On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 9:28 AM, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2008/10/14 Gregory Maxwell
<gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>om>:
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