Andrew Gray wrote:
Hi all.
One of the interesting projects on de.wiki is the idea of Personendata
- basically, a set of standard biographical details, appended to
individual articles. Name, other common names, a few words of description, date/place of birth, date/place of death. The sort of thing you would find on a disambiguation page, basically.
This is implemented in quite a clever way - the CSS is set up in such a way that the "{{Personendaten}}" template isn't shown, so whilst it remains in the page text it's invisible to the casual reader; it's stored at the bottom of the page along with categories and interwikis and other "housekeeping" text, to avoid editors tripping over it.
Very nice. So what does it do? It allows all sorts of applications - see http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05/Paper-JV2 - and I'm sure you can think of others. Build it, and they will come. One of the smart ideas there was to tie it into the Deutsche Bibliotek authority records (the files cataloguers use to keep authors uniquely identified), meaning that deeplinking to works by that person is relatively easy.
[[User:Kaldari]] has started experimenting with adding this to articles on en: - there's only about a dozen as yet, but the idea has promise. It's certainly a lot easier than our clumsier work with categories, and would probably help with finding duplicate articles.
There's a page up at [[Wikipedia:Persondata]] going over the details; any comments or suggestions would probably be appreciated.
I think that the idea is interesting and useful. From the Wiktionary pespective, where I have been trying to promote the sourcing of information, it would certainly be helpful to provide the personendata information for any author that is quoted. Each quotation should identify the source of that quotation, and in developing one of these I like to include a link to the Wikipedia article about the author. This I do whether or not such an article exists. For many authors, especially contemporary ones or ones that were identified in the 1913 Webster, it does not. Given the kind of work that I am doing, it would lead me too far astray to put together a real article about the person, but I could easily add some of the personen data that I acquire in the process of tracking down the quotation.
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.
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.
Ec