Wikipedia talk:People by year

message: When a person has their own category, do we place the year categories in the person's article or in the person's category? --Joy [shallot] 21:38, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The various queries work much better if the categories are on the article (e.g Nikola Tesla), rather than the person's category (e.g :Category:Nikola Tesla). Thus, I'd prefer if they are added to the article. Besides, with the category on the article, it's more likely some corrects a year. -- User:Docu
Star Navya Naveli Nandaa (talk) 09:39, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  person category 

message: How are these dealt with? A statement concerning this should be present on the main project page. Particularly in relation to template usage (or non-usage)--ZayZayEM 13:47, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  BC births/deaths 

message: Before I saw this talk page, I created Template:bio-cats because I was creating lots of short bios for the Wikipedia:Nuttall Encyclopedia topics project, and wanted to save typing. Example:
 
although, confusingly, I put the occupation first in the expansion, because I thought of "bio" mnemonically as "birth, interment, occupation". I don't quite follow the arguments against such a practice though. David Brooks 04:32, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  born/died/occupation template 

message: Anyone have a problem with changing  to ?  The only difference is where it shows up alphabetically, such as in a listing of all the articles in the style guideline category, and there isn't anything else that alphabetizes as a "category", so it's a category without a category. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 20:45, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alphabetization in the Cat 

message: As is says in the first line, this page is a spinoff of Wikipedia:Categorization of people.  That's an editing guideline, and this article has the same type of material, so I'm guessing this should be an editing guideline, too.  Revert me if I'm wrong. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 03:16, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moving from style guideline to editing guideline 

message: In the following case:
"Nathan Pennypacker Stauffer (January 1, 1875 – June 6, 1959) was an early American football coach in the United States."
and others like it, is there written guidance as to how to categorize by year? Currently even though there is an exact birth and death date, the categories are 19th-century births and 20th-century deaths. I assume this is because the dates are not sourced or justified. But I have seen cases where there are no justifications for dates and exact birth and death categories are used. Please advise. Thank you--User:FeanorStar7 09:08, 31 December 2012‎ (UTC)
: The people-by-decade category  is nine years old but it and its siblings are not mentioned in the crucial section 2 that instructs category assignment. Instead the instruction is to use people-by-year on the one hand --including "Year of birth/date is approximate", as well as known, a matter under discussion immediately below-- and people-by-century on the other hand.
: I suppose the by-year category should be used whenever we give the year of birth or death in the article (text, infobox, notes) without qualification. "Sourcing" is another matter. If anything, doubt about a vital date --including doubt for mere lack of a source-- should be visible elsewhere in the article (text, infobox, notes) before it justifies omitting the category. Why should the use of people-by-decade or by-century categories, or unknown, missing, etc, have higher priority as a way to express doubt?
: In the next section Andy & Obi evidently support equal priority: use the precise category if and only if the article uses the precise year.
: --P64 (talk) 22:58, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Query

message: The ambiguous clause 
is being as an argument for moving a subject who we know was born in 1982 or 1983 from :Category:1980s births to :Category:1982 births. This is surely not what was intended; it is definitely not sensible. Can the wording be clarified? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:53, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I now see that the same issue was raised above, six years ago, but remains unanswered. I'll post a neutral pointer to this discussion, on one or more of the busier MoS talk pages. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:53, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: why don't we change it to say 'Use the categories by year; if the exact year isn't known but the decade or century is, you can add one of those categories instead.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 00:02, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

text: The smallest accurate era-category could be very large. Suppose a person is only known to have been born sometime between 1490 and 1510: :Category:2nd-millennium CE births seems scarcely sensible. One solution might be a special series of cats for these, e.g. :Category:Uncertain births circa 1500, :Category:Uncertain births circa 1982. In general, I should think that it better not to categorize at all if the only available choices are inaccurate.—Odysseus1479 04:44, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I arrived here after a little edit war on an article that states (born 1921 or 1922) with someone insisting on putting it under :Category:1921 births. I am working on software that validates information on Wikipedia pages, and having inconsistent dates and categories is putting that page into the cannot be trusted section. My esoteric choice would be :Category:Year of birth uncertain. I agree with , surely putting an article into a category that has 50% chance of being right is not really the intention? Periglio (talk) 10:10, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm of the opinion that it's better to categorize biographies on a best-effort basis than to not categorize them at all, or to categorize them vaguely. In this case (Arthur Edward Blanchette), we have source stating his age in May 1976. Given that May is in the first half of the year, it's more likely that he was born in 1921 than 1922 (albeit not much more likely). I really don't have strong feelings either way, except that as long as we have a guideline we ought to follow it. If this article is an exception to the guideline for some reason, then it's not clear to me which articles wouldn't be exceptions. Pburka (talk) 19:09, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ambiguity vs accuracy 

message: 1. These data may be interesting, suggestive, or useful.
:  (630 pp ~6)
1400
:  (54 pp ~5)
: :Category:15th-century births (532 pages ~5 per year)
1500
: :Category:1500s births (213 pages ~21 per year)
:  (627 pp ~6)
1600
:  (223 pp ~22)
Roughly speaking: Century categories are all the same size () as increasing numbers of biographies balance increasing knowledge of birth years.
2. Do we have an administrative category of pages that are now in multiple  or multiple  categories? Or any tool to generate a list of such pages?
--P64 (talk) 20:21, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  2000s and 21st-century 

message: After this comment at my talk page User_talk:Magioladitis#BC_birth_cats_by_decade_not_year and after this CfD Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_May_22#6th-century_BC_births it's not clear to me anymmore. Can anyone help me clarify? -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:08, 14 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is the appropriate category to add to a person born BC? 

message: Some articles give birth and death categories and others don't.  Is there a policy regarding whether the categories should be included?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._de_Garis_Davies   no categories for birth or death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_and_Donald_Parkinson   categories for birth and death included
--FeanorStar7 05:45, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: The first of those 2 articles is about a couple (not just one person). DexDor (talk) 17:39, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: They both are, that’s kind of the point of the question :-) - Chris.sherlock (talk) 07:13, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Articles about multiple people

message: In my opinion, the vast majority of the categories in births by year and deaths by year are overpopulated. They have grown so large that they no longer serve their intended purpose, which is so readers can "browse and quickly find sets of pages on topics that are defined by those characteristics". The worst culprit, , contains 16,930 articles, spread out over 85 pages. Nobody browses that many pages, let alone finds something quickly on them. The solution is easy: subcategorisation. First by month, then by date, e.g. 1900 births > January 1900 births > January 1, 1900 births. Note that, unlike the categories that have consistently been deleted at CFD, they refer to an exact date of birth. While in the early days of Wikipedia, it would have constituted overcategorisation, by now it is needed to keep the categories usable. I do realise that this is a monumental task if done manually, but I suppose an editor who is savvy with bots should be able to let a bot do most of the work. ExcitedEngineer (talk) 10:12, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I added an RfC tag. ExcitedEngineer (talk) 14:57, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: But most people who are just browsing will not know (or care about)  the month, let alone the day. Though dividing by subject may be too complicated, we could divide by country.  DGG ( talk ) 15:57, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: This is why I hate categories. What about those who have multiple countries they reside in? And is this going to work well for UK and U.S. citizens? There would still be too many! - Chris.sherlock (talk) 07:12, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. Also, country and year are an intersection, while day/month/year is a subdivision of year. ExcitedEngineer (talk) 19:30, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

text: I wonder if the true purpose of the birth and death categories is not, in fact, so readers can browse and quickly find sets of pages, but to record important biographical data in a systematic way. Birth and death years are frequently used to distinguish people who have similar names, they help us identify BLPs, and they can be helpful in populating more useful categories, such as :Category:21st-century Angolan poets. Perhaps the solution to the overpopulation problem (if it is a problem) is to formally acknowledge this purpose and make these all hidden categories. pburka (talk) 19:46, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

text: Looks like somebody already took issue with this back in '08. Anyway, since this isn't exactly a hotbed of activity, I went ahead and added the overpopulated template to the cats with over 10K entries. ExcitedEngineer (talk) 20:42, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

text: Could subcat by month, or could look at creating subcat which combines year of birth with country of birth? 1988 births in the United States for example. Greyjoy talk 07:07, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

text: Hi BrownHairedGirl. Agreed. 1234qwer1234qwer4 brought this issue up to me as it relates to the  database report, which is now flooded as a result of the "YYYY deaths" categories being removed from a few thousand biographies of dead people. We could certainly adjust this database report, but it feels like concurrently categorizing in "YYYY deaths" and "YYYY suicides" would be preferable. That's my read of the situation and the read of the two conversations about this I read, at least. (cc: Marcocapelle, Mitch Ames, GiantSnowman, Treehouse.poet, valereee) --MZMcBride (talk) 05:06, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree wholeheartedly with  that "the practice of not diffusing "YYYY births and "YYYY deaths" is longstanding and stable. It should not be changed without a clear and broad consensus". However, I have no problem with categorising in both YYYY deaths and YYYY suicides et al categories. GiantSnowman 10:15, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

text: I suggest that "sub-categories diffuse by default", is longstanding and that there is no consensus to change it - and being an actual documented guideline (WP:SUBCAT) takes precedence over the (apparently) undocumented convention of "not diffusing "YYYY births and "YYYY deaths". Given that there are many subcategories in , each of which presumably is a subcat of "yyyy deaths", we might have a problem. Presumably the solution is to tag every "yyyy deaths" category as  and all subcats in  as . Mitch Ames (talk) 12:47, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed subcategorisation 

message: I see no sign of any consensus here to subcategorise these categories, or to tag the categories as .  I will therefore remove the  tags from the ~60 categories to which ExcitedEngineer added it.
These categories are fundamental biographical data, and between them they contain many hundreds of thousands of articles.  The practice of not diffusing "YYYY births and "YYYY deaths" is longstanding and stable. It should not be changed without a clear and broad consensus ... and while I am sure that ExcitedEngineer acted in good faith, it seems to me that they have gotten a wee bit too excited. This brief discussion between 5 editors is not the robust consensus needed for such a big change.
If anyone wants to revive this proposal, please open a new RFC, and this time advertise it properly by listing at WP:CENT, and at relevant WikiProjects such as WP:BIOG, WP:CATP, WP:YEARS. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:07, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi BrownHairedGirl. Agreed. 1234qwer1234qwer4 brought this issue up to me as it relates to the  database report, which is now flooded as a result of the "YYYY deaths" categories being removed from a few thousand biographies of dead people. We could certainly adjust this database report, but it feels like concurrently categorizing in "YYYY deaths" and "YYYY suicides" would be preferable. That's my read of the situation and the read of the two conversations about this I read, at least. (cc: Marcocapelle, Mitch Ames, GiantSnowman, Treehouse.poet, valereee) --MZMcBride (talk) 05:06, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree wholeheartedly with  that "the practice of not diffusing "YYYY births and "YYYY deaths" is longstanding and stable. It should not be changed without a clear and broad consensus". However, I have no problem with categorising in both YYYY deaths and YYYY suicides et al categories. GiantSnowman 10:15, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

text: I suggest that "sub-categories diffuse by default", is longstanding and that there is no consensus to change it - and being an actual documented guideline (WP:SUBCAT) takes precedence over the (apparently) undocumented convention of "not diffusing "YYYY births and "YYYY deaths". Given that there are many subcategories in , each of which presumably is a subcat of "yyyy deaths", we might have a problem. Presumably the solution is to tag every "yyyy deaths" category as  and all subcats in  as . Mitch Ames (talk) 12:47, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removing tags