Wikipedia talk:Persondata/Archive 3

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Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3 Archive 4 Archive 5 → Archive 9

Name order, etc., etc.

We read:

When specifying the person's name, use the following format: [surname], [forename] [middle names], [title].

This may need further thought.

Mao Zedong becomes "Mao, Mao", at least for those who rather reasonably presume that "forename" means the name that comes in front, and don't take the link to forename (a redirect to given name).

For those who do know that "forename" means given name, Mao Zedong becomes "Mao, Zedong". I thought that the comma was intended as a sign that the normal order had been reversed, but here it isn't.

I hazily remember or (very likely) misremember that (i) Vietnamese names are surname-last and (ii) Vietnamese people are referred to by their given names. It's very likely that I am totally confused here; but let's suppose for a moment that I'm right. Ho Chi Minh would then become "Minh, Ho Chi".

There are already comments above about the oddness of this template, or its instructions, or both, for Spanish names. Before the template (whose existence I only noticed today) is used tens of thousands more times, I suggest inviting people likely to know about names in Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hungarian (etc etc, but let's not labor the point) to discuss it. No doubt the short/medium-term result will be argument, confusion and frustration. Better to have that sooner than later.

(Incidentally, what about other scripts? There's no mention of these. Are Cyrillic, Hanzi, Hangul, etc. most welcome, tepidly welcome, permissible, or impermissible here?)

-- Hoary 02:51, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

The "[surname], [forename] [middle names], [title]" thing is a simplification that is only accurate for English-style names. It should be reworded to make it clear that the description should be written in a standard format for alphabetizing. This differs depending on the naming tradition. Mao Zedong would be listed as "Mao Zedong", since that's the standard way of alphabetizing Chinese names. Spanish names are different as well: Vicente Fox Quesada would be alphabetized either as "Fox Quesada, Vicente" or "Fox, Vicente, Quesada", I'm not sure which. Arabic names are a unique challenge unto themselves. Also, note that non-English characters are converted to English characters for the purposes of alphabetization: Võ Nguyên Giáp is alphabetized as "Vo Nguyen Giap" (since Vo is the family name). – Quadell (talk) (random) 03:49, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
P.S. For guidance on specific naming traditions and scripts, you might check out Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Arabic), Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Chinese), Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Cyrillic), etc. etc. etc. – Quadell (talk) (random) 03:58, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
That's a good start.
I know, or can find out, how to name the people that I want to name. What I don't know is how to make this compatible with the hazily understood purposes of this template, let alone with the instructions that are given for using the template.
How about Dürer (German)? Is his name "alphabetized" as Durer (ugh) or Duerer?
Is "ë" a non-English character? If so, I suppose that "Brontë" is a non-English name, needing "alphabetization" as "Bronte".
So Vo is indeed the family name. (Ha, good! My memory isn't has bad as I thought.) However, he's General Giap, surely. (The WP article says e.g. "Giáp was educated at..." not "Vo was educated at...") How about academic books in English about Vietnam: do they index him under Vo or under Giap? If the latter, shouldn't this metadata thingie do the same, or have feature pointing out that he's not normally indexed by family name?
Offhand I can't think of any language/culture in which personal names are in such arrangements as [surname] [everyday given name] [optional additional given name(s)]. But I expect they exist, and thus "middle names" is a dodgy term too. -- Hoary 04:13, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
When people look up Emily Brontë, they expect to find her between "Brontalope" and "Bronticide", since e comes between a and i. But most sorting algorithms put special characters at the beginning or the end. That's why Dürer becomes Durer: not because it looks good (it looks terrible), but because people expect him after Dolly but before Dustbunnies. The reason for the NAME parameter of persondata is for listing and sorting. – Quadell (talk) (random) 04:27, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
Fine. But the page should explain this kind of thing. Of course I don't say "Drop all your other commitments and do this right now!", and I even see some merit in hiving it off into a sub-page, in order not to confuse Mr Average Wikipediaeditor, who will be almost exclusively concerned with "English" names. (Uh, hang on, Mr Average Wikipediaeditor appears to be disproportionately interested in [disproportionate] pornstars: Is Maxi Mounds to be parsed as [pseudo given name] [pseudo surname] or as [adjective] [noun]? Even the names of people of great interest to anglophones can be problematic.) -- Hoary 04:40, 28 June 2007 (UTC)
Very true. :-) And let's not forget video-game characters. "Kong, Donkey, Jr."? – Quadell (talk) (random) 04:45, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

The rule with metadata is to make it as flexible as possible for different applications. For instance, if you wanted to use metadata to produce an alphabetically sorted list, you might need a separate field for "alphabetical sortkey", and this would vary with different naming conventions. The "name" field, however, is something you would expect to read when seeing the entry in a list. This can be reconstructed from "given name", "middle name", "surname", but that can get complicated. Let's take an example to see what I mean. The Ferdinand Magellan example on the documentation page. The metadata there can be parsed to produce the following: "Ferdinand Magellan (Portuguese: Fernão de Magalhães; Spanish: Fernando de Magallanes) was a sea explorer who was born in 1480 in Sabrosa, Portugal, and died on 27 April 1521, on Mactan Island, Cebu, the Philippines." The same sort of sentences can be mechanically generated, and can incorporate things like titles (Sir, Lord, King), and post-titles (MBE, CBE), etc. If a metadata field is precise enough that it can be parsed into an English sentence, then it is usually good enough to be used in most other applications. Carcharoth 19:53, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Ironically enough, User:Polbot (a bot run by Quadell) is doing the reverse for politicians and obscure animal and plant species. The entries on a website he is using are generated from a database, and Polbot is (I presume) just parsing out the information and constructing approximately grammatical English "articles". The results can be impressive. Carcharoth 19:56, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Along the lines of that Polbot, shouldn't the default name value be the same as the DEFAULTSORT, if there is one? That's what I do if it's unclear (taking into consideration knowledge of that culture's naming scheme, of course). --Rajah 07:19, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

What I see here is mainly this: "hazily understood purposes of this template." That's the problem, more than the order of names. I also find the entire exercise highly elitist and euro-centric. By elitist, I mean expecting to know the actual birth date, which throughout history has been exclusive to the elite. Peasants, even those who become emperors, usually don't have exact birthdates and where they do, they are likely to be in a non-Gregorian calander. Second, the naming issue and the dating of births is euro-centric, as many people recognize (but haven't spelled out) above. Both need a dose of NPOV ! DOR (HK) (talk) 09:52, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't "require" birth dates, you can leave the field empty. It also doesn't require an "exact" birth dates when one is provided, as you can inform only month+year, or only year. As for the date itself being eurocentric, please notice that the whole world uses BC/BCE dating system as an international standard. It's as much "eurocentric" as specifying weights in kilograms, and not a problem at all since a date (or weight) in one format can always be converted to another with relative ease. Besides, please remember this template isn't meant to be seen or directly interacted with by real people, it's meant to provide automated softwares a way to get standardized data for searching, cataloging and meta-linking purposes. In fact, nothing prevents the software you're using from presenting you the data in any other convertible way you want, say, Hegira-based, Japan Ages-based, China stellar calendar-based, Mayan calendar-based, or even, for that matter, Star Trek's Stellar Date-based.
As for the names, nothing prevents you from entering the original name, in the original script, in the "ALTERNATIVE NAMES" field. A well internationalized algorithm will use them meaningfully, recognizing from the language entered between parenthesis and from the scripts punctuation marks (if any) the sorting rules to use, even giving you additional options if available.
Thus, please don't try see a source for social criticism where there's none. This template is an engineering solution to an engineering problem: how to provide some level of machine-approachable semantics. IMHO, it should be altered only to accommodate unsolvable programmatic limitations. For as long as a 3rd party software can "do it" for you, the data structure itself is good. -- alexgieg (talk) 14:32, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
Comments: "Eurocentricity" is not an issue; this is the English-language Wikipedia, English is a European language, and all (as far as I know) English speakers use the Modern European calendar (except in specific contexts such as religious calendars in relgious contexts that apply to particular readers in their personal lives). Concur with alexgieg - use ALTERNATIVE NAME for non-Latin-alphabet rendering, and yes this is a tech solution to a tech problem, so don't complicate it. NPOV and "elitism" is not an issue. Either a birth date is known (precisely or approximately) or it is not; it's a simple bare fact. DEFAULTSORT's order is good, but it use of outright falsification of names to futz with the sort order is not good in persondata, which is intended to be accurate. Whether and how persondata-using applications handle non-English characters is a matter for that end of the transaction, and not a Wikipedia problem, nor an issue with the implementation of persondata here. I'll clarify the page in this regard. For Vietnamese names, use the family name first (the above assumption that Vo and Ho and not the family name is incorrect), but it is customary to refer to them by the second of their given names. Don't confuse proper order of a full name with traditional Vietnames customs of address and reference. They are not equivalent. It IS proper that Vo's article refer to him as "Giap" when discussing him, but his name for article title and persondata purposes is "Vo Nguyen Giap", and for DEFAULTSORT purposes is "Vo, Nguyen Giap" (yes, I am omitting the diacritics here for expediency). That is, he is indeed normally indexed by family name, just not referred to, as direct or indirect object, by family name. Yes, Spanish and other names need special handling (e.g. Diego Garcia y Vega's family name for our purposes here is Garcia y Vega, and the more modern form Diego Garcia Vega would be Garcia Vega, Diego), but we need not get into every possible variation here, or it will just confuse random editors (what do you do for Mexican-Americans? Some use this convention, some use American-style middle names, and w/o knowing the subject in detail, you can't safely assume one or the other) and will lead to guideline bloat. If someone mistakenly indexes this example as Vega, Diego Garcia, someone else who understands Spanish names will just fix it later. And, I've already changed the confusing "forename" in the text. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 20:27, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

PS: We should probably see how de.wikipedia's personendaten is handling such things, since I would imagine they are more sensitive to complicated names right off the bat, being Continental in general and from a culture that uses such names itself, more specifically. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 20:29, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Infobox Actor

Resolved
 – Query answered.

I'm lost, i just find out about Persondata through Jonathan Pryce's Peer review. Am i supposed to get rid of the Infobox actor? Will ALL the infoboxes (Infobox Artist, Infobox Football biography, etc) have to disappear? ---Yamanbaiia(free hugs!) 12:26, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi Yamanbaiia, it's a separate thing from Infobox, although I believe that since so much of the info. is duplicated, there are moves to create a program to run to add Persondata from Infobox. Persondata is a facility to aid computer searches. I've created the Persondata on Jonathan Pryce for you - [1] hth -- John (Daytona2 · talk · contribs) 13:21, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
I just saw that, thank you! so Persondata is the person's basic information hidden in the article, i think i understand now. --Yamanbaiia(free hugs!) 13:32, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Titles, revisited

Unresolved
 – Page updated to reflect date issue, but not title issue.

Can someone help with this page Abraham Lincoln (captain)? Captain Abraham Lincoln was the grandfather of President Abraham Lincoln and is referred to by historians as Captain to distinguish him from his grandson. Should the Persondata name include the title "captain" in this case? Or should he just be Lincoln, Abraham, and his birth and death dates would provide the distinction? Also, Captain Lincoln died in May 1786, day unknown. Does the death date still need to be wikilinked? -- Janeky (talk) 09:36, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

His alternative name should have the Captain. His date of death, May 1786 is fine. Wikilinking the dates is not needed, but preferred. In this context, it's fine to just wikilink the year. I've made some changes to it and I think it looks ok now. --Rajah (talk) 05:19, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
Wikilinking partial dates has never been preferred, as it does nothing useful at all, and wikilinking of dates, period, has been deprecated at WP:MOSNUM.
Furthermore, Rajah's advice directly conflicts with what the page says. Either this advice is incorrect, and "captain" (hopefully something more specific actually!) would only appear in the |SHORT DESCRIPTION= parameter, or the page needs to be altered to better explain what should be done in a case like Abraham Lincoln (captain). — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 20:01, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Infobox person and Persondata merge proposal

Resolved
 – No consensus for merge.

The information required for persondata is already availible in template Template:Infobox person. It in a ntardardised template which currently holds the information in a very similar way. I have cropped Infobox_Person to show hom similar they are in the hope that someone who knows what they are doing can find a way of automatically converting infobox_Person into personada, or can find a way of using Infobox_Person instead of persondata as a microformat etc. Chendy (talk) 00:37, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

{{Infobox Person
| name =
| other_names =
| known_for =
| birth_date =
| birth_place =
| death_date =
| death_place =
| other parameters }}

{{Persondata
|NAME =
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES =
|SHORT DESCRIPTION =
|DATE OF BIRTH =
|PLACE OF BIRTH =
|DATE OF DEATH =
|PLACE OF DEATH =
}}

This has come up a number of times before (see the archives of this talk page). It is acknowledged that there is substantial overlap between infoboxes and persondata, but there is no easy solution. Some of the main arguments against merging are (as I recall)
  • Persondata is (by default) invisible, whereas infoboxes are not. Many people think infoboxes are ugly/unnecessary/etc so would object to them in an article. Thus if infobox person is combined with persondata there would be articles which would not have persondata.
  • Infoboxes don't list the name as surname, first name. One of the advantages of persondata is the ability to produce lists of biographies sorted alphabetically by surname.
  • Even if infobox person was merged with persondata, there are many thousands of biographical articles which use specialised infoboxes, so you'd have to make sure that all of these were also persondata-compatible.
  • I'm sure there were other arguments.
In regard to your specific suggestions, I have already written a script which semi-automatically takes information from Infobox person (and a number of other infoboxes) and puts into into a persondata template at the end of the article. It's only semi-automatic as the results need to be reviewed by a human before saving (sometimes some of the fields are missing from the infobox, but are written elsewhere in the article). For more info see User talk:Dr pda/persondata.js. Regarding Microformats, some infoboxes already have microformat markup included in them (again see the archives of this talk page, or I think there is a microformats wikiproject). One problem with this is that (last I heard) some of the persondata fields are not included in the microformats specification (e.g. death place). Dr pda (talk) 21:44, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
This has been brought up a number of times before and it is not feasible since the primary purpose of Persondata is creating a way to search and sort biography articles by surname, which infoboxes don't differentiate. Dr pda's semi-automated approach is the correct solution. Kaldari (talk) 22:48, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Proposal

This is an issue that I feel is of growing importance, as metadata would greatly enrich Wikipedia. goals:

  • collect metadata utilizing templates e.g infoboxes.
    • reduce duplication/amount of information required to input data into persondata template

methods/proposals:

  • standardize properties of infoboxes, but not which standardized properties each unique/specialized infobox has: date of birth can be standardized as "born", meaning changing various similar template properties to reflect this i.e. "DateofBirth",dateofBirth etc would be changed to "Born." There should be a way in which the template property would be standardised, but the text actually displayed could be different like when typing [[[Born|Date of Birth]]]
  • Visable/invisable metadata/infobox data - There should be some way (syntax) in which information can be inputed into infoboxes could be made invisible, or the make the whole infobox invisable, so that metadata would exist but wouldn't have to be displayed.

I think these things can streamline the process as (hopefully) the amount of metadata on wikipedia grows. Chendy (talk) 14:37, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Year-only dates

Resolved
 – Page updated to address this issue.

Some bots and scripts that do maintenance on pages use to remove the linking from year-only dates, including those that are in Persondata fields. Talking to the author of one of those scripts, he pointed me to Wikipedia:Mosnum#Autoformatting and linking, where we're discouraged from linking year-only dates. So, I think the examples in the main page should be changed accordingly. Either this, or scripts should be changed to avoid removing such links. What do you think? -- alexgieg (talk) 16:12, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

WP:MOSNUM was right, and goes even farther now. I've updated the page to stop using examples that conflict with MOS. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 19:53, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Only for biographies?

Resolved
 – Page updated to address this question.

If an article is about an event associated with just a single person, can it have persondata? It strikes me that it could be useful, but I added some to an article about a murder (I'm keeping this argument general, so I won't name it) and it was immediately removed. If it's the case that it should only be used on biographies, then perhaps Wikipedia:Persondata should be modified to note this explicitly. Would there be any disadvantage in having persondata on pages that describe a person, but aren't the actual biography? Do people have to be notable enough to have a biography to have persondata? Artichoke2020 (talk) 18:24, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I believe this template is only for biographical articles, not events. Kaldari (talk) 18:48, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Yep. Only for biographical articles, as its purpose is precisely to catalog biographies in a machine-readable format. If an article mentions someone, but isn't specifically a biography about that person, then a {{Persondata}} doesn't belong in there. -- alexgieg (talk) 12:15, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Text reorganization

Resolved
 – Just an editing FYI; no objections.

Following the request from the above post to make it more explicit that this template should be used only in biography article, I changed the introduction section accordingly. Then I took the time to reorganize things in a way that I think is more logical, with the motivation first, then the explanation of how to see this data (what I believe most persondata-adding editors do, as it makes life much easier), followed by the template pattern, then the explanation for the fields (to which I added some text based on what I gathered in this talk page), and then the examples. IMHO, the whole makes more sense this way. Enjoy! And please correct any mistake. -- alexgieg (talk) 16:34, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

{{Birth date and age}} in persondata ?

Resolved
 – Page updated to say not to use templates in persondata.

Noticed this on Kylie Minogue. Does it get parsed the same as WP links and is therefore OK ? -- John (Daytona2 · Talk · Contribs) 08:57, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Use of templates within Persondata is not recommended as it makes it more difficult to parse. You cannot then assume that the first occurrence of }} after {{Persondata is the end of the Persondata template, but have to keep track of how many templates have been used. Wikilinks are OK since they use different characters. Dr pda (talk) 10:53, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
Thanks -- John (Daytona2 · Talk · Contribs) 13:32, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:Persondata

Resolved
 – Speedily kept.

Template:Persondata has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. Rockfang (talk) 13:14, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Requesting an admin edit of {{Persondata}}

{{editprotected}} I would like to request an admin to put {{tfd|{{subst:PAGENAME}}}} on {{Persondata}}. If this is done within roughly 5 hours of my timestamp of this request, then please inform me when it is done. If it is done outside the 5 hour time frame, please finish the submission for me as I won't be on 5 hours from now. If it was left incomplete, it could possibly be deleted. If an admin does do the whole submission proccess, here is my reason: On August 15th I added [[Wikipedia_talk:Persondata#Usefulness|this section]] questioning the usefulness of the template. Noone has responded, so I'm assuming that the template is not actually used for any specific purposes.
--Rockfang (talk) 08:12, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

To belatedly answer your question, the only publicly-accessible use of English persondata I am aware of is Project Templatetiger, which is linked on the persondata page. It's possible that people may make private use of persondata; all the necessary tools are again on the persondata page. (I have a database with the extracted persondata on my computer, for example).
I guess the main reason there is not more use of persondata is that currently only about 5% of all biographies have it. This does not yet approach the critical mass for an application to be useful. (Though I suppose the flip side of that argument is that having a killer app would encourage the addition of persondata.) By contrast on the German Wikipedia, 200 000 biographies have persondata, and more use is made of it. For example there is an application on toolserver, http://toolserver.org/~voj/pd/, which shows all the people who were born/died on a given date, though it doesn't seem to be working at the moment.
Anyway, just because persondata isn't being used much at the moment doesn't mean it won't be in the future. The potential uses given are still valid, and if people do decide to pursue them, deleting the template will mean they would have to start from scratch. Dr pda (talk) 14:09, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
I agree, this is a perfectly valid and potentially useful template. I personally put it on every bio article I create or massively edit. There is no cause for deletion. - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs)
With all due respect, I have the right to nominate templates for deletion. I would have done it myself, which is the normal method, but the template is fully protected. If you disagree with it being deleted, you could just state that in the deletion discussion. I'm reinstating the edit protect template.--Rockfang (talk) 23:26, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
While it probably would have been better to re-ask your question at either WikiProject Biography or WikiProject Persondata instead of jumping on the delete process when you didn't get a response, you are indeed correct that you have the right to request that this be taken to tfd. Road Wizard (talk) 23:42, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Disabled the editprotected request for the moment. I'm happy to advertise the TfD, but I can't seem to find it currently, and pointing thousands of users to a discussion that doesn't yet exist seems a bit rude. Re-enable the request when the deletion nomination is filed, please. --MZMcBride (talk) 07:39, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

There was no discussion made because the first step in listing a template is to mark the template. The discussion is here.--Rockfang (talk) 13:12, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

 Done. Template added. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 21:48, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Usefulness

I'm curious about the usefulness of this project (and the related template), and what it is currently being used for. Just for the record, I have read the following text already:

  • "...can be automatically extracted and processed by cataloging tools and then used for a variety of purposes, such as providing advanced search capabilities, statistical analysis, automated categorization, and birthday lists."
  • "...facilitate the creation of new applications for Wikipedia content, such as Wikipedia CD-ROMs, custom search applications, etc"

Are any of the above "uses" of actually being done? If specific examples can be provided, it would be much appreciated.--Rockfang (talk) 03:21, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Here is but one example of a really cool use: http://www.alder-digital.de/wiki/index.php?title=Personendaten/Top1000linksto . Now, imagine adding in geotagging of birth/death locations, professions etc. I hope you can see why machine readable metadata is the future of wikipedia. --Rajah (talk) 17:46, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
I can't see that has anything to do with persondata, and its 3 years out of date (only one year when you posted). Rich Farmbrough, 22:28, 19 October 2010 (UTC).

Don't render DEATH if not DEAD yet

You know, in some cultures, having "death" appear on one's page before one has in fact died is impolite. Do we have a coffin always ready in the parlor? Do we have our grave site already purchased even by middle age?

Therefore perhaps you can enhance the templates to not render the DEATH items into HTML until they are actually filled in. Jidanni (talk) 02:56, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Is this really relevant? The template is already hidden metadata, so only editors that have purposefully selected to see the template will ever see those fields. The general readership and the majority of editors will never see the empty "Death" field. Road Wizard (talk) 06:52, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

OK, then help me get the message across to whatever those various templates there are that make the words "... of death" appear on users' screens, long before the subject has even contemplated dying. Thanks. Jidanni (talk) 23:59, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Not sure what you are talking about have you any examples of this behavior? --Trödel 01:10, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
$ w3m -dump http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore | grep DEATH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

Jidanni (talk) 16:43, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Again you refer to the hidden metadata template that is only viewable by editors that have taken specific steps to make it visible. The general readership and the majority of editors will never see those empty "Death" fields. It seems a little counter-productive to hide parts of a hidden template from the editors that have specifically chosen to view and work with it. Road Wizard (talk) 16:57, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
Looking at the data extract you have quoted there you have included the 3 letters "w3m", is that a reference to the text-based web browser w3m? If so, it may have been useful to mention that you are using a less well known browser from the start instead of making theatrical remarks about coffins and grave sites. If it is a text-based browser issue then we can start to consider the possible solutions. Road Wizard (talk) 18:11, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
IANAProgrammer (at least not for the last 10 years) - but it seems to me if you are using grep to find Death you could just as easily use another utility to exclude the information that you don't want. --Trödel 00:39, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

You can even see it in Firefox if you just click View->Page Style->No Style. Seems bad counting on CSS to hide things instead of making sure it doesn't reach the users' browser in the first place. Bad that search engines are getting a different view than users who have stylesheets enabled. Bad that you assume the devices e.g., PDAs the user might be using can and choose to use stylesheets. Bad that you thus have browser dependent code. Jidanni (talk) 01:02, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

I concur that the docs here and at the template should say to remove these fields for living persons rather than leave them blank, and that the template should be altered to not render the fields if this advice is ignored (a trivial pair of if-thens). — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 19:38, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
The amendment to the docs will not help the situation. The Mediawiki software treats a missing template field the same way it treats a blank field - the empty fields will still be rendered. Assuming that the if code is compatible with whatever code has been used to render the template invisible in normal conditions, that will probably be the easiest way to resolve the problem. Road Wizard (talk) 20:09, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Style sheets are just that, for adjusting style, not content. Same with skins. Glad to have altered you all to the problem. Jidanni (talk) 02:13, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

As you are so keen on removing impoliteness from Wikipedia, I should point out that your posts on this page read more like demands than requests for assistance. Hopefully one of the other editors will be willing to put effort into resolving this problem as I do not respond particularly well to demands. Good luck with this and happy editing. Road Wizard (talk) 02:25, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

OK, sorry. Pasting

here as it is a stylesheet issue... Jidanni (talk) 04:28, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

As far as I am concerned, DATE OF DEATH and PLACE OF DEATH should remain in the template and visible even for living persons. When the person does die, adding the details for those fields is much easier if they are already there than having to remember the proper format for those fields and then adding them. Similar fields are in most people-related infoboxes, though they are not visible until data is added to them. I guess the alternative is to code persondata to hide these fields until they are populated. – ukexpat (talk) 17:50, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
Does anyone know if this issue has come up the German Wikipedia? - they are heavy users of their version of the template. – ukexpat (talk) 20:54, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
Looking at examples of biographies of both living and dead people on the German Wikipedia, de:Abraham Lincoln renders both birth and death fields while de:Angela Merkel only displays the fields for birth. On closer inspection, the German Wiki's de:template:Personendaten applies IF code to every field, meaning that only the completed fields will appear. Road Wizard (talk) 23:04, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Discussion on gender metadata

Please see comment I made here about obtaining and recording gender (male/female) metadata. Opinions would be welcomed. Thanks. Carcharoth (talk) 02:01, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Deletion discussion of Category:Living people

There's a current proposal to delete the living people category: discussion at CfD here. Dsp13 (talk) 23:45, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Technical help please!

On the article Hillary Duff some of the persondata coding seems to have got mangled and is causing an error to display. The error message reads: Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character "[" (see it at the bottom in this version of the page). I have temporarily commented out the bit of coding that caused it the message to display [2] but have no idea how to fix it properly. Help appreciated (or a pointer to where to get help). Thanks -- SiobhanHansa 14:22, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

You cannot use {{age}} in an expression because it calls {{age sort}} which contains:
{{#if: {{NAMESPACE}}|[[Category:Template computed age non-articles|{{{1}}}]]|{{#ifexpr: {{{1}}} > 99|[[Category:Template computed age over 99|{{#expr:{{{1}}} - 100}}]]|[[Category:Template computed age|{{{1}}}]]}}|}}
Neither template seems to have changed lately, and I don't know why it would have ever worked, actually. --Splarka (rant) 16:00, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for responding. I'll try and search the history to find out who put it in and whether it needs to be fixed or can just be deleted. -- SiobhanHansa 00:45, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
In retrospect I believe it was broken since the {{age sort}} was added and nobody cared enough about Hillary Duff to notice (several weeks). --Splarka (rant) 00:59, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Biographical pages with more than one different date of birth

There are over 7,500 biographical pages with more than one incompatible date of birth. In some of these the persondata disagrees with other elements of the page (a category, an infobox or the first sentence of the bio). Any help sorting these out welcome! Dsp13 (talk) 00:38, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Wow, this is amazing. Whoever did all the work to put this list together, thanks! Let the discrepancy resolving begin! Kaldari (talk) 17:00, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
The list was put together by the internet search company where I work, True Knowledge, as a byproduct of their structured knowledge extraction from wikipedia - I'll pass your thanks on! Dsp13 (talk) 22:09, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Please add interwikis

Resolved
 – interwikis added to Template:Persondata/doc.

Please add the following interwikis to the protected template: [[it:Template:Bio]] [[eo:Ŝablono:Bio]]

Thank you. --Marcok (talk) 13:38, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

I have added the interwikis to Template:Persondata/doc, which is an unprotected sub-page of the template. Road Wizard (talk) 20:11, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Problem with {{Persondata}}

Another user added the {{Persondata}} to the page Frederick Norton Manning, and the data is clearly visible (and ugly) at the bottom of the page. I've tried re-doing the template, with no visible change. Can some one fix it for me? If not, I'll just delete it. Shelbypark (talk) 15:30, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

 Done - there was a closing ] missing in one of the date params. – ukexpat (talk) 16:27, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
In fact I just de-linked the dates in accordance with the template documentation and I also changed the dates in the ibox to use the proper microformat templates. – ukexpat (talk) 16:36, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Redundant template?

Would it be possible/advisable to merge {{lifetime}} into this template? See Template talk:lifetime#Merge with persondata? for additional discussion on this topic. ~ PaulT+/C 00:49, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Short answer: probably not, at this stage. One major issue is that only 30,000 out of half a million biographies include {{Persondata}}. Dr pda (talk) 01:10, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
I would say no. They serve different purposes. Persondata adds hidden metadata classes for datadumps or cataloguing or something (I'm not entirely sure what it's used for). Lifetime is meant to make it easier to add the standard Births in and Deaths in categories and DEFAULTSORT, which I strongly believe should not be hidden in a template. DoubleBlue (talk) 02:02, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
My initial thought on reading your proposal was that it is probably a bad idea in the short term. There is a level of opposition to the use of {{Lifetime}} instead of {{DEFAULTSORT}} on the grounds that the Lifetime template is confusing to editors (personally I find this argument rather spurious as it is no more complicated than {{DEFAULTSORT}} itself). What they will make of the multiple field Persondata template I have no idea.
However, on further consideration of the potential benefits I think it will probably be worth the time, effort and inevitable headaches of getting this through community-wide consensus.
The current situation is that we have a mix of {{DEFAULTSORT}} and {{Lifetime}} across several hundred thousand biographical articles. Persondata is currently used only on about 30,000 (at last count). This merge proposal will make {{Lifetime}} completely redundant and make {{DEFAULTSORT}} obsolete on biographical articles. Given the scale of impact from this proposal I think it will need a much broader discussion than we will get from the talk pages of two templates before implementation. I would suggest letting this discussion run for a week or so to get a general feel for the way opinion is swaying and then take this through WP:RfC or similar community feedback process if deemed appropriate.
The benefits I see from this merger are:
  • The removal of duplicated code: Persondata + DEFAULTSORT + Birth & Death categories; Persondata + Lifetime.
  • The increased rate of deployment of Persondata to replace the obsolete templates.
The problems that will need to be overcome:
  • Duplication of Persondata and DEFAULTSORT on the same page will trigger sorting errors unless both entries are identical. Checking 30,000 pages for conflicts will be a major task even for a bot. Persondata could be coded to only set DEFAULTSORT if it hasn't already been set specifically by another template. This will prevent errors in the time it takes to transition to using Persondata only.
  • A straight forward merging will cause Lifetime to break wherever it is used. Persondata relies on named variables while Lifetime uses positional variables (birth|death|DEFAULTSORT). A bot could be set to add persondata field names in the appropriate positions where lifetime is used, but there will be a significant lag time where pages are missing from birth and death categories.
  • Guidelines for DEFAULTSORT use will need to be aligned to Persondata guidance (or vice-versa) to avoid conflicts as to what should go in the name field. Persondata guidelines are very specific whereas users of DEFAULTSORT seem to use whatever name format they feel is appropriate in a given situation (is removal of such flexibility a good thing?).
  • The birth and death categories may be hidden from the majority of readers due to Persondata's hidden template code. This would need testing if the answer is not already known. I am not familiar with the hidden template code used here so I don't know if there is a way to force the categories to appear despite residing in a hidden template.
  • Inertia. The current system works, so a large number of editors will need to be convinced that the benefits outweigh the effort of change.
There are probably many other issues to deal with, but those are the first few that have come to mind. Road Wizard (talk) 02:16, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
I just want to clarify that DEFAULTSORT is not a template but rather a code that cannot be replaced by Persondata or Lifetime. It sorts article names in categories by what editors deem most appropriate (usually Family name, Given name for bios). DoubleBlue (talk) 02:49, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
Actually, {{DEFAULTSORT}} is a template that implements the DEFAULTSORT code key. {{Lifetime}} is a child-template that makes use of DEFAULTSORT code. No matter what happens with Lifetime, DEFAULTSORT cannot be removed because it is used across the whole project for a variety of purposes and I am guessing that it is also hard-coded into the MediaWiki software.
However, if this proposal goes any further towards implementation the discussion will need to focus in part on the usage of DEFAULTSORT, not its existence. While the code itself "cannot be replaced by Persondata or Lifetime", there is nothing to stop the template from being replaced with one of its child-templates on specific articles. Road Wizard (talk) 03:36, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
{{DEFAULTSORT}} seems to be pretty unused, which is a good thing I imagine. The code should be used directly. DoubleBlue (talk) 03:49, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
What you are linking is just examples of bad usage of DEFAULTSORT that people use "|" instead of ":". -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:44, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
Precisely. That was my point. DoubleBlue (talk) 17:13, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
  • Certainly not (to the original proposal). Recent discussions have suggested that "lifetime" and its surrogate "BD" should be stripped of their "Defaultsort" element. That makes these template fractionally more complicated to insert, but not unacceptably so. Your proposal replaces simplicity with complexity. What I need is a template with which I can quickly and easily add birth and death dates, with as few keystrokes as possible. Your proposal is the exact reverse of what is needed. Peterkingiron (talk) 00:31, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure how this would replace simplicity with complexity. If done correctly, {{lifetime}} would redirect to this template and the parameters would be passed into this template. As it stands currently, there are a number of articles that have both templates. What I am suggesting is that any instance of {{persondata}} would include the same functionality as {{lifetime}} thus negating the need for it on articles that already have {{persondata}}. You should still be able to use {{lifetime}} to "quickly and easily add birth and death dates", but on articles where {{persondata}} is present there would be no need for the {{lifetime}} template. ~ PaulT+/C 16:28, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
At present by typing 20 characters, e.g. {{BD|1714|1763}}, I can insert the birth and death categories, without having to stop to click markup or type the words birth and death. I would have no objection to your regularly running a bot to convert this to "personal data", but I do not want to have to type out a long template everytime I complete a biographic article. BD redirects to "lifetime". Peterkingiron (talk) 21:02, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Empty template format

 Done

The current pasteable empty samples are based on this: 

<!-- Metadata: see [[Wikipedia:Persondata]] -->
{{Persondata
|NAME              = 
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES = 
|SHORT DESCRIPTION = 
|DATE OF BIRTH     = 
|PLACE OF BIRTH    = 
|DATE OF DEATH     = 
|PLACE OF DEATH    = 
}}

I suggest to update them to something like this: 

{{Persondata         <!-- Metadata: see [[Wikipedia:Persondata]] -->
|NAME              = 
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES = 
|SHORT DESCRIPTION = 
|DATE OF BIRTH     = 
|PLACE OF BIRTH    = 
|DATE OF DEATH     = 
|PLACE OF DEATH    = 
}}                   <!-- Goes above DEFAULTSORT/Categories -->

It's slightly more compact (the first comment goes into an unused space, like infoboxes do) and more self-documented (editors are more likely to keep it in the right position). 62.147.38.220 (talk) 17:13, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

 Unopposed so I did it. 62.147.38.27 (talk) 08:10, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I'd like to remove the later comment. This simplifies the wiki sourcetext of pages. -- User:Docu 11:04, 22 May 2009 (UTC)
Yeah, I don't really think it's neccessary to have instructions for where to place a template in the template itself. Kaldari (talk) 16:43, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

 It's done. Thanks for your support. -- User:Docu

Name format

This is specifically about Jack King (NASA Public Affairs Officer), but it's more about persondata than the article, so I ask here. King is generally known as "Jack King" but there have been a small number of references to him as "John W. King". Right now he's got persondata with "NAME = King, Jack W" and "ALTERNATIVE NAMES = King, John W". My two questions are:

1) My sense is that NAME should be "King, Jack", with no middle initial. He almost always goes by "Jack," and when using "Jack" never uses the middle initial.

2) on ALTERNATIVE NAMES, should there be a period after the middle initial?

If there is documentation on this, can someone point me to it? TJRC (talk) 23:21, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Generally the NAME field is the same as article's title. So in this case, it would be King, Jack
For middle initials, yes you should have a period. In any section. --Rajah (talk) 15:32, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Exclude in print?

{{editrequest}} Should the Persondata template be added to the Category:Exclude in print? -- Ejosse1 (talk) 17:07, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Yea, verily. It looks terrible in print. There shouldn't be anything in the persondata that isn't in the article anyway. TJRC (talk) 18:23, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
You can do this on Template:Persondata/doc which is not protected. Martinmsgj 18:38, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

A stable ID?

I'm interested in linking external bibliographic information (e.g. literary works) to Persondata records in Wikipedia. However, I'm wondering about the lack of a stable key for the external information to link against.

Suppose I find that bibliographic records A, B, and C in my external database are all written by (or translated by, or written about, etc.) John Doe. Suppose a human made the connection initially, so my external database can record the string "John Doe", and use that string to look up data from the Persondata record inside John Doe.

But what if tomorrow we discover (bear with me) that old John Doe should actually be called Jethro Q. Walrus-Titty? My external DB will have a broken link, unless we depend on there always being a trail of REDIRECTs (which may not always be there, I think).

It seems to me highly desirable for there to be a stable person-identifier, like the German Wikipedia's PND numbers, borrowed from the German national library's catalog. The Library of Congress has authority numbers, as discussed earlier in this talk page, and either that number, or some compound containing it, could be a good stable key for external databases to reliably refer to a specific person in Wikipedia's database, regardless of the nuances of any changes to the headword.

I'd much appreciate any thoughts any of you may have on the matter. Ijon (talk) 01:43, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

It's good to hear, that you mention the PND. In de.wp we now have a template called "Normdaten" ("Authority control"), which makes the PND visible to every visitor and which also allows to add the Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN), see at the bottom of [3] for example. At the moment, we don't use it widely - but one day we want to - and so it will be relativly simple to get the LCCN or PND via interwiki links for english articles (matching PND and LCCN is relatively simple, too). I think the problem is the licence. Is it possible to link thousands of articles to their LCCN? Isn't this a LCCN database? In germany we are in contact with the DNB (which manages the PND) and everything goes fine, but I think an american (or at least native english speaker) should get in touch with the LC. A clear statement from the LC regarding this would be fine. I hope, that one day, we could share our authority entries ;) --APPER (talk) 01:03, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Displaying persondata

Did the most recent edit to the template make persondata invisible for everyone? I know I could see it last week, but not today. How can I fix this? Ntsimp (talk) 16:01, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Change the entry in your monobook.css file to read: table.persondata {display:table !important;}  – ukexpat (talk) 17:19, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
Thanks; it's working fine for me now. I noticed that the instructions differed from what I previously had, but I took two tries to get it right. Since this is a recent change, I think a more prominent message should be added to draw attention to the fact that users have to update monobook.css. Ntsimp (talk) 18:31, 20 April 2009 (UTC)
I have just made a very prominent notice and emboldened some relevant italic text on the project page. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong. As a keen supporter of persondata I found it a shame that whatever changed to make it invisible was not better publicised. Maybe a Village pump alert? 84user (talk) 16:37, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

I just noticed it, actually. What is the rationale for this change? — CharlotteWebb 18:55, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Common.css had had a cleanup-sweep a few weeks ago, removing all non-'common' (ie. template-specific) CSS from the file and moving to the template itself. Having to use !important in your personal CSS is a consequence of moving the CSS inline. — Edokter • Talk • 20:19, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
Okay, but what was the rationale for this "cleanup-sweep"? — CharlotteWebb 21:51, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
To clean up. Common.css was growing out of control with all kinds of non-common tidbits being added. But that is best discussed at MediaWiki talk:Common.css. — Edokter • Talk • 17:32, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Actually this is a step in the wrong direction as inline style attributes will be deprecated (read strongly discouraged) in XHTML 2.0, in favor of defining CSS properties within a <style> tag, or on a separate page better yet. — CharlotteWebb 10:53, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

That's very old news, and as long as Mediawiki does not allow the style tag, we're left with inline styles for those attributes that do not warrant inclusion is a common stylesheet file. — Edokter • Talk • 22:12, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Parameters

Why does this template have PARAMETERS THAT SHOUT? Hardly any other template does. Gurch (talk) 20:58, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

No clue why they are initially like that. I don't think it matters that much as it's mostly a machine readable template. --Rajah (talk) 03:03, 11 November 2009 (UTC)
The answer from December 2005 is available in Archive 1. Road Wizard (talk) 08:10, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Diacritics

Just for clarification, is it appropriate for letters with diacritics to be used with Template:Persondata? Or, to put it another way, is there any reason why diacritics should not be used? – PeeJay 01:58, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Good question. I can't find any information about the use or non-use of diacritics using the template. Jared Preston (talk) 20:20, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Clarify name fields

The advice on what to provide for the name fields need clarifying.

Wikipedia:Persondata#Name, alternative names and titles states "When specifying the person's |NAME=, use the following format: Family Name, Given Name Middle Names, title" but this recent edit of mine was partly reverted with the comment "Restoring Persondata; name is what the name of the article is - not birth name, etc".

If the Name should indeed be the same as the article title, then the text needs to explain this. -84user (talk) 07:07, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

This has been something I've been confused about for quiet a while as well. I've been using their real names, which can always go into the 'Surname, Firstname' format specified, and then putting their stage names — or what have you — into the Alternative Names field... Because putting their actual name in as 'Alternate Names = Smith, John (real/actual name)' seemed a bit silly... – Quoth (talk) 16:46, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

After reading the German help page for Personendata de:Hilfe:Personendaten I now see the NAME field was intended for the common name (how the person was best known), while the ALTERNATIVE NAMES was intended for a list of all other names, including the real name if different from the common name. This allows real names and names at birth to be listed with optional explanatory attributes in parentheses - the German de:Hilfe:Personendaten#Alternativnamen lists suggestions such as pseudonym, artistic name, nickname and so on. For example Lewis Carroll's entry is:

{{Personendaten
|NAME=Carroll, Lewis
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES=Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (real name)
|SHORT DESCRIPTION=Author, mathematician, and clergyman
|DATE OF BIRTH={{birth date|df=yes|1832|1|27}}
|PLACE OF BIRTH=[[Daresbury]], [[Cheshire]], England
|DATE OF DEATH={{death date|df=yes|1898|1|14}}
|PLACE OF DEATH=[[Guildford]], England
}}

- 84user (talk) 16:17, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Short answer ism, nobody knows. Reason: solution in search of a problem. However the birth date and death date templates should not be used in this context, and wikilinking is probably not good. Rich Farmbrough, 14:08, 17 July 2010 (UTC).

What's the latest usage count ?

The article needs updating. -- John (Daytona2 · Talk · Contribs) 21:01, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

57,050 articles with persondata on the English wikipedia, and 331,163 with Personendaten on the German wikipedia. Dr pda (talk) 22:41, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
Thanks - good progress being made then (dare I ask how many more articles to go !? :-) ) -- John (Daytona2 · Talk · Contribs) 09:36, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
According to Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Assessment there are about 840,000 biographical articles on the English Wikipedia, so a little over three quarters of a million to go :) Dr pda (talk) 10:06, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
Currently 177,000 + on en: Rich Farmbrough, 14:59, 27 September 2010 (UTC).
Now over 270.k At this rate we pass de: in a fortnight. Rich Farmbrough, 22:05, 11 October 2010 (UTC).
328,739, de: 349,780 Rich Farmbrough, 11:07, 18 October 2010 (UTC).
372,205, de: 350,858 - we have overtakenbd de; er... woot? Rich Farmbrough, 18:19, 24 October 2010 (UTC).

Usage example in documentation

I recommend the Usage example in the documentation be clarified a little. The example give a lot of extra spaces and a comment which I believe are unnecessary and only add extra bytes to the article unnecessarily. Although it makes it easier to read in the documentation the extra spaces and the comment really dont benefit anything and in my opinion needn't be placed on the article. I am however soliciting for additional opinions on this so that if I am in error I can fix myself and my errant ways. The reason I ask for this clarification is due to some new logic that has been added to AWB to automatically populate the persondata template if its not already there with data populated from the infoboxes if the article has one. I recently asked that the spaces and the comment be excluded and the developer (rightly so) correcting me stating that they are using the template as descibed in the usage for its documentation. So my question is are the spaces and the comment needed or can they be eliminated as unnecesary cruft? --Kumioko (talk) 19:34, 3 September 2010 (UTC) Just to clarify the Usage indicates that the entry should look like this: 

{{Persondata <!-- Metadata: see [[Wikipedia:Persondata]]. -->
| NAME              = Article name
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES = Alternate name
| SHORT DESCRIPTION = Description
| DATE OF BIRTH     = Date
| PLACE OF BIRTH    = Location
| DATE OF DEATH     = Date
| PLACE OF DEATH    = Location
}}

and I am suggesting that the below would be acceptable and would save 80+ characters of space for the article for every biographical article: 

{{Persondata
|NAME = Article name
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES = Alternate name
|SHORT DESCRIPTION = Description
|DATE OF BIRTH = Date
|PLACE OF BIRTH = Place
|DATE OF DEATH = Date
|PLACE OF DEATH = Place
}}

--Kumioko (talk) 19:55, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

I don't think this is a problem. The hidden comment is there so that users unfamiliar with the template can find out what it's all about and don't just delete the whole thing because they don't understand it. Extra bytes are not a problem, so IMHO the hidden comment should remain. – ukexpat (talk) 20:10, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
Extra bytes are a little bit of a problem. We have 500,000 living people and probably at least as many dead, so that is 80,000,000 bytes x number of revisions of article (constantly increasing, say average 20 at the moment) = 1.6G time the number of copies of the database - certainly hundreds if not thousands. And these bytes are to be carried down the stream of time by humanity a long way. Rich Farmbrough, 13:29, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

To continue this discussion again, and to expand on Rich;s comment above. Below are my comments about the use and in my opinion need for the removal of the <!-- Metadata: see [[Wikipedia:Persondata]]. --> comment and the majority of spaces from the Persondata template. I cleaned it up a little to clarify context but its roughl

I understand the comment is for new editors but we dont typically add comments for categories, infoboxes or the multitudes of other things. And if they see it on every biographical article there gonna figure it out pretty fast I think. And, Yes I know everything is saved and each save increases exponentially. I also understand that it does not remove it from the historical copies. But each time the article is saved, another "copy" of the article is saved, taking up more space. So if I am already there, making another edit, and I remove 80 spaces, then thats 80 spaces of harddrive space that will not be saved exponentially. Thereby making the article slightly smaller, thereby taking up slightly less space each time it is saved, exponentially until the article becomes FA status, we all ascend to a higher plane of existance or the aliens from Independance day show up and invade. For example, if you look at the revision history of this article Trefflé Berthiaume, you will see that in the edit prior to RjwilmsiBot the article was 2,810 bytes, when the bot added the persondata with the comment and some spaces it went to 3,174 bytes (and I see where the bot doesnt have as many spaces as the Persondata template so thats good). In the edit that I just made, that eliminated the comment and a few more spaces it went down to 3,114 bytes. Thats a difference of 60 bytes and after I added 22 characters. Now assume that article is revised 16-17 more times (which isnt all that much) that will be a savings of 1KB or 1000B. Now times that by a thousand articles thats a MB and so on. It adds up fast. Now I am not saying we should remove the spaces just for the sake of removing spaces and saving space. But as a minor edit along with other changes we could see a substantial and exponential savings in space over the long term of the WP project. Hard space is cheap, but its not free and I have to assume that WP's storage is in the TB range. Now I have no idea what the cost of running the site is but if we assume that WP has 4TB (thats 4000 GB for the non-computer savvy folks) of hard drive space (which is probably low) and we assume that it costs .25 per week per MB for storage, management and maintenance (which is probably also low) then we get somewhere in the range of $262, 000 dollars a week to run the site. Thats about 13.6 Million a year. Admittedly I dont think WP costs 13.5 million a year to run (if you factor in all the langauges, and all the sister projects and Commons it might) And that increases exponentially as we add and expand articles, images etc. If we can shave a couple gig off that progressive increase then thats potentially several thousand dollars a month. Again, I am just guessing at the numbers but along with our fundraisers if we employ some business consciousness we could stretch the value per dollar a bit more just by watching the extra spaces. --Kumioko (talk) 18:51, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm not convinced about the calculations on storage space since I believe compression is used on the revision history data, so I think the extra space requirement is actually much less than this. Rjwilmsi 11:36, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Caps

Can we please give the template proper capitalization? It's horrible getting screamed by the article with "ALTERNATIVE NAMES", "NAME", "PLACE OF BIRTH" or stuff like this. I recognize it's difficult to rename the parameters, but we should at least fix the actual output. --The Evil IP address (talk) 15:01, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Like this? Rich Farmbrough, 09:51, 12 October 2010 (UTC).
I fixed a couple of typos Rich, I hope you don't mind. --Kumioko (talk) 11:43, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
I'm delighted as always. Should we use the sand-boxed version? Rich Farmbrough, 11:03, 18 October 2010 (UTC).
I think so but knowone else seems to have an opinion. Personally I would love to drop all the spaces and that useless comment too. But this is a start. --Kumioko (talk) 13:01, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
This is now causing issues with AWB edits. See [4] & [5] for a couple of examples. -- WOSlinker (talk) 16:19, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
I have no idea why we decided to "fix" the parameter names when they are not displayed anyway. I thought the idea of this template was to provide simply formatted data for extraction by third party tools. We've now made it harder for third parties to extract this data. Now I will have to update AWB for this but don't agree with the change made above. Rjwilmsi 10:43, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Casimir's Code

Why do automated tools think it is a person that need a persondata? Renata (talk) 16:14, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Addition of persondata was recently added to the general fixes of AutoWikiBrowser (see here and here). I don't use AWB myself, but I understand it's only semi-automatic, i.e. the editor who is using it needs to approve the changes it makes, so someone wasn't paying attention here. Secondly, the article was tagged on the talk page as within the scope of WikiProject Biography, which is obviously wrong. I suspect it was the presence of this banner which caused AWB to think it was a biography. I have removed the banner. Dr pda (talk) 22:28, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
ah yes, Yobot does a lot with WP:Bio. Rich Farmbrough, 12:08, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

Linking placenames

Not sure that this is a Good Thing. There is a clue in the fact that "transform.pl" strips the [] off. What does a link tell us? Well it hints

  • There is a Wikipedia article of that name
  • The article is about the place.

Neither of these are guaranteed, and the first one is easily checked anyway. Potential problems include:

  • No page
  • Page is a redirect to the right article
  • Page is a redirect to the wrong article
  • Article about wrong place. Maybe it was right when the Persondata was set up, but has been moved. Or maybe it wasn't.
  • Page is not about a place at all (Westward Ho!)
  • Page is a dab page.
  • Page is subtly wrong - the city, not the county, or the CDP not the town.

Comments? Rich Farmbrough, 13:51, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

For the purpose of the Persondata I would say we shouldn't link. In my opinion linking in the persondata template serves no purpose and in fact I think it would actually be a hinderance. For example, say you are trying to find out all the people from Detroit Michigan. You are going to get a dozen different variations of it. Unlinked, city link and state linked together, city linked and not state, state linked and not city, etc. Then if you want to do any kind of analysis (say Geographical breakdown of what ages of individuals have biographies in WP then your going to have to spend a ton of time just cleaning up the data before you can use it. Of course this is just a hypothetical scenario but hopefully it makes my point. --Kumioko (talk) 18:37, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
Not sure I agree. Yes, linking in the template means that to get free text you need to do simple data cleanup to remove linkage. But links do a job of disambiguation which would be almost impossible to do automatically with a high degree of precision. Removing the links just removes information relevant for disambiguation.Dsp13 (talk) 08:11, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

"Japanese romaji"

We're told:

the Japanese romaji for Oprah Winfrey is not important metadata for her article on the English-language Wikipedia

I think this is about the Hepburn or other romanization of the Japanese katakana form of Oprah Winfrey. The katakana is オプラ・ウィンフリー (or so I learn from ja:WP). In Hepburn that's "Opura Winfurī" (more or less). However, this would hardly ever be used by anyone in Japan.

That minor oddity aside, let's consider Japanese people. (Though what follows is relevant in one way or another to Koreans, Chinese, Russians, Hungarians, etc etc.) One Japanese person with a handily short name is the one Japanese people and I call Domon Ken. WP stupidly dictates that his name is to be reversed (in order not to upset anglophones), and therefore calls him Ken Domon. In Japanese his name is written 土門拳, for some purposes, with a double-byte space: 土門　拳. WP presents this with an ASCII space: 土門 拳.

What's one supposed to do with his name? Wild guess:

NAME:Domon, Ken
ALTERNATIVE NAMES:Domon Ken; 土門拳 (Japan)

How's that? -- Hoary (talk) 15:49, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

This page is about the Persondata template; the instructions for the NAME parameter already say "The person's most commonly known name should be in the |NAME= field, in the following format: Family Name, Given Name Middle Names, title." I'm note sure where the correct place to discuss this is. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:59, 3 October 2010 (UTC)
Then this is already a contradiction with other WP guidelines. The people who know of Domon outside Japan are hugely outnumbered by those who know of him inside Japan. Script/spelling aside, the huge indigenous majority of the latter know of him as "Domon Ken". But thanks to middlebrow European/American tradition and "MOS-JA", en:WP calls him "Ken Domon".
However, let's forget Japanese people for now: I understand that their names are difficult for most non-Japanese people to get their heads around. Instead, let's look at Greeks. (I know no Greek myself; we're on an equal footing here.) "Nikos Economopoulos" is indubitably how one man's name appears in the languages of western Europe and also on books in English that are published in Greece. However, "Economopoulos" is a conventionalized version of what "should" (I think) be "Oikonomopoulos" -- even though I haven't seen this used for him. Should one therefore write:
NAME:Economopoulos, Nikos
ALTERNATIVE NAMES:Oikonomopoulos, Nikos; Οικονομόπουλος, Νίκος (Greece)
or does en:WP ignore scripts other than the roman alphabet? (It might have been a good idea to have this kind of thing clarified before all of this bot-addition took place.) -- Hoary (talk) 00:34, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
Please explain why you think this is the correct page to discuss which name is placed first. Jc3s5h (talk) 02:55, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
The latest question is not about which name is placed first, it is about whether scripts other than roman should be included in "Persondata". But yes, I also have a question about whether alternative orders of name should be presented as "alternative names". Neither is a request for discussion; each is a request for a simple answer to a question. I ask both questions here because they seem specific to "Persondata" and I cannot think of any better place in which to ask them. (Can you?) -- Hoary (talk) 10:47, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

No one knows the answer to the alternative name questions, because no-one knows what Persondata is for, because it is meta-data. However I would hazard a pro and con for non-roman:

  • Pro. We are all grown up programmers and use unicode all the time.
  • Con. I'm not, and it gives me all sorts of problems doing simple things.

Of course I keep hacking until it works but the problem with this is that someone who is not expecting Unicode, and goes, say 500 articles without getting any, can suddenly hit failures.

Having said that, I would conclude "if you think it useful, put it in". As to order, the same, if you think there is a good order use that. If at some point we define an order, then teh pages are going to have to catch up with the definition anyway. Rich Farmbrough, 00:06, 6 October 2010 (UTC).

Well, yes, the metadata is for what people care to use it for. However, a huge number of people with articles in en:WP have names that importantly (?) have non-roman forms. ("Importantly" is merely a very tentative first stab. What I vaguely have in mind is this: Few anglophones wanting to read about Tony Blair need to know how his name is written within Russian, Greek, Chinese, etc. Anyone wanting to go beyond en:WP on the admittedly minor figure of Akira Toriyama is likely to be stuck unless they know how his name is written in Japanese -- incidentally, a clearly different way from that in which the name of a somewhat better-known Akira Toriyama is written.) So I'm sure that, all things being equal, provision for other scripts would be a Good Thing. But for all I knew they might have been ruled out for some technical or other reason; thus my question on scripts. ¶ As for orders of names, I thought I might learn from the metadata for Franz Liszt (the "most famous" Hungarian I could think of), but unfortunately nobody has tackled this. (The article on him starts Franz Liszt (Hungarian: Ferencz Liszt, in modern use Ferenc Liszt, from 1859 to 1867 officially Franz Ritter von Liszt, oddly inverting the actual name order [I believe] within Hungarian.) I'd guess that alternative names for metadata should be: Liszt, Ferencz; Liszt, Ferenc; Liszt Ferencz; Liszt Ferenc; Liszt, Franz Ritter von. -- Hoary (talk) 00:53, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
Are you claiming the list for Liszt lists? But as to seeking the information I would simply use the interwikis. Rich Farmbrough, 19:41, 11 October 2010 (UTC).
I still can't get my head around why Latin-based diacritics aren't used in the "NAME" parameter. What is the reason for this, Rich? Jared Preston (talk) 02:46, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
I can't see a reason. I suspect that AWB is using the DEFAULTSORT? Rich Farmbrough, 18:36, 24 October 2010 (UTC).

One biographical page containing two bios: two Persondatas for the same page?

This article is about a duo of golf instructors who work together. Should I insert two templates? --Nuares (talk) 13:46, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

I can see no fundamental reason not to. Of course Democratic Party might get complicated. (Disclaimer - I don't know which of the American parties is which, and I prefer it that way.) Rich Farmbrough, 18:38, 24 October 2010 (UTC).
I think on the German Wikipedia, the persondata template is added to the redirect pages in such cases. You could just add the template to Andy Plummer and Michael Bennett (golf instructor). --Kam Solusar (talk) 20:37, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
Thanks Rich and Kam! I think adding the template to both the redirect pages is the best solution. --Nuares (talk) 13:07, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
Yes, seems sense. Solution to what though? We would need a use to evaluate which is the best solution. Rich Farmbrough, 01:59, 26 October 2010 (UTC).
I'm broadly in favour of that solution. Does anyone know if there's any established consensus about the adding of categories to redirect pages, which seems a similar question - see Sir Anthony Abdy, 2nd Baronet for an existing example of this.Dsp13 (talk) 07:52, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
Absolutely, it is the only effective way to have a page in two different positions in a category sort at the moment, and has been used for a long time. Rich Farmbrough, 16:35, 29 October 2010 (UTC).
Thanks - pleased to hear it's not disapproved of by redirect specialists! I won't hold back from doing it in future.Dsp13 (talk) 20:21, 30 October 2010 (UTC)
As for the question about what problem is being solved: representing structured data about individuals in a form which computers can exploit. (e.g., I happen to work for one company, True Knowledge, which extracts structured data from WP using infoboxes, categories, PDA etc.) For this purpose you need ways of strictly separating pages which are about individual people and pages which are about multiple people.Dsp13 (talk) 08:01, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
Yes I am familiar with the problem of automatically separating pages titled for an individual from others - which I have had some success with (on this note two person data boxes would make that crystal clear, sans errors). What I mentioned was the use. Depending on the use is the method. And that determines which solution is useful. For example if I have an XML dump of golf instructors I might miss this person data in redirects. If I have a complete enwiki-yyyymmdd-pages-articles.xml I will not. Rich Farmbrough, 16:35, 29 October 2010 (UTC).
OK, good example.Dsp13 (talk) 20:21, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

pooling with other Wikiprojects

Persondata is strikingly simmilar ro commons:template:creator, except that creator uses internationalisation templates and is meant to be displayed. Wouldn't it make more sense to somehow have it all in one centralised place with links to all relevant articles. It would reduce redundancies and potential inconsistencies between various wikiprojects.--Superzoulou (talk) 14:25, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Once "reasonably efficient interwiki transclusin" is done, possibly. Other issues:
  • Ensuring the same people are meant
  • Different levels of referencing needed across projects/languages
  • Translation of "About, After, Real name" etc.
  • Transliteration.
Rich Farmbrough, 19:57, 28 November 2010 (UTC).
Ensuring that the same people are meant, yes indeed. The idea, of creating a central interwiki repository is often mentioned. It it gets done some day, it could be useful.
transliteration: I guess we could useinterwikis, probably not perfect but at least be a starting point.
"About, After, Real name" a template like commons:template:name can work in many cases.
Any idea, when "reasonably efficient interwiki transclusion" will be implemented ? it seems a nice project but I don't know if it's still going on.--Superzoulou (talk) 09:04, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

The main project was finished. There are two more "things" that need to be done, then the actual release process need to happen. Whether these "things" are hard or easy I can't tell. The release process seems, in general - well I can't find a nice word for it. Rich Farmbrough, 21:39, 22 December 2010 (UTC).

How (or even whether) to identify someone as "missing and presumed dead"

There are various people within Category:Missing people. Category:People declared dead in absentia, Category:Forced disappearances, and to a much lesser degree, Category:Possibly living people, who have a "last-known-alive" date for which sources can be cited or a death in absentia date exists. As far as I can tell, there is no consensus for how such people should be represented in Persondata. If such a consensus has been documented, could someone point it out? If not, what would you do in such cases, such as Ambrose Bierce, Amelia Earhart, Edward V of England, Jim Gray (computer scientist), Vincent Mangano, Glenn Miller, Leonid Rozhetskin, and Kristin Smart.

If there's some debate about what to do in these varying cases, it would be a nice start to at least acknowledge the possibility of such cases and document the options an editor has. Thanks. 67.100.125.90 (talk) 22:48, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

My suggestion is to follow the German example (converted to English at Template talk:Persondata#Date format table), so Ambrose Bierce would have "after 1913" (which it does). Persondata for the other articles would have:
-84user (talk) 00:51, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
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