[WikiEN-l] Biographical data

Sun Dec 25 20:55:58 UTC 2005

Andrew Gray wrote:

>Hi all.
>
>One of the interesting projects on de.wiki is the idea of Personendata
>- basically, a set of standard biographical details, appended to
>individual articles. Name, other common names, a few words of
>description, date/place of birth, date/place of death. The sort of
>thing you would find on a disambiguation page, basically.
>
>This is implemented in quite a clever way - the CSS is set up in such
>a way that the "{{Personendaten}}" template isn't shown, so whilst it
>remains in the page text it's invisible to the casual reader; it's
>stored at the bottom of the page along with categories and interwikis
>and other "housekeeping" text, to avoid editors tripping over it.
>
>Very nice. So what does it do? It allows all sorts of applications -
>see http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05/Paper-JV2 - and I'm sure
>you can think of others. Build it, and they will come. One of the
>smart ideas there was to tie it into the Deutsche Bibliotek authority
>records (the files cataloguers use to keep authors uniquely
>identified), meaning that deeplinking to works by that person is
>relatively easy.
>
>[[User:Kaldari]] has started experimenting with adding this to
>articles on en: - there's only about a dozen as yet, but the idea has
>promise. It's certainly a lot easier than our clumsier work with
>categories, and would probably help with finding duplicate articles.
>
>There's a page up at [[Wikipedia:Persondata]] going over the details;
>any comments or suggestions would probably be appreciated.
>
I think that the idea is interesting and useful.  From the Wiktionary 
pespective, where I have been trying to promote the sourcing of 
information, it would certainly be helpful to provide the personendata 
information for any author that is quoted.  Each quotation should 
identify the source of that quotation, and in developing one of these I 
like to include a link to the Wikipedia article about the author.  This 
I do whether or not such an article exists.  For many authors, 
especially contemporary ones or ones that were identified in the 1913 
Webster,  it does not.  Given the kind of work that I am doing, it would 
lead me too far astray to put together a real article about the person, 
but I could easily add some of the personen data that I acquire in the 
process of tracking down the quotation. 

My biggest criticism of it at this point is that it's only available to 
the geeks who use a monobook skin and know how to edit it.  I'm not 
going to stop using the classic skin, and I have no intention of 
learning how to edit a css.  I'm sure there are many other non-techies 
in the latter group that would be kept away from the feature because of 
that.  A simple toggle in the user preferences would make a lot more sense.

The one thing that I wouild make clear about the contents is that one 
can add years when an author flourished.  For some authors we anly know 
the years when they wrote, and know nothing of their lives before or 
after the time during which they wrote.  Perhaps our German colleagues 
have already thought of that.

Ec