On 8/30/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/30/06, Anthony wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
Of course the fact that it's not useful information combined with the fact that it's almost never an easily verified fact is an equally good reason.
It's extremely useful information for the purpose of disambiguating. How do you know that semi-notable Jim Smith who lives in Sydney, born 1957 is or isn't Jim Smith (born Australia 1957, lives in New York)? Knowing their birthdates helps a huge amount.
The disambiguation page for [[Jim Smith]] seems to handle this fine without mentioning any birthdates.
Also, you don't need a birth certificate to source it. Any published source is a pretty good start.
It's a good start if you don't really care about whether or not it's correct, which is the case with birthdates. But if you don't care about whether or not it's correct, why bother.
Anyway, a published source can be better than a birth certificate. In the case of Jimbo, the Wikipedia article has a different birthdate than his birth certificate, and I'd guess that the article is probably the correct date.
Of course, it brings up questions about truth vs. "wikitruth" when you think about how easy it is to get information into Wikipedia - just tell some news reporter to publish it.
Anthony