Wikipedia talk:Persondata/Archive 2

message: The  template is including  at the top of pharaoh articles... Mike Dillon 00:46, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: yes, we need to resolve this. I asked on the Pharaoh infobox talk page that the Persondata template be removed from the Infobox. We need to follow up on this. --Rajah 22:05, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Template:Pharaoh Infobox]] 

message: Can we add siblings and parents as a cat? That way if the info is removed from the article, at least the info will be easily found by those who need the info. The info doesn't have to display, but its a good place to store it. The biography infobox has this information but it displays all answers. This way the info could be not displayed and still be available for researchers. Answer at my page please. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 20:45, 24 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This seems like a bad idea; persondata has been standardized for the most part.  Ral315 (talk) 23:37, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Siblings and parents

message: It should be relatively trivial to arrange to have "Persondata" published with hCard microformat mark-up, simply by applying some standard class names to its containing elements. The data coudl then be extracted by a variety of parsing tools. Please see also Wikipedia:WikiProject Microformats Andy Mabbett 20:59, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: hCard microformat

message: Anyone interested in a proposed project to link to WorldCat Identities is invited to leave comments or sign up at the project proposal page. WorldCat Identities provides pages for 20 million 'identities' (authors and persons who are the subjects of published titles in WorldCat). Several thousand of these pages provide links to Wikipedia biographical pages: providing links in the other direction would allow readers of Wikipedia biographical articles to move straight to associated library information held in WorldCat libraries. Dsp13 15:17, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Project proposal to link to WorldCat Identities

message: For the "Date of Birth" parameter, should we use  or should we stay clear of this? --WillMak050389 01:10, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I would avoid it. Any application using Persondata is likely to be working with the wiki-text directly, which means it will see  rather than 	July 15, 1967 (age 39). The idea with Persondata is to make it easier for automatic extraction of data; either of these is yet another format your parser has to handle. In any case the age is more useful to human readers; given the birthdate any program can easily calculate the age. Dr pda 01:39, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, I wasn't sure, but this makes sense. I'll change the ones I've edited. --WillMak050389 01:43, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Template:Birth date and age 

message: Where categories are immediately preceded by a Template:DEFAULTSORT, should the persondata go between the defaultsort template (which seems the strict reading of 'immediately before categories', but confusingly splits the defaultsort template from the categories it is concerned with) or immediately before the defaultsort template (which seems more natural to me, but should be specified if that is what is to be recommended)? Dsp13 12:33, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: In my opinion  is not a real but a meta-template which directly belongs to categories. I don't see the problem here, but to avoid any confusion I've added a comment. --32X 21:19, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks. I've modified the script to place the persondata before the  template if it exists. You may need to refresh your monobook.js to pick up the changes. Dr pda 23:04, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Query re positioning of persondata before categories

message: ...you can now tell them not to do it again, by putting  on their user talk page. They will also be pointed here for more information on persondata. Resurgent insurgent 03:33, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  If you see someone removing persondata templates... 

message: Further to my above comment about hCard, please can someone explain to me the purpose and advantage of having persondata in a separate, hidden-by-default table instead of having the same, standard fields in the output of the various infobox templates? What tools exist to parse persondata, inside or outside Wikipedia? Andy Mabbett 00:59, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The  isn't a real information box but meta data. It was introduced for the first DVD of the German Wikipedia. The data field is pretty easy accessible with direct SQL (when you have downloaded an image) and therefor allows search operations. With a large article base (more than 100,000 in de.WP) it allows you to do SQL operations like f.e. to search for articles of birth places which aren't written yet. Some time ago I've read about several tools, but because I didn't felt the need I haven't used them. --32X 18:50, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for the explanation. The use-case makes sense, but it seem to me that this could be achieved just as easily, by using hcard, and hCard-like classes, in infoboxes, instead of repeating the information separately; and that that would have additional advantages for readers and editors, through greater interoperability with other tools and websites and ease of authoring. It would also facilitate persondata-like metadata for organisations and venues, though their infoboxes. I'm happy to advise further, if anyone's interested in pursuing this possibility.Andy Mabbett 19:16, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

text: To clarify issues in my own mind, I've drawn up a comparison of persondata and hCard properties, on the microformats wiki. Andy Mabbett 19:49, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

text: A good reason is that someone using Pesondata usually has read this page and knows what they're doing. It is far more common for people to mess up and misuse infobox, which would garble the metadata.Circeus 19:03, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Like any bad edit, surely that can be remedied? Andy Mabbett 19:16, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

text: Cheers, Andy Mabbett 19:33, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

text: Andy Mabbett 19:39, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Why is persondata separate to infobox?

message: In the case of Victor Hugo, the displayed persondata box gets mixed up together with an immediately preceding succession box. Anyone know why, or how to fix it? Dsp13 12:12, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There was a missing  template after the succession box. It's fixed now. Dr pda 15:10, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Persondata box & succession box display

message: How best to handle old-style dates? At the moment with Samuel Johnson I've left a template for old-style dates in his birth year, but (per discussion of dates above) I'd rather leave something more transparent in the wikitext. Dsp13 12:54, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the way you have handled it is best for now. --Rajah 05:30, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Gregorian/Julian calendar shift

message: Ramesses II has persondata somehow 'transcluded' onto the page. I'm not quite sure how this works, or it it's desirable. Any thoughts? Dsp13 21:28, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It is because the Pharaoh Infobox contains the persondata template. Wikipedia_talk:Persondata#Template:Pharaoh_Infobox --Rajah 23:25, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Transcluded persondata?

message: Is there any other metadata templates?  Is there any project to make more relevant metadata templates or does the microformats project pretty much take up this area? Remember 16:13, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No, sadly, an organized metadata does not yet exist on wikipedia as far as I know. The microformats, persondata, geodata, etc. movements are all balkanized at present. (Not that that is a bad thing necessarily.) I'm actually in favor of articles having a separate metadata page a la talk pages, but that's just my two cents. --Rajah 05:26, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

text: You may want to look at Extension:Semantic_MediaWiki depending on your level of interest. --Rajah 22:18, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Other metadata information  

message: I'm looking at Delirious%3F_musicians and wondering if PERSONDATA can appear multiple times on the same page and not cause problems. Any thoughts? Dan, the CowMan 03:17, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: For now, I would stick to adding persondata to people with articles about themselves. --Rajah 05:24, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

text: You can, though, use  to generate in-line hCard microformats for each person. Andy Mabbett 08:58, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use on pages listing multiple people... 

message: Further to earlier discussions, a number of biography-related infoboxes now produce an hCard microformat. Please feel free to add the necessary mark-up to more. (Cheifly, that's class="vacrd" on the whole infobox and "class="fn" on the pagename or name field.) Note that the date of birth is only included if  or  is used. Andy Mabbett 17:14, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This is total madness. How did someone think it was a good idea to have redundant metadata? The hcard functionality should have been implemented in Persondata, not in 500 different infoboxes. What a mess. Kaldari 22:44, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  hCard microformats in infoboxes 

message: A couple of questions:
- Are nicknames acceptable within the ALTERNATIVE NAMES attribute?
- Could it be further clarified as to what should populate NAME and ALTERNATIVE NAMES? For example, for Tony Blair, his full birth name is in ALTERNATIVE NAMES, and his familiar name in NAME, but for Steven Gerrard it is the other way around.
Thanks,
--Jameboy 16:16, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The Tony Blair example is how it is supposed to work. For Steven Gerrard, his full name in the name field is enough. Having his name sans middle name in the Alternative field doesn't add any information. (If anything you would put Gerrard, Steven in the name field and Gerrard, Steven Middlename in the Alternative field. --Rajah 20:32, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks. What about nicknames though? --Jameboy 14:28, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I would say it would depend on the nickname and how uniquely identifying it is. e.g. "Honest Abe" shouldn't be in Abraham Lincoln, but Splendid Splinter could be in Ted Williams. For nobility, nicknames are sometimes the first name in the persondata, e.g. Catherine II of Russia Generally, if a nickname universally and uniquely identifies someone, I think it should be listed in the Alternative Names section, if it fails to meet those criteria it should be omitted. Do you have a specific example? --Rajah 20:33, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  NAME attributes 

message: Is light gray really a good color to put on a white background? Maybe it could be darker and in bold. ~ EdBoy[c] 03:15, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I guess most editors who use Persondata are familiar with the fields. Since the data is only a set of meta-data without any relevance for the article at all, it's not that bad to see it in a decent colour scheme. IIRC the colours are defined by CSS, so you should by able to define your own CSS rules (dark, bold, blinking, CAPS, ...). --32X 20:23, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Colors 

message: Could the instructions please be specific, that the surname generally used in Spanish language names is the first surname where two are given.  For example, I have just become aware of this template because of one of the pages I have on my watchlist, Ecuadorian footballer Ulises de la Cruz.  His mother's surname is Bernal, and so the full, formal version of his name is Ulises de la Cruz Bernal, but this is not in common use.  He has,however, been given a persondata box showing him as 
|NAME= Bernal, Ulises de la Cruz
There will be many errors of this type if this is not made very clear.  I am unsure as to how scripts to automatically extract information might avoid this error.  Kevin McE 16:47, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, the script is a guide. The human being who was using should have realized that Bernoid was the maternal surname and that it was not Ulises' surname. That's why the name of his article is Ulises de la Cruz, with no Bernoid. Generally, I think editors should either stick to names in languages with which they are somewhat conversant, or learn the rules for the language/culture they are editing, so that errors of this type don't propogate.  --Rajah 01:48, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

text: Interestingly, the german wikipedia gives this names as:  NAME=de la Cruz Bernardo, Ulises , while the Spanish wikipedia has to have his persondata added. --Rajah 01:50, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hispanic Surnames 

message: How is telling people how many articles on the German Wikipedia have persondata useful information on the English Wikipedia? Voretus 17:00, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: One way it is potentially useful is that a skilled programmer could transfer the persondata wholesale in the same fashion as the Interwiki bot does with interwiki links. --Rajah 18:47, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

text: Motivation. Compare it with my answer for So What Does This Do Now. You can't work with only a few articles, you need a larger base. --> "So they've reached > 150k? Wow. We'll try to be better in a few months." (hopefully) --32X 23:18, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  German Wikipedia 

message: Why not put Metadata in it's own tab for any given article? Thus all articles would have an "Article" tab, a "Discussion" tab and a "Metadata" tab. This would keep the article area clean of meta data, the tab could be (hypothetically) be limited to more advanced users. I realize this might be a bit of a pain in terms of extending the MediaWiki software, but long haul would this not be a major improvement? —Wikijeff 16:26, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I totally agree, as I mentioned earlier . For now though, this is the best compromise we can make. Mostly the reason this issue isn't that dwelt upon is that only a very small minority appreciate it. I'm slowly working on some offline wikipedia data mining/visualization tools that should, hopefully, get people fired up about it. --Rajah 00:37, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

text: I also agree that this would be a great step, but it needs to be raised with the devs (who for all I know may already be working on something of this nature).  Community support is only marginally relevant for MediaWiki software issues such as this. -- Visviva 02:27, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Until there is a change in the software, it seems to me that the best option is to store metadata on a subpage (I think this has been mentioned before). I discuss this below for the Persondata template, but in fact, the current version of my demonstration allows for arbitrary metadata: the data needed for a particular purpose (such as Persondata) are selected using a key. Geometry guy 20:07, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  My two cents on Wikipeda's handling of metadata 

message: I've now added more data to Talk:Alexander Grothendieck/Persondata and shown how this data can be used to generate the infobox. There is also a link in the infobox to allow the data to be edited. This is all very much an experiment and a work-in-progress, so please add comments. Geometry guy 22:09, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There's now an hCard, too. Andy Mabbett 22:13, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Update

message: Should the pages at Template talk:Persondata/Removing data have persondata or not? If not, please help tidy them up. Thanks. Carcharoth 01:03, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Just remove them. Persondata belong only to biographys (only one instance per page) or on redirects if there's only one article covering several people (f.e. twins, who're only notable as twins but not as single persons). --32X 01:30, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tidying up a few pages 

message: In case anyone missed it, see Wikipedia talk:Persondata#Half-automatic tagging with persondata-tool for details of a script to help extract and add persondata. Carcharoth 01:10, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Link to the archived discussion: Wikipedia_talk:Persondata/archive2#Half-automatic_tagging_with_persondata-tool  --Rajah 08:09, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Persondata tagging script 

message: What's to be done about projects like WikiProject Composers and WikiProject Opera, where a cabal are insisting, against the evidence, to have a consensus for the removal of biographical infoboxes from all of "their" articles? Andy Mabbett
:Forum-shopping, Mabbett. Isn't it time to let this go? Moreschi  Talk 09:02, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Not forum shopping; this is perfectly on-topic - and relates to previous discussion - here. Have you read that discussion, or are you just following me around? Andy Mabbett 09:34, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

text: The advantage of a separate MetaData page is that if editors of an article want to remove the biographical infobox, they can. The data remains available on the MetaData page. Hopefully this will reduce conflict of the kind that I am sensing here! Geometry guy 10:36, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I thought that the proposal was to generate the metadata page using data from the infobox? Andy Mabbett 10:59, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

text: Initially, there may need to be a data migration exercise to create metadata pages from current infobox and persondata tables. However, thereafter, the proposal is to generate the infobox (if desired) and the persondata (if needed) from the metadata. Indeed, the whole point of the proposal is that it is much easier to generate the infobox from the metadata than vice-versa. Geometry guy 12:54, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That seems reasonable, so long as there is only one place where the data is entered or amended. Andy Mabbett 13:16, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Metadata in biography infoboxes 

message: Is there any reason why a person's name is held as a single field, and not as, say, "family name" "given name", etc? Andy Mabbett 10:25, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No. This is an example of what I had in mind by the potential for the Person/Metadata subpage to refine the information in the standard Persondata table. The dates of birth and death could be refined in a similar way, if desired. Geometry guy 10:39, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Good, separate day, month, season and year fields would greatly facilitate display of date of birth (and of death, as planned) in hCard, which requires the YYYY-MM-DD format; and which, if DoB is given as, say, "spring 1456", should only be output as "1456". perhaps we might also consider adding "honorific prefix" and "honorific suffix" fields (for use in , for example, ). A handy list of hCard properties may be found at http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-cheatsheet Andy Mabbett 10:56, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Granularity of fields 

message: What was the rationale behind telling people to put it before the cats and IWs? Seems far more logical to be at the very bottom of everything (ie the Cats and IWs are displayed by default, and are more directly related to Wikipedia readers--metadata would make more sense separate from all the content, just like dab headers should be on the first line, ahead of all article content). It also often gets used in a way that adds excess whitespace to the displayed article--this could easily be avoided by putting it at the bottom. I do agree that the first directions (between Cats and IWs was worse, but I don't think before the Cats was the best "fix". Sohelpme 01:43, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Presumably, that was because of technical reasons. See Wikipedia_talk:Persondata/archive1#Location_in_article, Wikipedia_talk:Persondata/archive1#place_inside_the_article. Hopefully, metadata templates can get out of the main article in the future... --Rajah 15:53, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

text: It only adds whitespaces when stub templates are following. ("By convention this is placed at the end of the article, after [...] the category tags, so that the stub category will appear last.") So better start changing stubs to articles. ;) --32X 20:23, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

text: All other Wikipedia language editions (I think) place cats and interwiki-links at the very bottom. Interwiki-links are frequently added/changed by users from other language editions, or by interwiki-bots. It would be quite difficult for them if they had to look up the individual rules for placing the interwiki-links in each language edition. --88.134.44.255 02:18, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Location

message: FYI: WikiProject Infoboxes: Granularity of people's names. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 14:59, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Granularity of names 

message: The templates  and  now have parameters for resting place and resting place_coordinates (see Marylin Monroe for an example using both). These are included in the hcard microformat. I think we should add them in PERSONDATA, too. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 12:12, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That's not a very good idea. The persondata is a set of few but rudimental information about a person. The resting place isn't rudimental and not even known for the majority of people covert by biographies. I also fear the result of such an information for Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor. --32X 22:03, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Resting places of dead people 

message: Please see Wikipedia talk:Metadata standardization. Thanks! Kaldari 23:25, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Metadata standardization 

message: Hi all,
I've added instructions for how to extract persondata from the database dump and load it into a MySQL database. I've also compiled some lists of articles with problems in their persondata syntax, these can be found at User:Dr pda/Sandbox. Feel free to help tidy these up. There are over 1000 articles where the name has been entered in the form John Smith rather than Smith, John, so perhaps further education is needed somewhere. Dr pda 23:45, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Nice work! I totally agree that we need to make it easier for the people who are new to Persondata. --Rajah 06:20, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Added instructions for extraction from database dump

message: Especially, how to deal with things like inexact birth and death dates. e.g. Are "1480/1", "late 1500s", "c. April 25, 1994", etc. acceptable? If not, what should be there? (I know a lot of this answered in the archives to this talk page. When I get time, I'm gonna go back and collate all the suggestions/pronouncements and place them where they should be (IN THE INSTRUCTIONS).) Also, reminding people that Last name first holds in alternative names as well. (I've been guilty of that myself.) Etc. I think the best way of showing those new to Persondata how to add it would be about 4-5 examples of common things that occur: People who are still alive, people with unknown birthdates/years, people without simple "LastName, FirstName" orderings, etc. --Rajah 06:19, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: We need to rewrite/revise/update the instructions

message: How easy would it be to see a monthly figure of how many bios now have persondata?  I've seen the figure of 15,000 as at Nov 07, but could it be done along the lines of x for Nov, y for Dec, total = Z? Lugnuts (talk) 18:09, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It should be pretty easy. A simple way would be to screenscrape the pages you get from What Links Here in the mainspace. For historical data, you can check out User:Rajah/persondata#Persondata_count --Rajah (talk) 22:37, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Progress stats