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Archive 1Archive 2

Using Persondata in articles about person-centered events

Hi. I'm wondering if there would be any problem with including the persondata in an article such as Muhammad al-Durrah incident, which is primarily concerned with one person, but might not be technically considered a "biography". (or maybe it is, simply by being included in Wikiproject Biography?). I'm not sure who or how the end result of this data is used, but am hoping that this kind of usage won't be a problem. I'm mostly just curious, as I saw the bot making an update to the template there. Thanks for any pointers. -- Quiddity (talk) 20:46, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

I don't like this idea: it's useful for bot-readers of the page to have all the help they can to know if the page is about a person, or about something else - here, an event concerned with a person.Dsp13 (talk) 09:16, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
Template:Persondata/doc makes it quite clear that it's not for events about people. Such articles might not include information like birth/death dates and places, for example, so the template would have limited use.
Also, not everything under WikiProject Biography's scope can really be called a biography. Music groups can also fall under their scope (unless something changed) and those don't need persondata either. 1ForTheMoney (talk) 23:26, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
I've removed it from that article. Thanks for the input. -- Quiddity (talk) 19:09, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Difficulty finding your project

Hello. I was trying to find information on what "Persondata" was and came across the Persondata article, which has been deleted multiple times. After some effort and searching I finally arrived at the correct destination: Wikipedia:Persondata. It appears that several people have tried to create an article for Persondata to help others find information (perhaps after going through the same searches themselves), but the article seems controversial and is usually removed.

It looks like some people are struggling to find out what Persondata is, and are unable to easily find the Wikipedia:Persondata page. The Persondata article being repeatedly deleted looks like a symptom of this problem. Do you think you could help solve this? Please see my explanation on the Talk:Persondata page - if you have suggestions they are welcome. Thanks! --Culix (talk) 03:59, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Identifying vandalism

I reverted an earlier case of vandalism here in which the Persondata was changed to show that Max Clifford is dead. The article lede was not changed, nor was the infobox. Since the Persondata is not displayed, isn't wasn't obvious. (I was adding an external link for Worldcat, so it caught my eye as I scrolled past.) It's certainly possible this, and similar vandalism to Persondata fields, has been done to other articles. Could someone perhaps write a script to flag occurrences of Persondata being in conflict with the infobox? I believe there are currently scripts which create and fill in Persondata based on infobox data, so this would be similar but in reverse. 99.50.188.77 (talk) 16:45, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

In Persondata tables, should the place of birth and death fields be populated with wikilink brackets? The examples at Wikipedia:Persondata do not show such brackets, but the example on this project page (Wikipedia:WikiProject Persondata#Guidelines) does. Thanks. Jweiss11 (talk) 16:24, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Ultimately this is really a matter of personal discretion; sometimes I do it and sometimes I don't, depending on my mood. If you do choose to wikilink, link the names of places but never whole countries (since they're commonly known), and avoid piped links as they make the fields longer than necessary. 1ForTheMoney (talk) 23:45, 23 October 2011 (UTC)
I don't think there should ever be any wikilinks in any of the Persondata fields. The main purpose of Persondata is to make it convenient for external parsers to extract data in a standard format. The wikilinks just add another step in the parsing process. --Thorwald (talk) 15:53, 30 October 2011 (UTC)


Category:Persondata templates without short description parameter

As some of you are well aware this category is massive (over 706,000 articles) however it is coming down (from over 740,000) and we have now cleared all the articles in "Z" have been cleared. Is it time for a mini celebration! Waacstats (talk) 13:52, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

You tell me, is it? — DeeJayK (talk) 15:51, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
Not until that counter reads zero - over 75% of templates still need a description, so celebrations are a bit premature. (On that note, get back to work! And get more people to work too!) 1ForTheMoney (talk) 02:35, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

Place of birth through the ages

I posted the following question on WP:HD, but was redirected here as no one knew the answer.

When documenting someone's place of birth, do you write the place name and county when the person was born, or what it is today? For example,Tony Hayward, the poor guy, was born in Slough, which is now in Buckinghamshire, but at the time was in Berkshire. So what do you put on his article? It's a question that's bugged me for some time but I've never found the policy on it. Thanks in advance. —Half Price 11:20, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

A fair question. There may not be an obvious answer when the time interval is relatively short. However for a longer interval stating the current location could mean giving a country or place that didn't exist at the time, which wouldn't make sense. So I'd give the location as it was at the time. Rjwilmsi 13:33, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
It's really a case of individual discretion whether you use current or historical. I use the place names as they are given in each article; this way it's less likely to have conflicting information in the persondata and article/infobox. (Plus I personally don't have time to go checking where every town or city is or was, if that makes sense). 1ForTheMoney (talk) 23:21, 14 March 2011 (UTC)
I had the same situation with someone born in what is now West Virginia, but well prior to the American Civil War, when the place was in Virginia. I put [[place, West Virginia]] in the persondata, as that way the link would work, but left the text saying Virginia, accurate for the date of birth. Having links work is one consideration, but there are others, too. UK or United Kingdom is absurd for the middle ages, England, Wales, or Scotland is far more likely to be accurate and useful for links.--DThomsen8 (talk) 12:52, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps Slough, Berkshire (previously Buckinghamshire and West Virginia (previously Virginia. It's a similar problem to Old Style and New Style dates dates - for example: Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705] – April 17, 1790) . 99.50.188.77 (talk) 16:53, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm running into this a lot with Canadian music articles. I agree with Rjwilmsi in that the Persondata project must use historical place names at the time of birth and at death. Émile Benoît was born in 1913 in the Dominion of Newfoundland and died in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. To assign as his PLACE OF BIRTH = Newfoundland and Labrador in the {{Persondata}} is plain wrong. The British colony didn't join the Canadian Confederation until 1949. For Canadians born 1841 – 1867, I am including the Canada East / Canada West destinction. My anachronism is in treating East/West as separate provinces. The legislatures of Upper Canada and Lower Canada were merged under the Act of Union 1840 to form the single United Province of Canada. The East/West differentation is important as both were given equal representation under the Act regardless of population in the newly formed legislature. This was one reason for the Canadian Confederation of 1867. I'll be treating Rupert's Land in the same manner: historically. Argolin (talk) 04:10, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Viewing each article's Persondata

I created a /myskin.css for myself per What is Persondata?. I'm not using it as it is radically different from the default vector. There is no format to any wikipage with this custom CSS. I would still really like to view the Persondata without having to edit the page. Two questions: 1. What other statements have to go into the /myskin.css? 2. Can't someone impliment a checkbox on the Appearance tab in My Preferences? Thank-you. Argolin (talk) 21:08, 9 January 2012 (UTC)

There is a customizable CSS page for each skin. Vector's is at User:Yourusernamehere/vector.css (note lowercase V). To that page, add the code:
table.persondata { display:table; }
Save and do a hard refresh (Ctrl + Shift + R works in Chrome and Firefox) and you should be good to go. (I'm not sure why the Persondata page advocates using myskin, that is a mostly empty skin intended for use by people who basically want to create their own skin from scratch.) —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 06:35, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
That's the problem. It "is a mostly empty skin". I looked at User:Argolin/vector.css to add the code to the custom CSS. There is no code there to add. I want it to look like the default vector. What other code is missing? Argolin (talk) 13:02, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
Adding code to your empty vector.css should modify the Vector skin, creating a combination of Vector's default CSS and whatever you add. Your vector.css should contain only this:
table.persondata {display:table !important;}
Of course, you need to have Vector selected as your skin via Preferences. This code, added to vector.css, should display Persondata in a standard Vector skin. (I errantly forgot the "!important;" above, this was apparently not needed with Monobook, so I overlooked it. Apologies.) —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 12:42, 12 January 2012 (UTC)
The problem was that I created a new MySkin | Custom CSS instead of a new Vector | Custom CSS. Thanks. Argolin (talk) 06:40, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2012 January 30#Template:Persondata

Your comments are welcome at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2012 January 30#Template:Persondata. Fram (talk) 10:12, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

About Jean Buckley

Previous Jean Buckley entry (please see Wikipedia:WikiProject_Persondata/List_of_biographies/25) was moved to Jean M. Buckley, as she appears at FBLA-PBL website. There is a new entry for Jean Buckley, a former AAGPBL player. Thanks for your attention. MusiCitizen (talk) 23:36, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:HighBeam

Wikipedia:HighBeam describes a limited opportunity for Wikipedia editors to have access to HighBeam Research.
—Wavelength (talk) 18:49, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

User pages?

Are user pages supposed to have persondata? AutomaticStrikeout (talk) 01:53, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

No, just articles. (A user could create an article in their userspace and add persondata to that, but I don't know whether that's such a good idea or not.) 1ForTheMoney (talk) 10:41, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

How many biographies, and how many persondataified?

Hi all,

I'm doing some preliminary research at the moment regarding the possibility of integrating authority control identifiers into Wikipedia articles on a large scale (similarly to the way de.wp does it - they have 50% biography coverage, we have >0.5%...). One thing I'm trying to work out, as part of this, is what level of coverage the persondata system currently has - what proportion of biographies currently have the template?

Some datapoints:

  • this project has a nominal target marker of 913,425
  • we're approaching 995,000 articles with {{persondata}} at the moment
  • just over a million pages transclude {{WikiProject Biography}}
  • there's 988,000 articles in WP Biography assessment categories
    • ...but both of these have some non-biographies counted - perhaps 19-20,000 disambigs, categories, etc.

There's clearly more persondata articles than WP Biography articles; the question is, how many are left to go? I've been working on a rough estimate of "persondata is over 90% complete", which would suggest no more than 1,100,000 biographies in total; does this seem too high or too low an estimate to anyone? Andrew Gray (talk) 11:54, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

That estimate (and in fact most of this page) are extremely out of date, as efforts are normally coordinated at Wikipedia talk:Persondata and this project has basically been left to rot. Bots that add persondata normally do so based on categories such as [[Category:XXXX births]], [[Category:XXXX deaths]], [[Category:Living people]] and so on, along with templates like {{birth date and age}}, rather than whether the talk page is tagged with {{WikiProject Biography}}. So the actual percentage of biographies tagged with persondata is probably higher than you think - certainly more than 90%. 1ForTheMoney (talk) 15:03, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
Yeah, I was somewhat baffled by the arbitrariness (and precision!) of the target marker. I'm reassured by the coverage estimate, though - higher is definitely good. Thanks! Andrew Gray (talk) 16:28, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Ancestor fields

I have been in a debate over ancestry see talk:Marie, Duchess of Auvergne#Ancestry section, which has landed a question at WP:RS/N#Ancestry section (Ahnentafel) at Marie, Duchess of Auvergne. Whatever the outcome of these debates it is obvious that many editors like to use {{Ahnentafel top}}/{{Ahnentafel bottom}} templates to create ancestor trees and that many of them have no reliable sources to back them up.

It seems to me that a service this project could carry out is to add fields to the Persondata for "mother" and "father". This would in the long term allow data in Persondata to be used to check the information in the Ahnentafel templates and to generate ancestor trees for notable people such as royalty and major noble families. As it would be automated it would also allow automated cross checking of entries in Ahnentafel templates, and probably generate information that is not currently available from other sources. -- PBS (talk) 23:56, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Joint biography

Section 5 far above #How to deal with "dual biography" articles? (2008–2010) includes cross-reference to a section of Wikipedia talk:Persondata that was archived long ago. (That talk page comprehends both usage and technical matters, for Template talk:Persondata redirects there.)

Our five-year-old cross-ref concerns the earliest of three sections that I found this hour by skimming the Contents of those WP talk archives:

The latter ends with a recommendation by Rich Farmbrough (my interpretation) that multiple copies of {{Persondata}} should be used in joint biographies, one for each person covered. Clearly he conveys that multiple completed templates do not interfere inevitably; that depends on what use outsiders try to make of them.

That conclusion is now more than a year old. I don't know anything myself about its validity then or now.

--P64 (talk) 23:27, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

K. A. Applegate needs attention

K. A. Applegate persondata needs attention. The format for provision of three names may be correct and the three names may be individually correct but none is the name we give in the lead sentence.

Furthermore DNB lists three pseudonyms; LCCN lists those three alternative names and also links LCCN: Morris, Kimberly which confuses me.

--P64 (talk) 22:44, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Jean Lee Latham needs attention

Jean Lee Latham persondata needs attention for the latter reason given immediately above for Applegate. LCCN lists two or three pseudonyms for Latham.

Pursuing the first of three ... LCCN explains "[Rose Campion seems to have been a "house pseud." of Dramatic Pub. Co.]". Is that something we should pass over in Latham persondata? (although the article should cover such work insofar as it is known)

--P64 (talk) 22:44, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata

Doesn't Wikidata completely supersede this project? So what is the future of the project? --Nullzero (talk) 13:06, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I completely agree. Wikidata is essentially what Persondata aspired to be. It looks like there are plans already. Seeing as English is being used as the primary language on the site, I would like to see the whole of persondata moved to wikidata (interwiki-style). This information only really gets useful when it's in a proper database. SFB 17:55, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
It would probably be somewhat trivial to have a bot transfer data from Persondata templates to Wikidata. Unfortunately Wikidata does not yet support dates as a datatype, but once that is done, there is no reason we couldn't transfer all the data. I will raise the subject on Wikidata's project chat (their version of the village pump) and see what response I get. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 20:39, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
Apparently there are already people aware of Persondata and bots are being written to import existing Persondata into Wikidata items. That being said, it probably doesn't make sense to add new Persondata to articles on Wikipedia; instead, contribute to Wikidata directly. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 03:17, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
You say don't add Persondata to articles, add to Wikidata instead. I cannot see that Wikidata is ready to accept the data at the moment? Periglio (talk) 15:34, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
The name goes in the label (first name first, unlike in Persondata), short description goes in the description field. Since my post in April, Wikidata has added date support, so now date and place of birth and death are available. d:Wikidata:List of properties/Person is a list of possible properties for person-related items. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 18:32, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Can I use the date of birth and date of death

Hoi, at the moment I am harvesting information about "alma mater" and "political party" from en.wp and add this information to Wikidata. Is it ok to use the date of birth and date of death to Wikidata.. it will state en.wp as its source. GerardM (talk) 21:20, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Have you successfully specified en.wp or any other source? I have tweaked WikiData only a few times regarding major problems (less than once monthly, editing more than a hundred biogs monthly); no more because I have not been able to add a source. Nominally adding a source --that is, with the source composition window active-- I have the option to cancel but not to save. --P64 (talk) 19:53, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Request for comment on Biographies of living people

Hello Wikiproject! Currently there is a discussion which will decide whether wikipedia will delete 49,000 articles about a living person without references, here:

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Biographies of living people

Since biographies of living people covers so many topics, nearly all wikiproject topics will be effected.

The two opposing positions which have the most support is:

  1. supports the deletion of unreferenced articles about a living person, User:Jehochman
  2. opposes the deletion of unreferenced articles about a living person, except in limited circumstances, User:Collect

Comments are welcome. Keep in mind that by default, editor's comments are hidden. Simply press edit next to the section to add your comment.

Please keep in mind that at this point, it seems that editors support deleting unreferenced article if they are not sourced, so your project may want to pursue the projects below. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ikip (talk • contribs) 02:16, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Nationality

I am surprised there is not a NATIONALITY parameter in the Persondata. A lot do seem to mention the nationality within the short description - British Actress, Spanish politician, French painter - but there are still many that do not. Should we make nationality a requirement within the description and add it to the instructions? Periglio (talk) 18:30, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

As I understand the issues, yes we should.
I do add nationality to SHORT DESCRIPTION whenever it is missing, simple and clear --including specification that is clear but not clearly true, such as British or English in the lead sentence. Commonly I leave it unspecified if it's complex such as Canada-born Australian, or Australian in the lead sentence and Canadian in {{infobox writer}}.
On one of your elsewhere questions (Wikipedia talk:Persondata) I think we need WikiData to report clearly and conveniently its mass incorporation of data from Wikipedia. The report should cover each field of our template {{Persondata}} but not only that.
--P64 (talk) 21:07, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
Discussion has moved to the specific talk page --which covers both Persondata and its template {{Persondata}}. --P64 (talk) 22:42, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

Cricketers

I'm slowly moving through the broad cricket categories adding PERSONDATA to any that are missing it. I've only got about 1,000 more of Category:English cricketers to go, and then will move on to the corresponding cats for Australian, South African Indian etc. Thus far the English one had about 500 or so with no PERSONDATA in them, which have now been fixed.

Is there any way to quickly ascertain how many articles in a certain category don't have PERSONDATA? Or is that not a stat that can be quickly generated by tools? --S.G.(GH) ping! 11:23, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Reason why I ask is I would ideally like make one of those "progress bars" that you have for the PERSONDATA project, I think they are neat. --S.G.(GH) ping! 11:27, 1 March 2014 (UTC)
Out of curiosity, how are you finding the ones that are missing? Do you have to individually check each article in the category? Periglio (talk) 07:31, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
AWB is generating its list in the Category:X cricketers, where 'X' has been English (the largest, 9,000 +) Australian, Indian etc. And I set it to skip any page that contains "PERSONDATA" so that it does not look at anything with a PERSONDATA template in it. Admittedly this means that any tables without the short description parameter are not getting fixed, but it catches and auto-populates any without the persondata table. The English one had about 500-600 missing, the rest have only had about 100-200 or so. The worst culprits are small articles on very historical cricketers from 150-200 years ago where often only a surname, or surname and initial, are known. Most of these pre-date the rise of PERSONDATA by a great margin. --S.G.(GH) ping! 10:53, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Joint biographies and Living people

My this hour's note Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography#Joint biographies and Living people includes a postscript on {{Persondata}} in joint biographies: some have two such templates, some one, most none.

Offhand I think I recall seeing {Persondata} in at least one Redirects to joint biographies, many of which I have not opened. --P64 (talk) 04:37, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Not sure what you are asking/saying but here are my thoughts on joint biographies. It is a no-brainer that Persondata only applies to an individual. For example, Brothers Hildebrandt as it currently stands is wrong! One of the brothers has died, this fact cannot be recorded in Persondata as it would be ambiguous. Having two Persondata templates in the article may be a solution but I say the best solution is to have the template on the redirect pages Tim Hildebrandt and Greg Hildebrandt. Periglio (talk) 10:46, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
It's a report, not a question, and the main point is cross-reference to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography#Joint biographies and Living people fyi.
--P64 (talk) 20:38, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Where to put DEFAULTSORT in article?

The Template:DEFAULTSORT page seems to say that DEFAULTSORT goes after any metadata (that would include persondata), but the WP Persondata page says that the Persondata should be put after the DEFAULTSORT. I've been following the former instructions, but I had a bot change it to the otherway round. Am I interpreting the defaultsort page incorrectly? Or is one of the pages wrong?

—Msmarmalade (talk) 11:24, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

WP Order agrees with "persondata before defaultsort". —Msmarmalade (talk) 22:36, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal

Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

October 2014 - Template for Discussion

A Template for discussion request for Persondata was closed with the outcome: Deprecate. —Msmarmalade (talk) 05:33, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Please discuss at Wikipedia talk:Persondata (archived). —Msmarmalade (talk) 05:39, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

WikiProject X is live!

Hello everyone!

You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.

Harej (talk) 16:56, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

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