Template talk:Infobox person/birth death params

Proposal
There are currently over 150 different infoboxes for adding to biographical articles about people. While there are reasons to have different infoboxes for different categories of people it would be useful to standardize the names of some of the parameters that are common to most of the infoboxes.

One such example is for the date of birth param. There are currently a number of ways of specifiying this :
 * birth_date
 * birth date
 * birthdate
 * date_of_birth
 * date of birth
 * dateofbirth
 * yod, mod, dod
 * yearofbirth, monthofbirth, dayofbirth
 * byear, bmonth, bday
 * born
 * Born
 * DateOfBirth

The main advantage of having a single common parameter name is that editors would not need to refer to the template documentation for each infobox when adding the relevant information.

Single common parameters can easily be updated through scripts and bots.

Things to discuss
Some of the things that need discussing are:


 * Which parameters could be standardized and what the standard parameter names should be?
 * How to implement that changes? One option would be to add the new parameter names to the infobox and update the docs to only show the standard params.
 * Should all the existing articles be updated to use the standard param names?

Magioladitis' view
-- Magioladitis (talk) 14:24, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
 * We need to have 1 or 2 variations most for birth_date, birth_place, death_date, death_place
 * Remove any fields with links to other sites like IMdb (I think only Infobox adult biography still uses them)
 * We should use only 1 field to add birth_date and not 3 (year, month, date separately)
 * We should use only 1 field to add birth_place and not 2 (place, country separately)
 * We should have birth_date and birth_place in different fields and not in one (Infobox artist come in mind)
 * In this way infoboxes will be nearer to persondata, microformats can be be applied, it's the standard used by the vast majority of pages so far, etc.
 * An interesting stat: Out of 166 infoboxes in User:WOSlinker/Infoboxes right now, 144 use the birth_date and most of them have it exclusively.

I think the parameters that can be standardise are: -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:02, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
 * name
 * image
 * alt
 * caption
 * birth_name
 * birth_date
 * birth_place
 * death_date
 * death_place

Kumioko's Comments
I agree with the comments by Magioladitis. As Wikipedia's mix of policies, guidelines, essays and various other referenda continue to evolve and grow it will become more important to reduce the complex and haphazard nature that some things have been done in the past.
 * I also recommend the same standard be applied to the Persondata tempalte as well
 * Standardizing these dates and places of birth and death will be an improvement for the following reasons:
 * It will make it easier for users to edit the infoboxes especially newbys
 * It will reduce formatting errors between templates
 * it could simplify the logic of some of the other templates that support dates and date formatting
 * It will make it easier to program bots, applications like AWB and scripts that fix problems with dates
 * Taking several of the above into account it will improve the process of doing these things by making them more efficient
 * Could allow a bot to periodically check for format inconsistencies and either fix them or report them, potentially even with instructions on how to fix it
 * Software standardization is considered a Software industry best practice and as Wikipedia continues to develop into a more and more trusted and relied on source standardization practices will begin to play a more and more important role in ensuring that things run smoothly and our integrity is maintained.
 * Even the most democratic societies fail to function if adequite rules aren't in place and Wikipedia is no exception. Having flexibility is good but we should still use naming standards when building templates and other infrastructure. --Kumioko (talk) 17:39, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

J Greb's Comments
With regard to the scope of the RFC - parameters for the date of birth and death - I'm more inclined to see fields for full date and for components. That allows the editor entering the information the flexibility of entering the date plus other stuff - October 12th, 1965 < /ref> for example - or just the components and letting the infobox produce the standardized output look. With that, yes, keeping the field names - 2 or 6 - consistent across the infoboxes would be desirable. "Birth/Death_date" and "Year/Month/Day_of_birth/death" see the reasonable basics.

Outside of that... - J Greb (talk) 20:48, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, the same naming - "Birth/Death_place" - makes sense for where a person was born or died.
 * Same can be said for keeping name, place, and time separate.
 * I'd need to see an example or three of what is going on with 2 parameters for locations. It sounds like there may be something other than just getting the place into the 'box is involved.
 * And I've got a question/concern about 'bot runs through these parameters. If the result is just the 2 fields - "Birth/Death_date" - and the material the infobox is rendering is consistent with the desired look for Bio 'boxes and the subjects nationality, does it matter which date template, if any, is used? Yes, I can see the argument for a living person - the age will increment if the year is present. Beyond that though, it seems like a "make work" or personal preference 'bot function.

Comments from Fetchcomms
It would be nice to have standardized parameters. But is this really a pressing issue? I'm not convinced it's big enough of a deal that we need to change all these infoboxes. / ƒETCH COMMS  /  22:45, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
 * It's not a big deal on Wikipedia, but for people doing structured data research and trying to datamine our Encyclopedia so that the robots can take over the world, it'd be nice. Don't you think we should help robots take over the world? Ocaasi c 20:45, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree with Fetchcomms and with the ironic point I think Ocaasi is trying to make. This is an encyclopedia project, we're not here for data miners.  They can pay us salaries if they want us working for them.  I'm not much into biographies so I don't deal with infoboxes much, but (constrained by a desire to avoid pointiness in existing articles) I've to an extent stopped bothering using citation templates for references, typing them as normal text instead.  Also, standardization of the infoboxes is overrated give how much variation there is in article style. 75.57.242.120 (talk) 09:28, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The current chaos is fine for editors who always use the same kind of infobox, but it's terribly confusing for editors who are using different biographical infoboxes on different articles and like to type them from scratch. The lack of uniformity enforces one particular style of adding infoboxes – by copy and paste from the template documentation – which is often not the most efficient. Hans Adler 07:55, 12 April 2011 (UTC)

Comments from Rd232
I don't have any strong views on the details, but in general this is a standardisation worth doing, and as suggested in the proposal, it can be done in a way that causes a minimum of disruption and conflict, by (a) deprecating the old parameters (remove from the documentation, and replace gradually via cleanup bots and AWB general rules, so causing no edits just to update the parameters) (b) leaving the old parameters in place in the infobox templates (alongside the new), so they still work, for a good long while (eg come back in a year or two and check if they're still in use). Rd232 talk 05:13, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Comments from Lugnuts
Lets go for the Big Four (birth date, birth place, death date and death place). Pick one format for each (say go with the most used one in the Person infobox) and change them all. Now. If there are no objections by this time next week, I'll get the ball rolling and raise a bot request.  Lugnuts  (talk) 07:15, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Since it's up for discussion, how about waiting for the RFC to close? - J Greb (talk) 21:46, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Comments from Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing)
The more we can standardise, the better. Not only on parameter names, but also on what generic parameters are included in the various templates; and on their visual appearance; and by merging similar templates into this one. Andy Mabbett (User: Pigsonthewing ); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:32, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Note that some templates don't even have a death date parameter. Not only should we standardise the parameter names, but also which parameters are used. Andy Mabbett (User: Pigsonthewing ); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 10:16, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
 * We should also have as standard native_name and native_name_lang; see this edit request. Andy Mabbett (User: Pigsonthewing ); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:47, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
 * A few thoughts:
 * Merging strongly used templates - say at least a few hundred transclusion - that have "extra" parameters not in this template's full list and/or use a limited selection of the full list may not be a good thing. Even if those templates call this one and pass the information along there are going to be cases where something gets lost.
 * The "basic parameters" list might be the place to limit "required" parameters. Might be. But there is the possibility that some of the subsets won't need, or want, some of them.
 * I'm kind of surprised that a switch for adding and showing the native language spelling of the subject hasn't been implemented here.
 * - J Greb (talk) 22:24, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

Courcelles' view
This is a perfectly fine task, with good end results. However, it should not be done as the only purpose of an edit. Build it into stock AWB, let it get done as it gets done. There is nothing here worth making tens of thousands of edits just to accomplish- the benefit is not worth that much server resource. If it takes a year or more before a human or bot runs through every page while doing some other beneficial task, so what? Courcelles 01:35, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks to standardisation we managed to reduce the number of infoboxes, achieve a common style for tenths of them, easily fix wrong template parameters which were added by unaware editors, made automated programs to update parameters and much more. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:04, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Hans Adler's view
Those editors who use cut and paste (from the template description page or from a related article) may not understand the point of parameter standardisation, but for those of us who type out infoboxes by hand (because it's quicker for a fast typer), it's an issue. Unnecessary variation between templates makes this harder than necessary.

Microcoformats are an unrelated matter. So far they are not really useful in this context, as the case that you want to add someone with a Wikipedia article to your addressbook so that you don't forget their birthday should be extremely rare, and that's about all that is currently supported. Microformats should never get in the way of getting the content right. We are writing an encyclopedia, not an employee database. If there is uncertainty about a person's birth or death date, or a plain, unannotated date would be misleading for some other reason, then it must always be possible to include that information in the appropriate place. And no, trying to guess all the special cases and create additional parameters for them is not a good idea. It's unintuitive, and it's bound to fail.

I believe what we need is something like this set of parameters: In typical cases we would just fill in birth_year, birth_month, birth_day, birth_location and death_year, death_month, death_day, death_location. When there is a need to annotate the birth date we would fill in birth_date as well. In this case birth_year, birth_month, birth_day would be ignored for page display and would only be used for microformats (if at all – and we might leave them out for simplicity). When the available birth date information cannot simply be expressed in year,month,day form, then we would use birth_date instead of these other parameters.
 * birth_date
 * birth_year
 * birth_month
 * birth_day
 * birth_location

Instead of the "birth_date" convention any other convention would do ("birth date", "date of birth", "date_of_birth", "birthdate", ...), so long as we have a convention. Any old parameters that don't agree with the convention would be deprecated and gradually replaced before they could finally be removed. We have done this successfully in other cases such as ref harvard, a template that was once used in many articles but is now completely forgotten. Hans Adler 11:12, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

GiantSnowman's view
I would support standardisation across most infoboxes, but not all - for example, is used in tens of thousands of articles, and is only used by a small group editors who create articles about footballers. We've already had far too many issues with our infobox being changed - shows those using incorrect parameters, which this Bot task is trying to rectify - and to change it again would only be disruptive. Conclusion - I see no benefit to changing the paramaters of this particular infobox. Regards, GiantSnowman 13:31, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
 * What about at least using name rather than playername? -- WOSlinker (talk) 17:00, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
 * That'd be fine actually - my main concern here is with the places of birth/death parameter. The current football infobox has seperate parameters for city & country, which works fine - but, based on my 5 years here of editing footballer articles, having only one  parameter will lead to editors introducing lots of trivial & unsourced information into the infobox. There's an old saying of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" - and I think that applies perfectly to these parameters. GiantSnowman 17:29, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
 * The main issue with using  rather than   is that many footballers play under a different name form their actual name, and the ruling consensus is to show that as the infobox title, and then use a   parameter to show their actual full legal name.  If we  were to rename that parameter to   there would be great inconsistency in how it was used, and no doubt numerous edit wars over it.-- Club Oranje T 08:42, 30 April 2011 (UTC)
 * "Name" is the name we want on the top of the infoboxes. The manual can explain this. This is the main rule for all infoboxes anyway. That's why we have "birth_name" and "fullname" as separate parameters. Name is 99% the same with the PAGENAME. We use the parameter when the PAGENAME contains things like "(born 1978)" or "(footballer)". -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:50, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

More things to do

 * Use Infobox class wherever possible.
 * Try to give the same names to all fields and if possible to the same order
 * Use standard width, colours and fonts. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:45, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Remove image placeholders from all infoboxes.
 * Image parameter should not require prefix. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:02, 16 July 2011 (UTC)