Template talk:Infobox person/Wikidata

Circa birth date causes error
The template fails on Pierce A'Court-Ashe, with "Error: Need valid year, month, day)", presumably because the birth date is "circa 1707". Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:48, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

What to do when there are more than one qid?
Greetings to all you great wikipedians out there :-) I want to utilize the for a person who I have discovered has two entries on Wikidata (QIDs). One of the entries is associated with more information than the other. Is there somehow a way to "direct" the fetch to the preferred QID? Picturesqua (talk) 13:11, 23 June 2023 (UTC)


 * In case you haven't done it already, you should merge the QUIDs so that there is only one QUID for the person (Tools > Merge with). David Nind 11:50, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Suppression error
On Mark Farrow, I attempted to suppress birth_date as it is unsourced, which was successful, but the template continued to show age. Other than manually creating an infobox template, can age be automatically suppressed should the birthdate be eliminated? ☾Loriendrew☽  ☏(ring-ring)  19:24, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Unsourced? What about MoMA where Wikidata gets it (1960) from? What's wrong with that? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 00:53, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you for pointing out that link, as I am unfamiliar with how wikidata works as that is not en.wiki. Unsupported infobox fields should be removed, especially on BLP articles so my question about the template are still valid: if dob is suppressed, should not the age should be removed as well.-- ☾Loriendrew☽  ☏(ring-ring)  01:20, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
 * am unfamiliar with Infobox person/Wikidata and I've never used it. However, the documentation says this template only retrieves data that is sourced, excluding "imported from Wikipedia". But it doesn't seem to offer a mechanism to display those sources. If you're not happy with the way the template works, don't use it. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 02:05, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Claims in the infobox should appear in the body of the text and should be sourced, per MOS:INFOBOXREF. The bigger problem here is big enough that I put it in a new section below. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:09, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
 * There appears to be a bug in the  statement logic that decides whether to show the age. If birth_date is suppressed, the age should not show. That is not happening. It appears that you can work around it using birth_date death_date. This template does not appear to be suitable for widespread use. I recommend using a well-maintained infobox template instead. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:22, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

Age calculation error
A birth year of 1960 should not say "age 63" in October 2023. It should say "age 62–63", since the person's birthday might be in December. This template should use one of the age templates to display the age. See the documentation for infobox person for guidance about which template to use, depending on the data that is available. It appears that I noted this problem above in 2022 but that nobody has addressed it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:09, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I have commented out the "age XX" code until someone decides to fix it, since it can show an inaccurate age. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:26, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

Infobox person/Wikidata (usage)
I've added  to a number of articles recently (mostly when no infobox is present), and have found that fairly often other folks come along and replace it with a "normal" or "standard" infobox (one example, coincidentally, can be found in the Mark Farrow article discussed in "Suppression error" above). I have no vested interest in this, however it seems like a robust feature that we would want to expand the use of and continue to improve. Is there any consensus on how and when these wikidata enabled infoboxes should/should not be used? Cheers, Cl3phact0 (talk) 11:55, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Judging by the discussion above (and elsewhere), it's obviously not robust. If the results are wrong, it's better to use the standard infobox. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 12:34, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Fair enough. What would it take to make it more so? -- Cl3phact0 (talk) 13:25, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I think the way that you are doing it may be the best way: use this inadequate template as a weak but passable placeholder until someone can come along and replace it with a real infobox. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:07, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
 * , I find that if the wikidata side is in order, then it works very well here too. If one actually goes to wikidata and takes the time to fill in any egregious blanks (of course making certain they are properly referenced), better still. The upside of having this baseline information centralised in one place and useable across the board seems self-evident.
 * [NB:, in retrospect, perhaps I should have said that it's potentially a very "robust" feature (and could do-away with a lot of repetitive, error-prone, and tedious busy-work), so let's continue to expand and improve it until it's as flawless as possible.]
 * One could even imagine a highly automated "Infobox Gadget" that taps wikidata, and with only a few clicks, generates a mostly complete infobox. Cheers, Cl3phact0 (talk) 17:01, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
 * There should not even be any need for that: the information being on Wikidata should suffice. There is a lingering resistance and hostility towards Wikidata, observable on the Wikipedias in several languages, that I am simply at a loss to explain. Rama (talk) 10:33, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Currently there is an error at Vera Bulich ("aged Error: Need valid year, month, day") due to another stuffup with Wikidata. That's one reason for resistance. Johnuniq (talk) 01:01, 9 March 2024 (UTC)
 * There are conflicting entries for both her birth and death dates. I've dialled it back to year of birth/year of death, however, if you have a good source for either or both, I'd be happy to clean-up the mess. Cheers, Cl3phact0 (talk) 09:57, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

"Error: Need valid year, month, day" for Died at Pietro Colonna Galatino. Please fix. Otherwise the wikidata infobox should be removed. Johnuniq (talk) 04:23, 18 April 2024 (UTC)