Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography/Archive 3

message: When reading biographies of individuals, I find that the introduction part is chronologically organized rather than being organized by their importance. A case in point is Eduard Shevardnadze. I would normally expect people to know him as a former President of Georgia first, and then as a former foreign minister of the erstwhile Soviet Union. The article prefers to introduce him in the reverse order. Is it a convention in wikipedia to follow this methodology or is it upto the editors? Left to me, I would change the order, but I find simply too many articles like this, and I thought I would ask first. 
I tried to find the answer in Wikipedia biography style guides. But, I found no specific answer.
chance 06:22, Nov 28, 2003 (UTC)
:Left up to editors, not least because "importance" is subjective; for instance, some would argue that Shevardnadze was more important as foreign minister of the SU than as president of a small country. Also note that sometimes it works better to list the most important notability last in a paragraph, because you can make it stand out more - a sort of mini-conclusion. Read it out loud both ways before deciding. Stan 08:22, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: What you describe is not limited to biographies, but very common in the natural sciences where I like to work.  Lots of "good" facts added over time with no thought to any logical arrangement/organizatioon. But that is how this place works for a lot of people: "Hey, I have a factoiid, I'll go add it to Wikipedia!" IMHO that is just fine. My forte is to go into those articles and do the organizing; I love it, especially if I'm confronted with numerous interesting factoids.  It is called copyediting, and a valid persuit that many spend their time here doing. Great system in my opinion; not a short-coming - Marshman 21:02, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Organization of biographies 

message: I note that full dates are preferred, even in the opening 'graph.  IMO the alternative is to put at most years in that 'graph, and put full birthdate in the first 'graph of the chronology, and full death date in the last 'graph of the chronology, bcz full dates are too much detail for the opening 'graph.  And having to find them in the text is only a problem if everyone thinks they'd only be in 1st 'graph, bcz very few people care about more than what general time-frame to think of the person in. However, the standard is clear & i don't mind checking my contributions & fixing the ones i've done that way.  In the longer run: if others agree with my argument, they could note that here. --Jerzy 02:43, 2004 Jan 12 (UTC)
:I agree. Maurreen 17:35, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Disagree. It is standard enclopaedic practice to use full date at the start. The opening paragraph should be a suffiently self-contained work to tell who a person was, when they lived and died, and what they are most famous for. That is standard style. If you don't know the full information, you can often just gives years. Older encyclopaedias did that because they had to balance all the information they had on older biographies was years, not dates. But newer encyclopaedias have better methods of chasing such information and produce constant new editions, so they have greater flexibility in updating information. As we can update information instantly there is no excuse for not putting the relevant information up front. And there is nothing more relevant  that the birth and death dates as well as years. FearÉIREANN 22:55, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please Consider Changing Dates Style 

message: I recently created a stub about Ruth Krauss. I wanted to include her places of birth and death as well as the dates, without saying anything more about them.  (biographies) recommends the standard format
*Ruth Krauss (July 25, 1901-July 10, 1993)
but if you open like that, it is hard to think of a way of including the places succinctly. It's not as if it were a full biography, in which you could have a paragraph beginning "Krauss was born in a red-brick Mongolian yurt in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of a poor but honest woodchopper and screenwriter Anita Loos. The influence of Baltimore's red-brick architecture can be seen every aspect of her work..." (or whatever the actual facts might be). 
I settled for:
Ruth Krauss (b. July 25, 1901, Baltimore, Maryland; d. July 10, 1993, Westport, Connecticut)
Thoughts? Are there any experienced sages who have a recommendation (and might consider adding it to  (biographies)?)
* It's hard to work in the birthplace where there is nothing about youth or upbringing.  If there were, it would be easy to start with, "Born in Baltimore, Maryland...". Even a short article like this would not do poorly to end by reiterating death date (and that's where place of death can go): "Krauss died July 10, 1993 in Westport, Connecticut." -- Jmabel 21:01, Jul 30, 2004 (UTC)
* I recommend "born" and "died" instead of "b." and "d.". Much more readable at the cost of only 4 bytes! Gdr 18:26, 2004 Aug 1 (UTC)
*I don't put in born or died.  It is quite obvious that the first date is the birth date and so on.  The introductory paragraph states why the person is important.  It is in the Bio section, the next section, where I put in the birth place and places the person been to. WHEELER 23:34, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  How to include places of birth/death '''briefly?'''