On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 9:28 AM, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
2008/10/14 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
There are many hundreds of thousands of date related articles in Wikipedia. The number of articles mentioning February 2 is enormous. To answer trivia such as "who else was born on the same day" you're no worse off searching. (The date article can't hope to list all the people born on that day, and whatlinkshere will be no more informative than a search).
Interestingly, when I was wondering "what value does a date link have" the other night, the only particularly "useful" circumstance I could think of, beyond the obvious case of "articles about holidays etc", was people's birthdays.
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.
What IS useful is a link to a year for birth and death dates, so as to get a person's life in some sort of context.
Realistically, linking all dates and years in wikipedia just makes articles confusing and overlinked. You really want to know what happened on a specific day, do a search. That's not hard.
Peter