2008/10/17 Elias Friedman elipongo@gmail.com:
It seems to me that linking someone's birth year would give a reader easy access to a listing of an individual's contemporaries via the list of people born in that year and adjacent years. Having an idea of the other people who were alive and working at the same time can give a lot of context when reading a person's biography.
No. Oh it might sort of work if you were working with the ancient world and you assume wikipedia maintains it systemic bias but even there it isn't that significant that Moctezuma I and Zhu Zhanji (Xuande Emperor) were born around the same time. Their civilisations had no contact.
As you move to more recent events you hit problems with shear numbers Harry Houdini and Winston Churchill were apparently born in the same year. I doubt this has any significance to either of their lives.
Worse still when you consider that it is possible that a 20 year old man of adventure may be have an impact in the same area as an 80 year old diplomat. So unless you work your way through 60 odd years of articles you would miss that completely.
So if there is a significant contemporary you mention them in the article about the person.
Consider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jessop
It mentions John Smeaton someone more than 20 years his elder. It covers Rennie and Telford. The people who either directly influenced Jessop or were influenced by him. It mentions Brindley the other very high profile British canal engineer.
If you want to see who else was around you can look to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Canal_engineers (which for some reason appears to suffer from rather limited coverage of non brits) or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:English_civil_engineers
Clicking through to dates is not a very effective way of trying to get or trying to represent the information. Consider the year in question:
February 18 - Alessandro Volta, Italian physicist (d. 1827) February 20 - Henry James Pye, English poet (d. 1813) March 4 - Charles Dibdin, English composer (d. 1814) March 10 - John Gunby, Maryland soldier in the American Revolutionary War (d. 1807) April 6 - Thomas Peters, Dutch supercentenarian (d. 1857) July 13 - Robert Calder, British naval officer, (d. 1818) August 20 - Francis Asbury, American Methodist Bishop (d. 1816) September 16 - Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov, Russian field marshal (d. 1813) November 23 - John Treadwell, the fourth Governor of Connecticut (d. 1823) December 15 - Johann Gottfried Koehler, German astronomer (d. 1801) date unknown - Danwon, Korean painter (d. 1806)
None of these are of much importance to Jessop's life.