Wikipedia talk:Persondata/Archive 6

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Any plans to hide unfilled "death" fields?

Five years ago, there was a discussion on possibly hiding the death-related fields where the person is not dead, because showing those fields for living people might be impolite. It was noted that the German Wikipedia uses if statements to hide unfilled death-related fields. Is there any chance of similar functionality being added to the template here? See {{Persondata/sandbox}} revision 563947267 to see what the edited template would look like. --Joshua Issac (talk) 11:36, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

That's fine with me, although I'm not sure why it matters since all the Persondata fields are hidden by default. Kaldari (talk) 17:20, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Why would blank fields be impolite? I don't get it.--ukexpat (talk) 17:56, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Persondata is a hidden template. Persondata is for computers and not humans. I see no reason to hide a hidden field from over one million articles. Bgwhite (talk) 18:35, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Agreed, it is not like we have a category for "No Death of death" or "Not Dead" plastered on the screen. Persondata templates which are lacking fields seldom get filled in properly by editors - let alone the death one. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 18:40, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Given that persondata is hidden to readers by default, is deliberately placed outside the body of an article, and is currently used on over a million pages without causing a major ruckus over whether fields are impolite, this seems unnecessary. 1ForTheMoney (talk) 23:55, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Does Wikidata make Persondata obsolete?

Someone asked WP:Persondata in February. There were two replies, both during April, both essentially answered "Yes, obsolete".

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Persondata#Wikidata --P64 (talk) 22:39, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Cause of death?

Would it be of value to add a cause of death field to Persondata? JudyCS (talk) 03:00, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Problem with extractPersondata.stx

Hi, the file is empty with this command for extracting persondata :

bzip2 -dc enwiki-20131001-pages-articles.xml.bz2 | java -jar joost.jar - addNamespaces.stx extractPersondata.stx pd2tab.stx > 20131103-extract.tab

the script 'extractPersondata.stx' produces nothing.

thanks for replies. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Arribo (talk • contribs) 18:46, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Restricting the categories to article namespace

I would like to edit {{Persondata}} so that the "templates without name parameter" and "templates without short description parameter" categories gather only pages in article namespace (and not, for example, users' sandboxes). To do this, I believe I have to change

{{#if: {{{name|{{{NAME|}}}}}} | | [[Category:Persondata templates without name parameter]] }} {{#if: {{{short description|{{{SHORT 
DESCRIPTION|}}}}}} | | [[Category:Persondata templates without short description parameter]]}}

to

{{#if: {{{name|{{{NAME|}}}}}} | | {{#if: {{NAMESPACE}}||[[Category:Persondata templates without name parameter]]|}} }} {{#if: {{{short 
description|{{{SHORT DESCRIPTION|}}}}}} | | {{#if: {{NAMESPACE}}||[[Category:Persondata templates without short description parameter]]|}}}}

. I'm an admin so I can do it myself, but I thought I'd better double check with others that this is a good idea (and the right way to do it) before making a change that will affect hundreds of thousands of articles in one swell foop. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:02, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

@Angr: - I thought it would be good to keep these maintenance categories for userspace, so people might fix these errors themselves before moving an article to mainspace. However, if consensus is to make the edit you're suggesting, then I guess {{polluted category}} can be removed from the two category pages. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 01:22, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

GoingBatty, you are assuming editors have clicked the "show hidden categories" box under preferences. I'm in favor of Angr's proposal. If an article is moved out to mainspace, it will still be in one of the categories. Those articles stranded in sandboxes won't litter up the categories. Bgwhite (talk) 06:38, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

I just caught a mistake in my syntax, so I'm glad I didn't make the change immediately. I agree that the categories aren't really going to make it more likely that users correct the mistake before taking the page live, and in a lot of cases what they have in their sandbox is already a live article anyway. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 09:37, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

date link to MOS

§Dates of birth and death says

Follow the Manual of Style guidelines on whether to use DD Month YYYY format or the Month DD, YYYY style when filling the |DATE OF BIRTH= and |DATE OF DEATH= fields. Do not link the date or numbers. YYYY-MM-DD is also acceptable, provided the Gregorian calendar is used and the year is at least 1583.

The MOS link is to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Dates of birth and death, an anchor on the subsection Ranges, which is irrelevant since Persondata lists the two dates separately.

Unfortunately, the relevant pieces of advice are sprinkled all over that MOS page, including advice about templating dates, which is specifically counteradvised here. So the best I could do was change the link to point to the top of the whole Dates and years section. --Thnidu (talk) 03:49, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

WikiData

I recently used Persondata for my own personal analysis and I am currently in the process of paying back the wiki community by updating templates that I highlighted as needing revision. However, I am wondering if I am wasting my time?

There was a suggestion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Persondata that we should be updating WikiData instead of updating Persondata. WikiData appears to be the Betamax of personal information and Persondata is the VHS!

Does anyone know what the latest situation is with WikiData and Persondata. I have seen bots mentioned that will copy data across, has that happened? Which has the more comprehensive dataset, WikiData or Persondata? Should I just continue updating the Persondata template until someone tells me otherwise? Periglio (talk) 13:17, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

It's important to remember that Wikidata has only been around since October 2012 - about 15 months. Persondata has been around a lot longer, though its use has only really expanded in the last few years thanks to bots/AWB. On the other hand, I believe the future really belongs to Wikidata - it's not limited to biographies and it connects Wikipedia in pretty much every language (along with other projects), without the need for a separate template on every project that has to be populated. It's just a question of giving Wikidata enough time.

As for whether you should continue working on Persondata, my answer for now is yes. At least one bot was approved several months ago to transfer the contents of Persondata to Wikidata, but I don't know their current status. Not to mention there are still plenty of templates missing information. Until a solid plan is put in place, it'd be best not to drop Persondata too quickly. 1ForTheMoney (talk) 13:34, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

1ForTheMoney is correct. Wikidata is the future, but has the future arrived? I wouldn't worry about Persondata on articles that have an infobox. Persondata is redundant in that case. If an article doesn't have an infobox, then adding Persondata would be very reasonable. Bgwhite (talk) 22:53, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

Friday I wrote at Persondata project talk (quoting myself -01-10):

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.

Of course it will also be useful to know in advance, as soon as there is any fact of the matter, whether WikiData hopes to undertake mass importation (and concatenation, I suppose) of infobox Nationality and Occupation fields.

(quoting Periglio) "... updating templates that I highlighted as needing revision. However, I am wondering if I am wasting my time?"

Not a waste, I think, unless you have already wasted time by highlighting too liberally! Even if WD imports first from {infobox}, template {persondata} is likely to be a second source, eh? (I suppose so, but I am not helping to design project WD unless this counts.)

I have viewed persondata only in edit mode, where I would fix what needs revision, defined conservatively. If you have used the data automatically, or as in section 2 of this article, it suggests to me that someone else may do so. Another reason to fix what needs fixing.

--P64 (talk) 22:39, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

New paragraph for Short description section.

Speaking as someone who has been using persondata generated information, I found the nationality a useful item. I would guess about half the entries have a nationality in the short description, but I would like to propose making it an official requirement by amending the first sentence in the Short Description section in this article.

A small description of the person, including nationality if it is specified within the article. Try to be concise but informative...

Periglio (talk) 14:40, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

You have already asked this somewhere else, and P64's response is a good reason not to make this a binding requirement. Plenty of biographies have complex or even disputed nationality (for example, somebody born in one country but residing in another.) Making this a requirement is just not possible. 1ForTheMoney (talk) 01:19, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

I know I asked somewhere else! The positive reply gave me encouragement to take it further. I am not trying to make it a binding requirement. My suggested amendment does say "if". I am just trying to get it at least mentioned in the instructions, so a few more people will add the nationality. Even a few more nationalities in the examples would help! Periglio (talk) 07:57, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Periglio is correct about asking elsewhere and given an encouragement. I see no problem in them asking here. 1ForTheMoney is also correct in that requiring nationality is not a good idea. It is extremely complicated. In some case such as politicians, it is better to mention the U.S. state. It can also get confusing... Australian Australian rules footballer, American American football player or Canadian Canadian football player. Bgwhite (talk) 08:32, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

I prefer discussions to stay on one page, and admittedly my response was typed very late at night. Bgwhite's note about sportspeople is an interesting case - to someone who isn't aware of Persondata that would look like a mis-spelling and we could spend a lot of time cleaning up after people removing it. WikiProject Football had a small discussion about this - they seem to like nationalities, but what works for footballers doesn't necessarily work for other walks of life.

It seems that including nationality could mean adding plenty of exceptions/extra instructions to cover every possible situation (I know that amounts to instruction creep but it's probably what will happen.) That seems unworkable, and I'm inclined to go the other way and remove them just for the sake of consistency and simplicity. 1ForTheMoney (talk) 10:23, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Okay, I accept I probably have to wait until WikiData takes over. But from a personal point of view, and one who has used a persondata extract, it is certainly nicer to see "French poet" then just "poet". Periglio (talk) 18:34, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

I alone replied on the Project talk page; this discussion is otherwise unified. I agree with 1ForTheMoney that my reply gave "good reason not to make this a binding requirement." --P64 (talk) 22:49, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

Just reading through the comments again, I just want to emphasise that I was not after compulsory. Just a mention in the instructions to let editors know that nationality within the description is acceptable. Periglio (talk) 23:14, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Well... although it's certainly true that "plenty of biographies have complex or even disputed nationality", the vast majority still mentions an uncomplex and undisputed nationality. As a little experiment, I've clicked Special:Random right now until I got five biographies (as biographies form a large part of Wikipedia, that was quickly achieved), and these are the ones:

• Sławomir Fabicki "... is a Polish film director and screenwriter"
• Serhiy Krasyuk "... is an Ukrainian former swimmer."
• Jacques Hodoul "... is a Seychellois judge and former politician."
• Päivi Räsänen "... is a Finnish politician."
• Richard O. Covey "... is a retired United States Air Force officer and former NASA astronaut."

In none of these cases the question of nationality is in any way complex. So, though I agree that a binding requirement wouldn't be advisable, I think it could be mentioned that it's a good idea to include nationality if it poses no problem. How about changing the phrasing from Periglio's suggestion to something like: "A small description of the person. It's recommended to include nationality as well if it's not a complex case. Try to be concise but informative..." Gestumblindi (talk) 23:43, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Short Description length

A suggestion for the instructions for Short Description: Keep the description under 30? characters.

My interpretation of Short Description is that it is equivalent to "Occupation". For example, German politician. Any additional information is not wanted - German politician who introduced parking tickets.

I have seen a lot of long descriptions such as Angela Donald. Editors seem to be inclined to elaborate on exactly why the person is notable. There are also extreme cases Kleber Romero whose short description is longer than the article. I think a character limit statement would help keep the descriptions brief. Periglio (talk) 11:38, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

1. First, I believe our unquantified guideline is sufficient to discourage the Angela Donald instance and that is certainly true of the Kleber Romero. (Those links are not stable.)
2. It may be useful to align with WikiData.

See WikiData Help:Description.

By the way, WikiData labels and descriptions[1] are not considered to be 'properties'[2].

--P64 (talk) 19:27, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

1. Routinely our short descriptions nationalize their subjects: 'German politician' = nationality German; occupation politician. I do nationalize whenever that is missing. None of our current illustrations do so, which is a bad misfit with practice.
2. 'Australian illustrator and writer' is succinct but 32 characters. One of our illustrations is 'Baseball manager and team owner' (31) where I presume we would now prescribe 'American baseball manager and team owner' (40). So we cannot prescribe 30. We might say that we expect most descriptions to be shorter than 30 or perhaps 25 characters, as a guideline.

But see point 1. --P64 (talk) 19:14, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 18 February 2014

--Madlady6103 (talk) 05:31, 18 February 2014 (UTC) Items of general interest are missing, such as her marriage to Albert Amato (SP); literary friendships, such as with Ursula Le Guin; and political affiliations (certain Trotskyist parties). I was and am a close friend, and helped with biographical material for one of her books, etc. Please advise. I believe these to be important facts about my closest friend. Madlady6103 (talk) 05:31, 18 February 2014 (UTC) Melody Annaed [pseud: Madelyn Arnold] 21:28 18 February, 2014 Madlady6103 (talk) 05:31, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Not done: According to the page's protection level and your user rights, you should currently be able to edit the page yourself. If you still seem to be unable to, please reopen the request with further details. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(t • e • c)} 05:46, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Er, Technical 13 - you seem to have used {{subst:EP|hr}} here - but the request as worded is clearly not for Wikipedia:Persondata at all, but some unrelated page (probably an article about a person); this is what {{subst:EP|mis}} was created for. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:55, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

• Yes, Redrose64, you may be correct. I couldn't make heads or tails of the request and since there is no protection on this page here, I just went with that. I've struck my earlier response and put the new response in just below. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(t • e • c)} 14:52, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

• Not done: this is the talk page for discussing improvements to the page Wikipedia:Persondata. Please make your request at the talk page for the article concerned. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(t • e • c)} 14:52, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Occupation gender

I have noticed lots of actresses have actor in the Short Description. I found something in the talk pages that suggests that this may be because an automated script picks it up from an infobox, ignoring gender. I just want to ask is there some form of precedent set for using "actor" or should I be changing these to actress if appropriate? Periglio (talk) 16:21, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Whitespace problem

Just documenting an oddity I found. I was attempting to remove the last three articles from Category:Persondata templates without name parameter but they all had NAME parameters set. I noticed that the names were not showing in my visible persondata box. To fix this, you need to delete all the whitespace in the template ie | NAME = Dave becomes |NAME=Dave If you want to maintain the aesthetic appearance, you can put the whitespace back. Finally save your edit.

It would seem that occasionally a rogue unicode character gets used within the template instead of ASCII 32, corrupting the parameter name. Deleting the whitespace and replacing with good old 32 cures the problem.

For example, my fix to Andrew Gray (actor) which shows that some unknown characters have been replaced with a space. Periglio (talk) 04:10, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

The unknown characters are non-breaking spaces. Their presence meant that the first parameter wasn't |NAME = but something like |NAME              = which is not at all the same. The MediaWiki template parser can (and does) strip plain spaces around both parameter names and their values, but it leaves non-breaking spaces alone. So as far as the template parser was concerned, the |NAME= parameter simply wasn't there. Problems like this can affect any template, not just {{persondata}}: it is very important not to use non-breaking spaces unless they are necessary. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:16, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Surname always first?

Would "Gunnar Gunnarsson" (not other way) around be ok? This is Icelandic name-standard. I guess not as you would follow "English/global standard". Then Halldór Laxness is incorrect. And "Halldór Kiljan Laxness" should be added somehow. comp.arch (talk) 11:28, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Persondata#Name and titles doesn't mention Icelandic names, but it does say "format the name according to how you would expect it to be alphabetized" also "Names that do not include a family name should be given as-is". See for example Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir#persondata which I believe to be correctly-formatted; personally, I don't think that Björk Guðmundsdóttir#persondata has been formatted properly. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:10, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Redrose, you are correct. I fixed both Gunnar Gunnarsson and Halldór Laxness. How to deal with Icelandic names when it comes to sort value and categories is covered under WP:SUR. Bgwhite (talk) 18:06, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

I disagree that NAME=Gunnar Gunnarsson (as it currently stands) is correct. It should follow DEFAULTSORT:Gunnarsson, Gunnar. WP:SUR states that only Icelandic specific categories/lists should be sorted by "forename". Someone extracting Persondata information would not know the name is Icelandic. Periglio (talk) 02:26, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

WP:SUR *only* covers DEFAULTSORT and category sorting. WP:SUR only deals with sorting. An exception was made when sorting Icelandic names and it is the only patronymic exception. It does not cover Persondata. Persondata data says, "... in the following format: Family Name, Given Name Middle Names, title. For most cases this will be straightforward." Icelandic names have no "Family Name". This has also been talked before. Persondata also contains an example of this in the examples section. "NAME=Gunnar Gunnarsson" is the standard way for Icelandic, Malaysian, Burmese, Ethiopian, and older patronymic systems for several years now. Bgwhite (talk) 05:47, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

'Icelandic names have no "Family Name"' is not true in general. Most Icelandic names are patronymic (or matronymic). Many Icelanders have an Icelandic (or foreign-origin) family-name. Some even use them with a patronymic such as Einar Hjörleifsson Kvaran. Some use a patronymic and a matronymic (without a hyphen I think, can't remember any using a hyphen). That is rare, never seen those and a family-name. Then there are other options. What are the arguments for not treating them all the same? comp.arch (talk) 14:46, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

BLPs

Does anyone else see a problem with adding this to BLPs? I wince every time I see someone add it (with date and place of death), as though we're waiting breathlessly to fill in the details. I'm wondering what the benefit is of adding it to BLPs (or to any article). SlimVirgin ^(talk) 15:42, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

I can't remember where this has been talked about before. If I remember correctly, which is doubtful, reason for keeping it in is because the reader does not see it. Same reason you see blank death parameters in infoboxes. It's also in over a million articles, so making a change now won't do much. Bgwhite (talk) 19:33, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

This came up six months ago. My stance has not changed. 1ForTheMoney (talk) 15:05, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Ancestry

One of the problems that Wikipedia has is the building of unsourced ancestry trees in what are otherwise well sourced articles. Some some of these go back five generations and it only takes one mistake early in the tree to invalidate large parts of it.

If {{Persondata}} was to include mother and father fields then it would be relatively easy to check an ancestry tree (or to build one). It would also allow network analysis tools to easily check for family connections which have been missed by historians and could be a useful additional source of information for them when explaining a subjects reasons for supporting or opposing notable events. -- PBS (talk) 17:27, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

PBS, Persondata is dead as Wikidata is taken over its function. Wikidata does handle family trees and has an interesting tool. The example is taken from data found on Johann Sebastian Bach's Wikidata page. Bgwhite (talk) 21:26, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

@Bgwhite: If Persondata is dead, does that mean that Waacstats (talk · contribs) is wasting their time? --Redrose64 (talk) 21:48, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

A bot was supposed to take the info in Persondata, add it to Wikidata and then Persondata could be removed. I want to say Lego was going to do that, but I'm not sure. This is also being talked about on dewiki. It's down to somebody on Wikidata to get the ball rolling in some direction. Bgwhite (talk) 22:17, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

OK then I see that my suggestion is going to have any traction as this is now an obsolete process, particularly as what I had in mind was only placing information into the fields if it could be validated by a reliable source. I can see that the database is extremely useful for answering all sorts of questions which can be teased out of the data contained within Wikiepedia pages which is not easily accessible any other way.

However although the database approach it is a useful tool checking for genealogical errors in Wikipedia both because it will throw up inconsistencies between pages (such as the mother not matching on father and child pages etc), and because such a tree can be checked against independent data sources (such as Burke), unfortunately I suspect that it is not asymmetrical, because of the old issue of "garbage in garbage out", as it appears that the database does not have the means to take into account, whether the family data is reliably sourced. I looked at at the entry in the example to which Bgwhite linked and the biography on Gottfried Heinrich Bach (a leaf) has no sources for his parentage (his entry in his mothers biography likewise is unsourced (see Anna Magdalena Bach). The biography page on his father does have a source and it is reliable, but I doubt if the database checks against that has a (list/algorithm of reliable and unreliable sources against which to check). In other words the database it is not necessarily any more accurate than an unsourced ancestry tree that appears on a page. In the short term as editors have almost certainly used other sources to draw up the tree the data extracted from Wikipedia is a useful cross check but as soon as someone draws up a tree using the tool it is of little use for validation of such trees. Perhaps longer term a tool can be produced that includes the sources (if any) when creating these types of graphs. -- PBS (talk) 10:20, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Slightly off the original topic, but I want to say that Persondata is alive and kicking. I wanted an extract of birth and death dates for my own personal use and after investigating I went for Persondata. It is the one that is widely applied and consistently updated, in particular with the less notable articles. I have made the comparison previously - Wikidata = Betamax / Persondata = VHS. I would like to see Wikidata being used but there does seem to be anything in place to keep birth/death information updated. In answer to the original question - please no more fields in Persondata - Wikidata is the way forward. Periglio (talk) 16:27, 19 March 2014 (UTC)