2008/10/14 Skyring <skyring(a)gmail.com>om>:
But is a birthday really significant? Or a deathday?
Thomas Jefferson
and his mate dying on the same day is of some interest, I guess, but
it's really trivia rather than encyclopaedic.
I should have been clearer, I think - when I said "useful", I meant in
the sense that someone following the link might possibly get something
they expected in the page at the other end...
As you note, with year articles, you always get some contextual
benefit (even if trivially small) to linking the year something took
place, even if it's just the ability to quickly check whether the
Renaissance had started yet or not.
You don't get any such contextual benefit from linking the "day of the
year" something took place, unless you want to know something that
happened on exactly the same date. It's very unlikely you want to know
what happened on the same day a century before or after - the only
circumstance that I can think of that happening with any frequency is
people's birthdays, hence why it seemed worth mentioning as an
exception.
I'm not arguing we need to link birthdays, but I do think there's
usually slightly more merit for linking [[6 January]] in the context
of a birthdate than there is for doing it anywhere else in the
article. (This may, indeed, be taken as a demonstration of how useless
the rest of them are...)
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk