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? 7 Let's reduce this big list 8 Year of birth missing - living person 9 Category:Year of birth missing and Category:Year of birth unknown as mutually exclusive 10 Goes in articles not talk pages

[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

Marking this "Resolved" as precisely the opposite happened vs. this proposal; a then-extant Category:Unknown births was renamed to Category:Year of birth missing in the first placed! And the knowable-but-missing vs. missing-and-never-knowable problem has long since been solved with the creation of Category:Year of birth unknown. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:10, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

[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)

Strongly disagree with the female/male split too, not that it's ever likely to happen.--HisSpaceResearch 18:27, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Marking this "Resolved", since over a year later this proposal (which also came up in several related categories) has gained no traction at all, and some "bold" attempts at creating such subcategories have been WP:CFD'd out of existence. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:10, 27 May 2007 (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 —Preceding unsigned comment 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)

Marking this "Resolved", since over a year later this proposal (which also came up in several related categories) has gained no traction at all, and some "bold" attempts at creating such subcategories have been WP:CFD'd out of existence. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:10, 27 May 2007 (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)

Over a year later, this is no longer a serious problem, as editors have been recategorizing, and the categories have much better documentation. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:10, 27 May 2007 (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)

This has already been resolved at WP:CFD, where the consensus was that that Category:Date of birth missing (along with other "non-defininging characteristic" cleanup categories for details, such as Category:Date of birth missing (living people), Category:Place of birth missing and Category:Place of death missing) should be used on articles' talk pages, while the "defining" Year-of (birth missing, birth unknown, death missing) categories go in the article, in the same way that some other crucial WP selfrefs do (stub tags, cleanup/dispute templates, etc.) — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:10, 27 May 2007 (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)

Add it as normal as if you knew the information for sure and use the 1939 births category, then tag it with this immediately after the date: {{fact}} --HisSpaceResearch 06:17, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm thinking: hang on, if you know that she doesn't want her year of birth to be public knowledge, then how about just not including it? For goodness sakes', we don't want WikiPedia to become oppressive to people. I'd like to think that we are kind and gentle folks here at WikiPedia. Tmrussell 00:44, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

I am now thinking, that is right, if she doesn't want that published, leave it off and besides that was a pretty 'iffy' source. Maybe it could be said in the article that the date of birth info is left off by request. --Bluejay Young 04:42, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Let's reduce this big list

Here's my ideea. I don't know it it can be done, but it would be nice to see articles (in this case - people) that belong to more categories. Example: Let's say I'd like to reduce this list of people (Year of birth missing). I am a hungarian guy. So the easiest thing for me it would be to reduce this list (Year of birth missing) to a list like : "Year of birth missing" + "Hungarian". See where I'm going? It would be a lot easier for me to go after a few guys and get their birthdate, if I'd know where to look. And I know where to look for hungarian-related stuff. And this is also true for every other article on wiki. Let's say you are looking for people, who got an Oscar (Academy Award) and also got an Emmy. Makes sense? I don't know how. Maybe this is a totally new feature to wiki. Maybe we can even do this right now. Maybe it's only me and I cannot find the information I am looking for. Csabadapp 14:30, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Subcategorization has been proposed before and not gained any consensus at all. I realize that you are attempting to re-opening the issue, but I think the case would need to be compelling and well-thought-out to gain any traction. The only way that will happen is if the well-crafted proposal is aired in depth at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography and if consensus reached, proposed as a multi-category splitting-CfD that covers all related categories. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:10, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Year of birth missing - living person

Please, remove the "year of birth missing" line -- I fear that having my date on the page will be used to discriminate against me by reason of age. Sadly, I already have the female Hispanic dilemma with which to contend. Do I need another one? Please respond as privately as possible. My name is very Googleable. Thank you for your time and ettention to this concern Mig 16:04, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Year of birth missing and Category:Year of birth unknown as mutually exclusive

I adjusted the paragraph/sentence "This category and Categories Date of birth missing and Year of birth unknown are intended to be mutually exclusive" to read "This category and Category:Date of birth missing are intended to be mutually exclusive". While I found (and corrected) numerous instances of editors appending Category:Date of birth missing and Category:Year of birth missing to the same article (in the mistaken belief that the absence of the month/day of birth and the absence of the year of birth must be separately documented for the same individual), I have never seen a single instance of an editor appending Category:Year of birth missing and Category:Year of birth unknown to the same article. Those two categories are also, of course, mutually exclusive, but the exclusivity appears to be of such clear nature as to virtually eliminate any possibility of confusion. Romanspinner (talk) 18:06, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I reverted this without intending to (that is, I didn't know you'd previously made this change). I stick by the revert though, as while the mutual exclusivity of the missing/unknown categories may be obvious to some, everything about this talk page suggests that many people have been confused by the difference, and simply making the sentence shorter does not to me justify making it ambiguous and missing the logic. That is, if the sentence is going to state what C:Yobm is mutually exclusive with, it should include both C:Dobm and C:Yobu even if the latter is obvious to many of us. Does no harm, and makes more sense. :-) — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:10, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Goes in articles not talk pages

Per consensus at WP:CFD this category is considered "defining", and unlike most related categories goes in the actual article itself. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 17:04, 27 May 2007 (UTC)