Category talk:Year of birth missing

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Contents 1 Name of category 2 Known to have been born 3 Female/Male Split 4 My Subcat Idea 5 Nice idea but... 5.1 Self-reference to Wikipedia? 6 What if year of birth is supplied but undocumented?

[edit] Name of category

(copied from User talk:Quuxplusone) I think you should rename this Category:Unknown births to conform to the style we now use (i.e. Category:2003 births. Interesting idea... part of me really likes it, part of me thinks it might get VfDed. gren 02:25, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm not sure of its utility. I'm trying to be symmetric with Category:Year of death missing (note: not Category:Unknown deaths — that sounds weird anyway). There's some related talk on Category talk:Year of death missing; the gist of it so far is that there's no clear policy as to which categories should be listed on a page with an approximate birth or death date. E.g., I added Juan Ponce de León to this cat as an initial feeler: will the people watching that page think it's a helpful addition, or not? (Ponce de León is listed with "c. 1460" as a birth date.)

I admit that the word "missing" is a poor choice, since it implies that someone needs to fill in the "missing" information — when in fact it may not be available at all. "Year of (birth/death) unknown" would be best, I think. --Quuxplusone 08:22, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The word "missing" is a poor choice in many circumstances. It does not differentiate between people whose birth year is unknown or not known with certainty (such as Guillaume de Machaut) and articles that simply don't have a birth year listed (such as Daniel Bernard). This category should be reserved for articles of the latter type, and an entirely separate category should be used for examples of the former. If such a category does not already exist, then one needs to be implemented. I don't have a problem tagging a biography as both "1430s births" and "Year of birth unknown", but I do have a problem tagging one as both "1430s births" and "Year of birth missing". In the second example, the two categories are directly contradictory, and we don't want that.

The same argument applies to Category:Year of death missing. Microtonal 23:49, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

see Category talk:Year of death missing. -- User:Docu

[edit] Known to have been born

Surely everyone who has a Wikipedia article has been born? Not everyone has died, of course, so the explanation for the respective death category is OK. — JIP | Talk 19:23, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Female/Male Split

My idea to reduce the size of this category is to have something like Category:Females with unknown births or Category:Males with unknown births. The female/male split would just be for humans. If there were non-human creatures that would get listed, list them here. --Midnightcomm 00:11, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't see the point. They would still be huge, but they would be harder to browse. It is an editorial category so it doesn't need to be subdivided . ReeseM 02:13, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree with ReeseM that the category doesn't need to be subdivided, and that an artificial male/female split would be harder to navigate with no appreciable benefits. However, I do think that this category is very large, and might benefit from some kind of subcatting. At the moment, it includes at least three somewhat distinct categories of people:

• People who were born so long ago that their birthdates are almost certainly unrecorded (Hotepsekhemwy, Nothelm). Note that some civilizations' records go back a lot further than others', so some medieval Britons might be at home here and yet some Roman-era Britons have well-established birthdates.
• People whose birthdates are uncertain due to lack of research or intentional obfuscation on their part; some Hollywood actresses fit here. A dedicated researcher could probably track down primary sources in these cases, but nobody's bothered.
• People whose birthdates are definitely recorded (birth certificates, e.g.), but aren't considered notable enough to make it into any secondary sources yet; lots of contemporary authors, musicians, and educators with bios on Wikipedia fit into this category.

So that's why I'm unsatisfied with the "one big category" approach. However, I strongly do not support splitting up this category along the above lines, because those lines are so fuzzy and subjective. This topic needs much more discussion, if splitting is really thought to be a good thing. --Quuxplusone 06:20, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] My Subcat Idea

ok my idea is that we have it sorted out by occupation, for example all actors and actress go into one catergory one for writers and one for potilcian leaders, does this good —The preceding unsigned comment was added by LeafGreen Ranger (talk • contribs).

Same objections as to the male/female suggestion — that's an artificial division that doesn't provide any information or help to the editor or browsing reader. --Quuxplusone 15:14, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Nice idea but...

I kind of saw the addition of this category to a page I had worked on as a criticism, a kind of "please provide a year of birth for this person". And actually, looking at the category text itself it does direct the user to Category:Year of birth unknown for historical figures. I think there are some people in the wrong category on both sides. -- Francs2000 23:56, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

I think there are too, but it's a formidable task to weed through them and research in each case which is the case! This category implies that no information about the year of birth has been provided in the article, and that can be true of both historical and contemporary figures, whereas Category:Year of birth unknown implies that there are no sources anywhere that can state the year of birth with certainty. This is a self-ref category, but 'unknown' isn't. Ziggurat 00:01, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Self-reference to Wikipedia?

My impression of categories is that they logically group Wikipedia articles according to the subject matter. From Wikipedia:Categorization:

"Categories (along with other features like cross-references, lists, and infoboxes) help users find information, even if they don't know that it exists or what it's called."

Are we helping users find information? How many other self-referential categories exist? Is this a candidate for category deletion? (Big disclaimer: I haven't done a lot of template work.) Thanks, GChriss <always listening><c> 20:14, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What if year of birth is supplied but undocumented?

I'm working on the article for author Truddi Chase. As long as I have known of her, Ms. Chase wouldn't give her exact date of birth. However, this morning the words "DOB 13 JUNE 1939" turned up at the bottom of the article, attributed only to an IP address which I traced to Australia. Now, I've gone ahead and put it as her date of birth in the article, but I have not removed the "year of birth unknown" category and won't until I get confirmation. Is this proper procedure? Should I make it "possibly June 13" instead? Thanks, --Bluejay Young 18:39, 6 August 2006 (UTC)