Template talk:Lived/Delete

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was RESULT: kept, delisted on March 16

[edit] March 10

[edit] Template:Lived

Simply puts in the births and deaths category - much better to just add the two categories (this doesn't simplify things at all). violet/riga (t) 17:37, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Delete - Agree completely. -- Netoholic @ 17:53, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)
• Delete - 100% agreement; we know someone has lived if they were born and did something that was notable enough to be included in Wikipedia as an article or piece of an article. I'm implying that if someone is put in the births or deaths category that they should appear elsewhere in Wikipedia. Courtland 18:36, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)

• Keep. I misinterpreted the usage. It is useful as a way of adding two categories at once, one for birth and one for death. Apologies for the reversal in vote. Courtland 02:40, 2005 Mar 11 (UTC)

• Delete not necessary. Categories aren't hard. This template results in ludicrities such as Category:44 BC deaths. These work far better as decade or century links (i.e. Category:1st century BC births. Makes the categories actually useful. Smoddy (t) (e) (g) 18:35, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • I do understand the inefficiency of creating categories of death years that contain one person. However, there seems to be no reason why one cannot accomodate the broader year spans; maybe someone who has used it in that way could comment. Courtland 02:40, 2005 Mar 11 (UTC)
  • I can't understand why this template results in the alleged problem. Deleting it will do nothing to stop anyone putting any year into a single Category field.Saga City 09:54, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)
    • Deleting wouldn't stop people using ridiculous (IMO) categories, but it would make their automation far quicker. Not deleting would encourage it. I concede the usefulness argument, but I would say that using it with subst: is essential. Smoddy (t) (e) (g) 23:42, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Keep. It doesn't harm anybody. Gerritholl 21:51, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Keep It does simplify things, it provides a quick and easy way to add the births and deaths category and the sorting all in one line, and by listing the sort key exactly once for both categories, reduces the number of keystrokes and possibility for error. slambo 23:03, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. "Helpfulness" in this sense is being defined as helpful for the editor, not helpful for the user. I think it is the latter sense which is meant by the "helpful" criteria at the top of the page. An editor has the choice not to use this template, and in fact most don't. Nothing grave is affected either way, and I don't see any reason for providing multiple routes to solve any given problem. Given that a large amount of pages use this template, clearly some editors find it useful to use. As I can see no negative reason for using it, I don't see any good reason to delete it. Furthermore, given the number of pages which use it, I think that deleting it would cause more difficulty in replacing the categories on the affected pages than would ever be saved by getting rid of it (and I have a hard time seeing why it is "much better" to do it the other way. More direct, perhaps, but who cares? Does it affect anything much? I'm not sure it does). --Fastfission 03:14, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Keep A useful shortcut, I use it all the time. Why make me type more? The reader doesn't care how I accomplished things, but I do. Fawcett5 05:47, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Handy for editors, and at some point in the future someone might come up with other clever things to do with the birth/death year information. The fact that it's being filtered through a template like this allows said clever thing to be easily implemented across the board. Bryan 07:58, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Keep It is an extremely useful shortcut to allow addition of two categories at once, one for birth year and one for death year.Saga City 09:48, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. It performs exactly the function of a template, which is to allow similar information to be entered and processed in a uniform fashion: in particular it ensures that a given person's entries in the categories for thei birth & death years are uniform. --Phil | Talk 11:15, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep if only because I use it. You don't have to enter the sort twice this way. (I admit, I often forget to put a sort key on people categories since nonpeople cats don't usually need it.) :) --Sketchee 21:17, Mar 12, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Agree with Bryan and Phil. --Carnildo 07:38, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Keep for easy addition of the categories by editors, even though I favor converting the templates periodically to categories by bot. -- User:Docu
• Keep, very useful. Dan100 12:52, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)
• Weak keep, but there should be a guideline somewhere (at least on the talk: page) requesting that it only be input as {{subst:lived|whatever}}; otherwise it's a resource drain. -Sean Curtin 18:22, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, helpful. JYolkowski 20:50, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. Very usefull. I've used it alot and like it. And as a template it might make future changes in birth/death apperance possible, for instance by including images/symbols or things like that in the bios. Shanes 00:56, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Comment: Given that there are concerns for the servers with the number of articles any particular template is attached to, how will they be affected by an - albeit very useful - template like this, which could be used on thousands of articles? Grutness|^hello? 11:44, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • There is a slight marginal hit associated with using any template. The concerns voiced refer to a situation where a template, used by a lot of articles, is edited, because the system then has to invalidate any cached versions of the containing pages. This template is stable (it has been edited exactly once since creation and that was the addition of the {{tfd}} tag) and therefore should not give rise to such a problem. What I don't understand is that the very idea of creating the template system in the first place was to allow zillions of article containing common text to all use the same template and be kept consistent: this is now being described as a problem. --Phil | Talk 14:39, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. If you don't like the fact that the article has the template, you can always add subst: to it forcing it to include the article text INTO the article. -- AllyUnion (talk) 05:19, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• Keep but should only really be used with subst.
• Keep, a useful shortcut and it helps to remind people to include a sort key on categories, which is easily forgotten. —User:Mulad (talk) 00:17, Mar 16, 2005 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.