to keep authors uniquely identified), meaning that deeplinking to works by that person is relatively easy.
[[User:Kaldari]] has started experimenting with adding this to articles on en: - there's only about a dozen as yet, but the idea has promise. It's certainly a lot easier than our clumsier work with categories, and would probably help with finding duplicate articles.
There's a page up at [[Wikipedia:Persondata]] going over the details; any comments or suggestions would probably be appreciated.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk