On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 11:52 PM, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
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This is one of five different ways the Birth & Death dates are now being represented in the Project.
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I suspect you mean /style/ issues (i.e. "born" versus "*" vesus "b." and so on), but I might be wrong. Can you list those five ways you are talking about?
There is a similar profusion of different methods of dealing with biographical metadata.
See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographical_metadata
That is more concerning to me than inconsistent style. If you have the same information entered four or five times in the same article, you will end up with articles where the different entries are inconsistent, with different birth/death years in the lead, the main text, the infobox, the Persondata and the birth/death year categories. You would think that sort of thing gets checked, but it is surprisingly common for the birth/death date in an infobox to be mistyped or just plain wrong, compared to what is in the article.
What should happen is that the basic biographical data, with sources, should be entered *once* and then reused in the various locations where it is needed. But I haven't yet seen anyone able to come up with a way of doing this that still allows new editors to avoid using a horrendously complicated template or coding system (Template:Lifetime is a step towards such a system - for geography, the co-ord templates do similar things). I think the most workable solution would be to have the biographical information in the lead and main body of the text entered freehand, but to have the infobox, categories and Persondata all calling the biographical metadata from a dedicated place designed for that purpose.
Anyone have any ideas how to set up a system like that cleanly and get it working on Wikipedia? The relatively poor spread of Persondata suggests that it is harder than it looks to get something like this going.
Carcharoth