Wikipedia talk:Persondata/Archive 1

message: This project was inspired by the Personendaten Project on the German Wikipedia. For more information about that project, see this article. Kaldari 15:45, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: German Wikipedia sister project

message: Can someone link to an example??  CoolGuy 17:41, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Some examples of articles using persondata include Ferdinand Magellan, George W. Bush, and Ross Winn. Keep in mind though that you won't actually see anything on the article pages unless you have metadata turned on in your user stylesheet. You can still see the persondata through the editing interface though. Kaldari 18:27, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

text: The What Links Here page for the Persondata article includes the pages that use it (as well as some places where it's being discussed). *Dan T.* 18:30, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Example

message: Any reason for making the field names ALL CAPS, and for small-capsing the name? — Jeandré, 2005-12-25t06:16z
:The field names are in all caps so that the information can be easily differentiated from information in the article body when constructing SQL queries to extract the data. The small-caps for the name is just for prettyness. Kaldari 20:57, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I got rid of the smallcaps for the name since it didn't really add anything and looked out of place. Kaldari 00:07, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: ALL CAPS?

message: Ray Saintonge brought this up on wikien-l:
: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. 
This seems an excellent idea - especially for older historical figures, we know the period when they were active, but often their birth is not recorded... and if they then died obscure, and unrecorded, we've lost all biographical track of them. Something like, hmm...
Philip of Poitou:
 
Any idea on how best to implement this? It strikes me as useful - even if "flourished" is just a single year in the middle of the appropriate timeframe (here 1191-1208), it allows us to sort people relatively easily by period. Perhaps an optional line? It's good to get all these standardised early, I guess... Shimgray | talk | 21:21, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's maybe got too much subjectivity, though... do you need to cite references about when a person "flourished", in order to avoid WP:NOR?  And would it apply to all sorts of biographical individuals, not just artists and writers?  Did Adolf Hitler "flourish" when he had maximum power?  Did Lee Harvey Oswald "flourish" when he assassinated Kennedy? *Dan T.* 21:53, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Flourished is a very vague term, but basically means "the period we're actually interested in" - it's usually only needed for relatively obscure individuals. (See, say, Reginald of Durham for an example of "real use"). A different word may be appropriate - "active"? Shimgray | talk | 21:56, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

text: We would only be following standard artistic/encyclopedic practice to use "flourished" (usually just seen as "f.") - i.e. artists of one kind or another. I've never seen it used in non-artistic contexts. I can't imagine it being used for twentieth century or later figures such as Hitler or Oswald - the birth and death data is almost always available. Pcb21 Pete 17:12, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Thanks! I didn't know the parser was that good... If we don't need to provide a precise year for birth/death, then we can just stick in "born 12th century, died 13th", and this takes care of it - no need to add a separate datafield. Shimgray | talk | 01:31, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, then you can also put everything in one field ;-) parsing different date formats is difficult enough and birth/dead are different basic items so I'd better not mix it. -- Nichtich 10:36, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: "Flourished" usually means the period between the earliest and latest datable events during which the person was known to be alive.  "Active" is sometimes used, as mentioned above.  A "FLOURISHED" field would be an extremely useful addition to the template.  I do a lot of work on medieval/Renaissance composers where "flourished" is all we have, and I don't want to make an original-research guess on a birth and death date.  Antandrus  (talk) 20:43, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

text: I think that's a good idea. As long as the parsing engine was fairly intelligent I don't think it would cause any problem. Kaldari 15:52, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Flourished? 

message: I've seen these template used inside the George W. Bush, where it duplicates a subset of information already given in the President Infobox template. Could the Persondata template not be implemented inside the president infobox - thereby implementing it on 43 pages at once. Ok, it means the scraping software has to be somewhat smarter, but then again that's ok because no scraping software is currently in production. Ditto in other templates that contain the relevant information. Pcb21 Pete 17:08, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I suppose you only have President Infoboxes for presidents while all people have names, birthday and so on. Merging both templates is possible (I won't explain here how) but you'd need to modify both templates. -- Nichtich 00:42, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

text: The capital letters should only be visible in the source code. -- Nichtich 00:42, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Use inside implementations of other templates

message: *I've added the Persondata template to about 40 biographical articles from my watchlist. --Dystopos 04:00, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Good idea

message: I've been thinking about this ever since my Wikipedia:Semantic Wikipedia proposal. :D I'll start work on this! --Golbez 20:15, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I guess the main thing we need to do now is work on publicity. Like maybe launching an implementation campaign and getting an article in the Signpost. Anyone want to help work on publicity? Kaldari 21:16, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: A pretty simple method to generate publicity would be to post a link to this place in the Edit Summary: +Persondata Wikipedia:Persondata. The autoinsert function works in your favor, you would only have to type +p . As the edit summary is constantly checked, this will draw curious eyes and perhaps even more collaborators. So this will attract people exponentially. It's more fun to integrate persondata than to check for spelling errors. Longbow4u 17:51, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Ergo you should add this to articles about famous people first, which will be on many watchlists. -Splashtalk 23:04, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Jojo, noted. Longbow4u 23:45, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

text: Well it looks like our exponential growth didn't happen. The number of articles with persondata has stagnated at ~150 since the new year began (despite being added to the higher profile biographical articles). Anyone have ideas for how get things moving? Should we start a WikiProject? Any advice from the German Wikipedians? Kaldari 23:39, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Is there an easy way to see a list of the articles with Persondata? Or better yet, an implementation of using it as a dataset? --Dystopos 00:01, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Persondata. -Splashtalk 00:34, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: OK. So you just count them by hand? Maybe if we showed a cool use for this, like automatically generated timelines showing lifespans of presidents, then people would jump on board. --Dystopos 03:00, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If you're an admin, grap WP:AWB. It can count a whatlinkshere for you. -Splashtalk 03:50, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

text: As soon as wikisign.org gets a newer database dump, we'll be able to actually demostrate pulling persondata. Kaldari 05:40, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Awesome 

message: What shall we do about things like User:CCMichalZ? Have a sense of humour, or actively discourage since it makes the intended usage rather harder to filter? -Splashtalk 00:28, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Seems relatively trivial to only search in the main namespace, surely? And a lot of the applications for this will be done on a dump of only that namespace... I can't see it causing a practical problem. Shimgray | talk | 00:43, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

text: On the other hand, a firm decision on whether or not to put this next to fictional individuals would be handy. A lot of people will quietly bend the rules on that one, and it could well corrupt the data just a touch. Shimgray | talk | 00:45, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: In German Wikipedia we don't use persondata for fictional characters. You can argue in some cases (people from the ancient times, characters of the bible...) but we definitively don't take homer simpson and things like that. -- Nichtich 10:40, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lighthearted uses? 

message: Could this be an idea? Creating something like this for organisms and such? Eksample:

{{Biodata
|KINGDOM=
|PHYLUM=
|CLASS=
|ORDER=
|FAMILY=
|TRIBE=
|GENUS=
|SPECIES=
|DESCRIBED BY=
|DESCRIBED BY ABBREVATION=
}}
And for plants:

{{Biodata
|KINGDOM=
|DIVISION=
|CLASS=
|ORDER=
|FAMILY=
|TRIBE=
|GENUS=
|SPECIES=
|DESCRIBED BY=
|DESCRIBED BY ABBREVATION=
}}
And i think Sub- and Super- prefixes should be added too. They can always be left blank. Pyramide 13:03, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds like a good idea, although I wonder if the same function could already be served by the taxobox. It looks like the vast majority of species articles have taxobox templates included, and the formatting on them is pretty consistent. It seems like you could theoretically already harvest such information from the taxoboxes. Any second opinions? Kaldari 13:32, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

text: There are taxoboxes for every plant, aren't there? I introduced Persondata because there was no way to automatically extract the basic data of people out of the article text (and I hope you don't really want "personboxes"). You should first try if parsing taxoboxes is possible instead of parsing biodata templates. -- Nichtich 10:46, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Biodata? 

message: Louis Braille has a Template:Infobox Person. Google recently linked a search for Louis Braille birthday from their home page. The wikipdia data is listed above Google's news and first web hit.
Ferdinand Magellan has Persondata. Googling for Ferdinand Magellan birthday doesn't show the wikipedia article in the first 100 hits, but it does show the Wikipedia:Persondata page.
Wouldn't it be better to not have data duplicated (normalized), and displaying the single instance of the data? -- Jeandré, 2006-01-07t10:45z
:You are correct that Persondata duplicates Infobox Person, in the same way that the proposed Biodata would duplicate the Taxonomy Infobox. The difference is that the Taxonomy Infobox is included in all species articles, while Infobox Person is not included in all biographical articles. There was a push a while back to implement Infobox Person more widely, but the push was met with resistance from those who felt the template was largely redundant with content already in the articles. At one point Infobox Person was even nominated for deletion I believe. There are also many articles for which Infobox Person would be obviously inappropriate, for example George W. Bush which uses Infobox President. There are numerous specialized Infoboxes for people that would make universal use of Infobox Person untenable as it would lead to redundant article content. Persondata gets around this problem because it is not article content, it is hidden metadata. Thus it could theoretically be adopted universally for all biographical articles. It's awesome that Google has figured out how to cull data from Infobox Person. It will be even better when they figure out how to cull data from Persondata (assuming Persondata is widely adopted as it was on the German Wikipedia). Ferdinand Magellan is a special case. The reason Google is linking to the Persondata page rather than Magellan's article is that Magellan is used as the main example on the Persondata page (and the Persondata page is heavily linked to, thus getting a high Google ranking). I hope that answers your questions. Kaldari 19:35, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Not picked up by Google?

message: A clever program would be able to deduce the hemisphere from the birthplace, if necessary. --Dystopos 03:17, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Seasons in data fields

message: should e.g. Michael Jackson have name Jackson, Michael & altname Jackson, Michael Joseph or what? Derex 18:06, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I would recommend using "Jackson, Michael Joseph" as this will help distinguish him from other Michael Jacksons. Kaldari 19:31, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  name / fullname 

message: Should the name field have the subject's birth name, their legal name at the time of death, or the legal name that they're best known under? I'm not quite sure how to handle maiden names, women who were married multiple times, or people who had their names legally changed at some point -- particularly when they're best known by a pseudonym, which I assume should always go in the alternative names field. (And I see I forgot to sign this, sorry. Aitch Eye 17:17, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've been assuming that NAME should be the alphabetized version of the name in the first few words of the article, and that all the others can go in ALTERNATIVE NAMES, with appropriate (parenthetical) descriptions of what/why they are. -Splashtalk 17:28, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Names and alternative names

message: I've been adding Persondata to bios I come across. Perhaps its time for a group of like-minded Wikipedians to make this a group effort and give this a bit more publicity? Greentubing 08:25, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree completely and would be interesting in helping in any organized effort to promote this project.  For now I have just  mentioned it on my userpage in hopes that people will notice it.  Also, I try to mention Wikipedia:Persondata in the edit summary someplace hoping that will get it more exposure. --PS2pcGAMER (talk) 04:24, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Collaboration 

message: Hi there. The current SQL query for extracting Persondata links relies on looking at the article text. This is very slow. I think I can rewrite it to use the templatelinks table to directly find pages that include . I'll update Wikipedia:Persondata if I come up with a suitable replacement. Mike Dillon 18:19, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: As a data point, I did a comparison of counting Persondata inclusions with the old query that uses a text search against my version. The text search version has been running for over an hour and still hasn't returned a count. My version ran in about 1 minute (254 uses in main, one in namespace #4, whatever that is). Once the other one returns, I'll verify that the counts were the same, but I think the query above is a great improvement. Mike Dillon 19:18, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Very cool. BTW, do you have any idea why the What Links Here page is not accurately reporting all the pages that include the Persondata template? I know there are about 300 articles that currently have the template, but the What Links Here page for the template only lists about 150 of them now. I know of several examples of articles that have the template that are not listed there, for example, Ross Winn. Kaldari 19:47, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: WLH is broken at present as far as counting template transclusions goes. It seems to be gradually correcting itself as articles containing tempaltes are edited after the introdction of this bug, but it's a very annoying bug that the devs are being slow to correct. See Bugzilla bugreport. -Splashtalk 20:02, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I'd have expected the bug to cause underreporting if it is at all based on Whatlinkshere's way of working. -Splashtalk 03:49, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You expected right, because that's what happened. Counting via cur_text was 365, counting via templatelinks was 254 (111 articles less). Mike Dillon 03:55, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I'm going to see if someone with a bot can do the null edits off of my list. Mike Dillon 05:28, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I asked User:Bluemoose to have User:Bluebot do it. Mike Dillon 05:31, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

text: After Bluebot's help, Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Persondata now shows 466 inclusions from the main namespace. I guess that means the templatelinks query will work fully after the next database dump. Mike Dillon 16:20, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  More efficient extraction query 

message: Hi all. After some of the discussions here, I've been thinking about proposing a Metadata WikiProject. The goals would be to expand the availability of varius kinds of metadata on Wikipedia, coordinate metadata strategies for domain-specific intiatives (e.g. Persondata for biographies), and drive changes to the MediaWiki software to support the capture and use of metadata. Would anyone active here be interested in such a project? For a while, I was also thinking that a WikiProject Accessibility would be needed, but this seems to be part of WikiProject Usability. Mike Dillon 04:55, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I was thinking about proposing a project to help expand the usage of Persondata templates.  If it is part of a bigger project instead, I would be fine with it.  In any event, I am definitely willing to help out. --PS2pcGAMER (talk) 00:18, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Metadata WikiProject 

message: I find it rather discouraging to see so few Persondata articles, and such a stale count on the main page. Any change someone could update the number of articles with persondata in'em? --maru   (talk)  contribs 19:27, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: User:Mike Dillon updated it for you.  Just so people know, if they have access to WP:AWB, the approximate total can be calculated with it. --PS2pcGAMER (talk) 21:09, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Update count 

message: The Persondata has now been on en.WP for four months (and de.WP for almost two years) and has been included in 950 articles. Is it a success or a failure? Would you recommend that other languages (e.g. Swedish) implement the same, or something different, or nothing at all? What are the success factors and what are the obstacles? Can automatic text mining of the existing articles be a successful alternative? --LA2 11:39, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hard to say. On English, it's a bit of a failure, as it is not in many articles and there doesn't seem to be any use of it. But I don't know how it is used on de. And from what I hear of the Persendata drive prior to the publication of the de Wikipedia, text mining needs to be manually hand-checked by a human. --maru   (talk)  contribs 13:37, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think we should give up so soon, but I don't think implementing a persondata on an article-by-article basis, often duplicating other infoboxes is a long-term flyer. See below. Pcb21 Pete 14:49, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: My conclusion is that the lack of applications that use the data is a more severe failure than the small number of people that have been tagged. If more useful applications (e.g. a people search index at Answers.com) existed, I think more biographies would get tagged pretty soon. I'm waiting for more applications to turn up before I try to introduce persondata in the Swedish Wikipedia. --LA2 06:02, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah. but is that a chicken-and-egg problem? --maru   (talk)  contribs 12:33, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No Problem, here it is (for the German Wikpedia): http://tools.wikimedia.de/~voj/pd 77.180.105.11 23:00, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Any conclusions and recommendations for other languages? 

message: I think we should be bold and push on with integrating this infobox as an implementation detail of Infobox Person, and that template should be an implementation detail for all the other infoboxes (the canonical example above being the Presidential infobox). If we design/modify the templates in the right way, we really will start getting a lot of uses of the data and it will accepted by the community at large because only very minor appearance differences (at most) will be seen. What do you think? Pcb21 Pete 14:47, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I still prefer keeping Persondata separate, for several reasons. Primarily, I think there will be resistance to including Persondata within other templates. There are several editors who are rather strongly opposed to having hidden metadata at all, but they seem satisfied if Persondata is limited to appearing after the article itself. I think all that is really necessary to achieve more widespread adoption is a project to promote adding Persondata and hopefully a tool to automate it at some point. Kaldari 22:13, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it's a good idea. If need be, we can have someone with AWB or a bot go around extracting out the persondata to make those people happy. --maru   (talk)  contribs 02:00, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Not trying because there might be resistance is not a good reason I don't think. Who are the several editors who are opposed to hidden metadata. What grounds are they objecting on? We could go down the route of adding persondata separately but then you will definitely get users complaining about the duplication, and I think that is a legitimate complaint. Pcb21 Pete 17:36, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: So are you proposing using persondata only within Infoboxes and never separately? Kaldari 20:44, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If infobox person implemented persondata internally, would an editor ever want to add a persondata rather than an infobox? If not, then I guess I am proposing that. Personal CSS can be used to turn display on or off. Pcb21 Pete 14:37, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Revisiting Infobox Person 

message: Should the locations of birth and death be given as the current designation (name, administrative division, country) or the designation at time of death? For instance, did Charles Darwin die in "Downe,  Bromley, Greater London", or did he die in "Downe, Kent" (as it then was?); did Richard Francis Burton die in "Trieste, Austria-Hungary" (as many biographies describe) or in "Trieste, Italy"? TheGrappler 18:58, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I would lean toward "as it was". I looked to see if this is addressed in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies), but it's not there. I didn't see any mention of a standard for this sort of thing within articles at either Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (biographies) or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography, but those might be good places to ask. Since the MOSBIO page does say that biographies of dead people should be written in the past tense, it seems to imply that in general, events should not be described anachronistically. If a modern frame of reference is required, the article text should say something like: Downe, Kent (now part of the Bromley borough of Greater London). Mike Dillon 19:24, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Location "as was" or "as is now"? 

message: On a completely different note: standardizing which fields to include is obviously extremely important. I really think that people have overlooked the importance of "flourished" - this is critical to many figures from Classical civilization, and outside of nobility, the Dark Ages and Middle Ages too. In many instances there is nothing inherently subjective about "fl.", and it is utterly encyclopedic - it is used by many well-respected biographical and encyclopedic sources. For many people, it is simply "their first entry in the historical record" to "their last entry in the historical record" when they faded into anonymity. For artists it may be from their first major work to their last. There is no need to make up "likely" years of birth or death. Another field that I think has a shot at being useful and encyclopedic is "Burial location" (or location of final resting place; there may be a better way to phrase this!). Many biographical summaries contain this piece of information, I think it would be relevant to Persondata too. So long as we have relatively few entries, Wikipedia should be open to adding to the Persondata fields; I am sure that previous entries could be expanded by means of a bot if needed. TheGrappler 19:34, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: For more information, the very brief floruit article is very useful. TheGrappler 19:38, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that flourished can be a very useful distinction to make. For myself, I would much prefer to have clear and reliable flourished dates than subjectively made up birth and death dates, which can vary widely between sources, and tend to rely on flimsy guesswork. However, I didn't know what fl. meant until my senior year in college, and neither did my T.A., so perhaps some education will have to happen with it. Mak (talk) 20:29, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

text: I strongly agree.  We need this field.  For example, for not many, but most composers (and probably artists) of the late middle ages and early Renaissance, we only know the periods that they were active, between their first dateable entry in the historical record and the last.  Sometimes they were fifteen years old when they began "flourishing" and sometimes forty; we can't know.  When we get an actual birth date we're lucky.  "Flourishing", as TheGrappler notes, is peculiar too artists, writers, composers, and such, and there is nothing subjective about it, since those dates are reported by the New Grove, Britannica, and other of our principal sources.  We don't want to be in a position where we have to make an original-research guess as to when someone was born (was Hugo de Lantins born in 1380 or 1405?  How about Perotin, where all we know is that he probably did most of his work around 1200).  Antandrus  (talk) 20:35, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  It's interesting to see there is support for this proposal - it's obviously not as "dead" as the old discussion's petering off suggests. Should there be two fields ("began to flourish" and "ceased to flourish"?) or will one suffice? Two seems excessive for examples such as Perotin, and it would be easy in all other cases to compress the data into one field. While that sounds natural, I just wondered if someone more technical knows whether that makes the data harder to read and use? Also, did anybody have any thoughts about adding final resting place as a field? TheGrappler 21:32, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

text: The "flourished" dates are the beginning and end of the person's trace in the historical record.  Grabbing an example more or less at random, Antonio_da_Cividale first appears when he enters a monastery in 1392 (his age is not known, or even guessed); and he disappears in 1421, the date of the last precisely dateable composition he wrote.  Any guesses of birth and death for him would be original research, but the begin and end of "flourishing" can be sourced reliably.  Antandrus  (talk) 03:27, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Indeed, it isn't limited to artists, musicians and writers. Tanaka Shosuke first appears in the historical record when he became the first recorded Japanese in the Americas in 1610. In 1613 he crossed the Pacific again, as part of a project to send the first Japanese embassy to Europe. But whether in 1614 he changed ships to travel on to Europe, stayed in Mexico to await the return of the Europe-bound contingent, or headed back to Japan in the return journey of the original ship, is simply lost to history. It's as if he "arrives" in 1610 and "vanishes" in 1614, dates we know exactly and which will only be extended if new evidence is discovered. What is the point of making up fictitious approximate birth and death dates when we have these exact dates to hand? It's "research" to say "fl. 1610-1614" only in the sense that this is the period in the historical record which another publication (our source) declares him to be "known to history"; it's not a case of Wikipedians digging around the primary evidence themselves so it's not "original" research. Of course, that publication could have overlooked a subsequent or earlier piece of documentation about the subject, so in a sense the fl. dates are based on historians' knowledge and understanding of the historical record rather than an "absolute" like a birth or death date, and may potentially be subject to change. But compare this to birth and death dates: evidence about when somebody was born or died is also often scant and disputed. Felice Beato was originally thought by historians to have been born in 1825, but now it appears he had been mixed up with his brother and the date was likely 1833 or 1834. A "Felice Beato" was born in Corfu in 1834 but nobody knows for sure if that's the right guy. So not only has his birth-date "changed" when historians realised their error, no new date has been confirmed. (Even more oddly, nobody knows quite when he died - he simply vanished! A date of death has been suggested based on the liquidation of his business, but this is not clearly any more "objective" than the use floruit for a medieval figure.) TheGrappler 09:08, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm sure there are other examples similar to the ones you show above, but for the vast majority of people with Wikipedia articles, the birth and death dates are well established and the flourished dates would be completely subjective. Flourished dates only seem to be commonly used for people who are known from a handful of historical artifacts and for which birth and death records are not available. For these people, it is common to cite flourished dates in place of the birth and death dates. We could do that within the existing framework. For example, for Tanaka Shosuke, you could put his birthdate as "before 1610" and his deathdate as "after 1614", or you could put "circa 1600" or something similar. I just don't imagine that many people doing searches based on flourished dates (which is effectively the purpose of the metadata). Kaldari 19:15, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: On the contrary, searching for "flourished" dates actually makes a lot of sense: that's precisely the period when that person is interesting! And I don't think that setting birthdate as "before 1610" is a particularly good way of doing this. Think about it: if I wanted to search "who's about in 1100?" would I want Shosuke turning up? Of course not, but by saying he was born "before 1610" he's not excluded from being born before 1100. If we did it only by flourished dates he would be excluded. Now if I wanted to search "who's about in 1612?", Shosuke would turn up, along with anybody born in 1612 or earlier and dying in 1612 or later. If one was using an especially clever search, it might even give a certain period of leeway from flourished dates that is not given to birth and death dates (or at least, to the earliest possible birth dates and latest possible death dates). Who'd use it? Well, serious academics (historians, biographers, encyclopedists) are well used to using "flourished" or "floruit" rather than birth and death dates. Does it make sense to search for? Clearly. Is it subjective for people for whom we have birth and death dates? Well, we wouldn't be using it if we had birth and death dates! But if we want serious credibility we should get in line with academics and use "fl." when they use "fl." TheGrappler 06:28, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

text: It seems that there is consensus for this. How do we implement it? I've never worked with "metadata" type things, so I won't venture to edit the article page (plus, I have a funny feeling that wouldn't actually make it work). Mak (talk) 18:59, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: One thing that needs to be changed is the documentation that says all fields are compulsory. Two things that need to be decided are whether we call it "flourished" or "floruit" (the latter may be more common but is also somehow more obscure!) and whether it needs two fields (for start and end) or just one. TheGrappler 06:28, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Although I still would prefer working within the existing framework rather than adding a new field, I think "flourished" is much more accessible than "floruit". Wikipedia is not targeted to academics after all. I wonder if we could find out how the German Wikipedia handles flourished dates (if at all). Kaldari 17:30, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd agree with using "flourished" rather than "floruit" - the main advantage of the latter is that people might take a look at the rather good floruit article. The German Wikipedia seems to deal with it by leaving birth and death fields blank if there are specific floruit dates (see de:Osmund). One clear advantage I can see to using a floruit field is that it means that a person using the data can make their own decision about how much leeway to give either side of the floruit dates, depending on what they are searching for. TheGrappler 17:36, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Flourished" and burial location 

message: I think it would be quite useful if we could have an editable list of people that does not have "Persondata" associated with it.  I think this would definitely speed up the implementation and usage as editors would know which persons still needed the template applied to them.  This list could be generated by going through the :Category:Living people and :Category:Dead people and comparing against what links to this template.  I don't know enough SQL to pull such a list from the database dumps (or even if it is possible), but I would definitely support and work on such an effort.  --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 18:38, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Still hoping for a response. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 15:26, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You can request queries here.--NMajdan•talk 15:07, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  List of persons without Persondata? 

message: I suggested that having persondata on biographical articles be a requirement for Featured Articles. We'll see if it passes.--NMajdan•talk 14:55, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: An effective way I've found of publicising Persondata is at least to add it to some of the articles on the main page. This may be a good idea - could you give us a link to the debate? TheGrappler 17:26, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That is a good idea. Here is the link to the discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Featured_article_candidates#persondata. --NMajdan•talk 17:43, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Did anything come from this? I'm not sure if it should be a requirement but I think it should be recommended. A recommendation alone will encourage the use of persondata. MahangaTalk 23:00, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: FA

message: Should we put the current name of the person or their birth name?  Obvioulsy the other one would go under alternate names...  American Patriot 1776 04:24, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I suppose the main name to use is the article title name.  For instance, use Cliff Richard rather than Harry Webb.  Noisy | Talk 08:41, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. Usually, the current name of a famous person is more widely known to the public than their birth name. However, a redirect page of their birth name to the current name is also a necessary inclusion. --Siva1979Talk to me 18:42, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: An interesting point is whether the article name should match the name field exactly. Having discussed this with User:Circeus, I am of the opinion that the name should be written in full (with initials spelled out etc.) while Circeus believes the name field should match the article title, and details like middle name and initials spelled out should go under the "alternative names". The relevant text in the guidance notes is When specifying the person's name, use the following format: [surname], [forename] [middle names], [title]. For most cases this will be straightforward, for example, "George Walker Bush" becomes "Bush, George Walker". In some cases, however, there may be ambiguity about a person's surname. When in doubt, format the name according to how you would expect it to be alphabetized. This, however, is sufficiently ambiguous that Circeus and I are doing different things. We could do with some third opinions, and whatever develops as the consensus, we should clear up the guidance text. TheGrappler 21:48, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It also says: It is usually a good idea to list as much of a person's name as possible in the name field to avoid confusion with similar names. Thus I believe you have the right approach rather than Circeus. Kaldari 12:40, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

text: Seconded.  Noisy | Talk 14:58, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Name 

message: Wikipedia.de included references to the name authority file of the German national library. If a persondata template is being imlemented for wikipedia.en, it seems a good opportunity to provide space for a reference to the Library of Congress name authority file (to which OCLC provides an API; OCLC also maintains a uri & url with the MARC data for each name).
Building links between Wikipedia and the Library of Congress name authority file would help machine readers of Wikipedia. It might also help speed up the process of filling in persondata for Wikipedia. 
Six months ago there were approx 28,000 people articles (and over 4,000 people stubs) listed on Wikipedia. From this list I tried automated matching against the LoC name authority file (using the stringent conditions that names and birth/death dates needed to match): around a third of people on Wikipedia (approx 10,000) could be found there. I didn’t know where to post the matches I generated between Wikipedia and the name authority file – is anyone interested in them? Dsp13 13:54, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Stick it in your user space. Someone will want to look at it sooner or later. --maru   (talk)  contribs 02:56, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you. I will try to do that. Dsp13 01:15, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

text: I have now put up a table - of people with surnames beginning with Z - as an example. Comments welcome! Dsp13 02:12, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

text: I've posted tables of over 10,000 people - born between 1500 and 1850 - matched to the Library of Congess name authority on my  talk page. When these tables are complete, adding people born after 1850, I expect around 30,000 more matches. I've also graphed the total number of people on Wikipedia categorized by birth year - over 188,000.) Comments very welcome here or there! Dsp13 10:52, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

text: Actually de: didn't do quite what you're implying, although I can see why it might be a good idea to. Look at :de:Lewis Carroll for an example - the Persondata is all the usual fields (you may have to click "edit" to see this) and the PND link has been added in the "external links" section (much as MacTutor biographies are for maths articles, for instance). TheGrappler 22:43, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You are quite right. All I should have said is that provision of name authority external links was historically associated with persondata at de:, and might reasonably be expected to be help en: persondata along. I don't have much Wikipedia experience, and hence have no reasoned preference for how name authority links should be added to pages (external links or templates). Dsp13 01:15, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

text: I think that links to specialised online databases (i.e. of particular sorts of people) should not be included within the PERSONDATA template: the fields in the PERSONDATA template should be fields which potentially apply to all people. A template with lots of empty slots is undesirable. If links to many online databases were provided in the template, it would also be (1) hard to get agreement on which online databases should be included there, and (2) problmatic to maintain, since online links always degrade over time (and Wikipedia can't control the way in which external links degrade).  The case for links to name authority files to be included in the template is stronger: though the LOC name authority file began as a specialised database (a list of authors, and only secondarily a list of people mentioned in published texts), it has evolved pretensions to be a one-stop name authority file for the English language. As an authority file, it is essentially designed only to provide uris, and gives only such information about an individual as helps in this task (i.e. helps to disambiguate the individual from others). The LOC name authority file seems the natural choice for :en, just as the German library was the natural choice for :de. However, before putting links to the LOC name authority in a template, assurance should be sought that the future of the links is guaranteed. (There are plans to integrate different national name authority files - e.g. German and LOC - in a Virtual International Authority FIle, though I have no idea of the likely timescale for this to be up and running.) Dsp13 02:12, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: As far as I know the LOC does not provide direct linking into their catalouge with a given LOC authority number - they first need to be convinced to make LOC authority numbers useful in en:. For PERSONDATA : have you tried to use German PERSONENDATEN (available at , see ) and match it via interwikilinks to en:? We now have more than 100.000 entries and many of them are probably also in en:. But you also need a way to extract PERSONENDATEN from en: to create stats and use the date (this could be done via Wikipedia-API for selected aricles). -- Nichtich 13:46, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks Nichtich that's very clarifying. Do you have any idea what might be involved in convincing LOC (based on your German experience?) It seems curious that an authority file should be maintained without any way of leveraging it. I had thought - even without such provision - that (given the authoritative name form from the LOC authority file) one could use SRU (examples) to find texts by, and only by, the author. But I'm now unsure about even this. Depressing. Dsp13 14:05, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

text:  at the moment the situation is that one can in fact directly link into the LOC catlogue, and use the name form given in the name authority file to do so more intelligently (but not quite perfectly) . Take John Russell, 1st Earl Russell as an example: From his name authority entry, his preferred name form is 'Russell, John Russell, Earl, 1792-1878' which is the concatenation of subfields in his MARC 100 field '|aRussell, John Russell,|cEarl,|d1792-1878'. Forming a search for someone with that name AND that title AND those dates, we can link directly to books by him, or books  by/about/associated with him, in the LOC catalogue.  
Dsp13 15:09, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Link to Library of Congress Name Authority? 

message: In case anyone wants to know, I've been putting persondata into figure skating bio articles. I'm not sure what this will accomplish, but wanted to let someone know that I'm using it. --Fang Aili talk 19:58, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  FYI 

message: I'm interested enough to start adding the markup to at least some bios that i work on, but not enuf to   repeat the traume of editing my stylesheet for viewing it, w/o seeing the effect first. How about a pretty picture of an example?--Jerzy•t 15:31, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've added a screenshot to the page Circeus 17:42, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Illustration of the effect of viewing Persondata  

message: I'm confused about why both this template and Template:Infobox Person exist. The latter seems to do everything that the former does, and more, plus it has the advantage of being much more noticable than this template. If I'm not missing something, then I would propose that Persondata is merged into Infobox Person (as several people have done above, it seems). Mike Peel 20:58, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The main thing this template does is allow for more accurate searches based on the LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME format. The person infobox does not allow that. Also, many times there is a more appropriate infobox that is used, such as NFL player or Musician, etc. And some of those templates do not include data such as date/place of death, aliases, etc.--NMajdan•talk 21:09, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

text: And also thefactthatthere are numerous variants of Template:Infobox Person, not all of them using the same parameters. See also :Category:People infobox templates, all of which are infoboxes that will usually replace Infobox person where appropriate. Circeus 21:37, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why is this seperate from Infobox Person? 

message: In the persondata box for Sofia Kovalevskaya, I listed her name in Cyrillic as an alternate name. I put (cyrillic) after it. Is this right? Should it be (Russian)? (Cyrillic)? Are there, or should there be, guidelines? grendel|khan 22:41, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: When I have to list a foreign spelling, I list it with the language, because if you gave that language's version, it'd be in the alphabet anyway, and other languages using the cyrillic alphabet might spell the name differently. Circeus 01:00, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks! In the same vein, should Gene Roddenberry be listed as "Roddenberry, Eugene Wesley" with an alternate of "Roddenberry, Gene"? If only the former is listed, "Gene Roddenberry" wouldn't pick up the record, right? But it's not really a nickname; does it even need a label? grendel|khan 12:43, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have been following the German Wikipedia's lead on this. For Name, I would put "Roddenberry, Gene" and then "Roddenberry, Eugene Wesley" for the Alternamtive Name. Name is for what most people call them and Alternative Name is for a fuller more complete name. --Rajah 02:25, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Standardized alternate name labels. 

message: Is it possible for us to get a monthly updated count of how many have the Persondata metadata and also which articles don't have it? 
Also, this link is an analysis of the German Wikipedia entries and how many incoming links various people have. I think this is really interesting and if we could do a similar analysis with the English Wikipedia, it might give Persondata more of a push. --Rajah 02:29, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Updated Count and German Wikipedia Persondata Link Network 

message: What should I do for someone who died at sea?--CMG 22:22, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Give the sea? --maru   (talk)  contribs 00:31, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  place of death 

message: Questions:
*For living people, do we just say 
 |DATE OF DEATH=
 |PLACE OF DEATH=
or do we say
 |DATE OF DEATH=living
 |PLACE OF DEATH=none
or do we leave these out altogether?
*For people who's year of birth is unknown, what do we do?
*And how about alternate transliterations? Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was probably born in Pakistan, and used Arabic script to write his name, so all names using Roman letters are approxomations. Should ALTERNATIVE NAMES include other transliterations (such as "Khalid Sheikh Mohammad")? If so, should I use just one, with an "et al" or something? For particularly difficult names, there can be dozens of possible transliterations. Check out Mohamed Atta for a more troublesome case.
*KSM (above) used 27 different aliases. Is what I've done appropriate?
Thanks, – Quadell (talk) (random) 19:12, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Just leave the date and place of death blank if the person is living. Regard transliterations: Any spellings or transliterations that you think people may commonly use to search for the person should be included under alternative names. Basically, if there is a redirect for it, it should probably be listed. Kaldari 23:05, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

text: Over at the Vietnamese Wikipedia, I've been placing "?" (without the quotes, of course) in DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH/DEATH if we don't know the information. If we aren't sure, I place "?" after the best guess. I'm not sure what common practice here is, but I've seen several articles that use "living" in the Persondata box. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 07:31, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've been typing "living" in date of death when the person is alive. If the birth year is c.1922, I either list the year of birth as "c.1922" or "1922?". – Quadell (talk) (random) 22:02, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  missing fields 

message: On one of my subpages, User:Rajah/persondata, is a semi-wikified list of the top 1000 linked people in the German wikipedia. (this is why the list tends to be german centric, but I still think it's a good start as most names on the list are universally known). I've put strikethroughs through the names of those with persondata. Feel free to add persondata to one ore more people and then put a strikethrough their name. I think this way, a lot of the really "important" people can get persondata in a collaborative, feedback apparent fashion. Thank you. --Rajah 06:15, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: List of highly connected people without Persondata

message: Hi there. There is currently a discussion going on about the CSS rules added to MediaWiki:Common.css for  at MediaWiki talk:Common.css#metadata. Mike Dillon 22:03, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I can no longer see persondata information. My monobook.css says "table.metadata {display:table;}", and I'm using Firefox 2.0. I'm not sure if I can't see the data because of Firefox 2 being different than Firefox 1.5, or if someone changed the CSS rules. I tried "table.metadata {display:block;}" (the IE way) to no avail. – Quadell (talk) (random) 12:50, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Persondata CSS class 

message: "To use the {Persondata} template, copy the wikitext below to the end of a biographical article. The template should be placed just before the categories and interlanguage links." 
I suggest to follow the style guide of the German Wikipedia, which suggests to put the persondata between categories and interwiki links. The main reason is that I've come over a couple of articles where directly above the categories were other templates (which sometimes include categories). Categories and persondata are both meta data, but the persondata are usually not included with other templates (I hope). --32X 11:43, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That's actually how we had it originally, but we had to change it for some reason. Can't remember why now :P Kaldari 19:29, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  place inside the article 

message: Is it ok to put a range of years for the birthdate, like 1423-1431? 70.104.16.146 21:42, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Normally, I think c. (circa) would best fit, and for your example, "c. 1428" would make the most sense. It seems odds for a biographer to know a definitive range of years. Do you have an example of who you are discussing? --Rajah 05:51, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Range of years

message: Has persondata been of any use thus far? Is WP:1.0 using it? I'm just wondering if persondata has benefited some application. I noticed the German WP uses it far more than we do. What have they used it for? 70.104.16.75 20:27, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's useful for database purposes, since it is the only standardized template of that type and scope. --PhantomS 21:07, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Use?

message: Is it proving to be of any use at all on the English Wikipedia right now. I mean, is there any way to look at a database, if there is one, that isn't all script and whatnot? Or are we just starting to add something to pages that will be made eventually? Kaiser matias 09:34, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's usually harder to find the birthplace of someone in the en.WP than on de.WP. The box shows that data pretty clear. (Yes, there are articles where the birthdate is mentioned several times.) --32X 10:57, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Not to forget, it was used for the German DVDs. But that means there's a need for a bigger base. It doesn't really work if there are only some thousand articles with persondata compared to some hundred thousands without it. --32X 04:43, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  So What Does This Do Now 

message: Should these be historically/contextually accurate, or simply follow common modern usage (as we normally do)?  For instance, if someone was born in modern-day Seoul in the 1920s, should I enter the birthplace as "Seoul, South Korea" (the modern location)?  Or "Seoul, Korea"? Or "Gyeongseong, Korea" (probably the most contextually-appropriate)?  Or "Keijo, Chosen"?   Just curious -- it would be helpful to have some guidance on this (and other standardization issues) before starting intensive tagging work.  -- Visviva 12:36, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This was asked previously and didn't get much of a response. At the time, I went with contextually accurate. I guess I still feel that way. Mike Dillon 16:43, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

text: Whenever possible I try to give original names. F.e. when someone was born (or died) in Berlin in the 1950s-1980s era, it's important to know in which part of Berlin that was. --32X 14:28, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Placenames