Andrew Gray wrote:
On 25/12/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
My biggest criticism of it at this point is that it's only available to the geeks who use a monobook skin and know how to edit it. I'm not going to stop using the classic skin, and I have no intention of learning how to edit a css. I'm sure there are many other non-techies in the latter group that would be kept away from the feature because of that. A simple toggle in the user preferences would make a lot more sense.
I'm not sure it really is - it can be set to be visible there, sure, but you can edit it at will through the "conventional means" - and, right now, it's not meant to be read in the article as such.
If nobody can see it, nobody will be educated into using it. If I have nothing to say about an author, I'm not even going to bother opening the edit box. We already have a wide range of info boxes about articles that work very well. I don't see the point of making this one an exception. I think that more generally our approach to metadata has been a little scattered.
The one thing that I wouild make clear about the contents is that one can add years when an author flourished. For some authors we anly know the years when they wrote, and know nothing of their lives before or after the time during which they wrote. Perhaps our German colleagues have already thought of that.
This is certainly a handy idea, but it doesn't seem to be in the standard format in de:. I've suggested a way of dealing with this on the talk page - an additional optional line for "flourished", just as a single year (for simplicity) or as a range -
|FLOURISHED=1200 |PLACE OF ACTIVITY=England or |FLOURISHED=1191-1208 |PLACE OF ACTIVITY=England or something else along these lines
Even if it's just a single year, it allows us to say "ah, he's thirteenth century" or the like. As it stands, if you don't have birth and death dates, they could be contemporary or they could be biblical, and we can't say at a glance - well, *we* can, but a computer can't.
That would be perfect!
Ec