Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography/Archive 1

Dates of Birth and Death
What about the locations of birth and death? I've seen a lot of wikipedia biographies with only the birthdate and location (as the person has not yet passed). Is there any convention for this? -DropDeadGorgias 14:43 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)


 * My own practice has been to give birthplace, parentage or background in the first detailed biographical paragraph. Then I try to include place and/or circumstances of death and sometimes burial information in the last such paragraph. If all you know is date of death, and that date is in the first line, it seems silly to repeat it....Lou I

For very short biographies, or those with no additional background, the current standard first line of Full Name (Day, Year – Day, Year), ... is fine. But I tend to disagree with it for longer articles. I think the Wiki use of full dates (e. g. November 24, 1995) and all of these being links tends to distract from the presumably important summary in the first sentence. See Frederick North, Lord North for an example of this. This becomes even more pronounced when long names and titles are combined with an image causing multiple lines to be used. So, I suggest that we change the Style page to indicate circumstances in which only the years of birth and death are preferred.... Lou I 19:27, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
 * No way, full day month year should be always given and prefered so that it will have a uniform appearance across articles, and so that the date will be rendered in manner specified by the user in their preferences. Fawcett5 3 July 2005 22:54 (UTC)

Darwin -- Wedgwood family
Request attention to some members of this family, particularly the artists and poets, since I know diddle squat about art or poetry. Dunc_Harris|☺ 00:23, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Category:Astronauts
Hi. Just wanna leave a note that Category:Astronauts has lots of poorly formatted biographical entries from NASA that participants of this WikiProject may be interested in working on. I often put them on the Template:Opentask, but they don't always gets fixed up as nicely as hoped. Have fun with them. -- PFHLai 04:14, 2004 Aug 19 (UTC)

Infobox considered harmful
Is it necessary for a biography have a big table in which to present a person's name and dates? The information is usually duplicated in the first paragraph of the article anyway. It's not necessary for all encyclopedia articles to have an infobox. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Novels and Village pump for some objections to putting infoboxes on all articles. Gdr 14:13, 2004 Aug 31 (UTC)


 * Although you seem to be aggressively against them (considering you yourself started the above threads), the community seems to prefer them. Done correctly, they present the most pertinent information about the subject, and look very nice on a printed page. Most biography articles already have an image in that location, so I don't see what's wrong standarizing the placement and accompanying text. -- Netoholic @ 16:05, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Sure, I'm against them. But not "aggressively" so: I quite like the WikiProject Tree of Life taxoboxes. Both discussions show that I'm not alone. Gdr 16:18, 2004 Aug 31 (UTC)

Img syntax should be sufficient to align an image. Let's not use an infobox for that. -- User:Docu
 * Well, it's not for that as such. It is just a fancy "picture frame", if you will. -- Netoholic @ 14:46, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Category:Births by year and Deaths by year
See Category_talk:Years. -- User:Docu

Still active?
I've moved WikiProject Biography to the Inactive section of the WikiProject page, as it hasn't been edited since Nov 1st; I wanted to let you all know, and ask if you're still working on it. If so, feel free to move it back up into the active section. JesseW 07:41, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

biography portal
I've created Wikiportal/Biography to see if anyone else thinks it's a good idea and would be willing to participate. It's still just a rough sketch of an idea. Matt 01:05, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Anyone want to comment on User:MattKingston/bio_index? I've created an index of Biographies that are featured articles, I'm looking for comments.
 * How but Louis Riel. Not that I have a vested interest or anything.... (-: Fawcett5

And, uh, every single person there so far is white. A little diversity wouldn't hurt. Fawcett5 02:48, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
 * I put a referece to the recent death (June 28) of historian Thomas D. Clark on the In the News section of the portal. Quinobi 3 July 2005 19:33 (UTC)

I love the portal idea. Never saw a portal before :) Wjhonson 14:16, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject_Biography
Please comment and contribute. Thank you. Adraeus 05:39, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

Bio-COTW
I proposed a biography COTW at the COTW Talk page for anyone interested.

Up and running
I've created the WP:BCOTW please come and help. This weeks bio is Henry Fonda. I'm not sure if it should be on this page. Falphin 00:07, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Lists of works
I've just created Manual of Style (lists of works) for discussion about the layout of discographies, filmographies, bibliographies and the like. It is an attempt to standardise these lists, as their styles currently vary greatly (order, content, layout). I thought it might be of interest to the partipants on this WikiProject. violet/riga (t) 16:56, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Genealogy
Are you aware of the above WikiProject and is it any use, either as a child project or absorbing as a subpage? Hiding talk 20:47, July 19, 2005 (UTC) Also, can you do likewise for WikiProject Monarchs? Hiding talk 21:11, July 19, 2005 (UTC)

Name changes after marriage/divorce
In a couple of articles I'm working on there's this problem of how to list the name at the beginning of the article for a person who changed their name after marrying or after a divorce. Chynna Clugston is one example... For Alice Liddell it's even more complicated, because she's widely known as Alice Liddell, but married later and died Alice Hargreaves. Any suggestions how to do this? How was it done in other articles? --Fritz S. 17:42, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

Deletion list
Hi folks,

I just wanted to let you know about a list of deletion debates on biographical articles. You can find it here: WikiProject Deletion sorting/People. Note that this includes a number of more specific sublists, such as actors, athletes, authors, and musical performers.

If you find these lists useful, please help to maintain them by adding new items and archiving old ones. Thanks!

Cheers,

-- Visviva 15:49, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

Monarch templates
I'm working on standardising the format of the early English and Wessex monarch by converting the HTML tables contained therein to templates. I've just seen the comment about "infoboxes considered harmful", but think I'll proceed. The templates allow a consistent style across these articles, and if we agree there is too much in them, then they can be centrally pruned by removing the parameters.

Articles for the Wikipedia 1.0 Project
Hi, I'm a member of the Version_1.0_Editorial_Team, which is looking to identify quality articles in Wikipedia for future publication on CD or paper. We recently began assessing using these criteria, and we are looking for A-Class and good B-Class articles, with no POV or copyright problems. Can you recommend any suitable biographicla articles? I have the following biographical FAs noted: Matthew Brettingham, Felice Beato, Robert Lawson (architect), El Lissitzky, Henry Moore, Sylvanus Morley, Benjamin Mountfort, Francis Petre, John Vanbrugh, Diego Velázquez, Norman Borlaug, Linus Pauling, David Helvarg, Elias Ashmole, Attalus I, Attila the Hun, Athanasius Kircher, Isaac Brock, John Dee, Elagabalus, W. Mark Felt, Carl G. Fisher, George Fox, Anne Frank, Helen Gandy, Franklin B. Gowen, Mahatma Gandhi, Julius Caesar, Stanisław Koniecpolski, (Laika), Ferdinand Magellan, William N. Page, Witold Pilecki, Cardinal Richelieu, Samantha Smith, Jonathan Wild, Ziad Jarrah, Noam Chomsky, James Bulger, Mário de Andrade, Isaac Asimov, Augusta, Lady Gregory, Samuel Beckett, Colley Cibber, John Day (printer), H.D., Du Fu, Robert A. Heinlein, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, George Moore, Chuck Palahniuk, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Blaise Pascal, Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, Jim Henson, Ian McKellen, Julia Stiles, KaDee Strickland, Sharon Tate, Louis Armstrong, The Beatles, Johnny Cash, Rebecca Clarke, Miles Davis, Duran Duran, Bob Dylan, Iron Maiden (band), Charles Ives, The Jackson 5, Kylie Minogue, Witold Lutosławski, Nirvana (band), Roy Orbison, Sex Pistols, Simon and Garfunkel, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sly & the Family Stone, Igor Stravinsky, The Supremes, The Temptations, Vanilla Ninja, Michel Foucault, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bernard Williams, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Robert Oppenheimer, Carl Sagan, Mark Antony, Tony Blair, Tom Brinkman, George Brown, Baron George-Brown, Charles Graner, George F. Kennan, Mark Latham, Abraham Lincoln, John Major, Sid McMath, Reginald Maudling, Joshua A. Norton, Barack Obama, James K. Polk, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Louis Riel, Theodore Roosevelt, Nicolas Sarkozy, Władysław Sikorski, Jean Schmidt, Margaret Thatcher, Mordechai Vanunu, Robert Walpole, Max Weber, Gough Whitlam, Ralph Yarborough, Father Damien, Anne of Great Britain, Charles I of England, Charles II of England, Edward VI of England, Elizabeth I of England, George I of Great Britain, George II of Great Britain, George III of the United Kingdom, George IV of the United Kingdom Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Henry VIII of England, James I of England, James II of England, Louis XIV of France, Mary I of England, Mary II of England, Penda of Mercia, Sverre of Norway, William I of Orange, William III of England, William IV of the United Kingdom, Victoria of the United Kingdom, Brian Close, A. E. J. Collins, Steve Dalkowski, Lottie Dod, Garry Kasparov, Sandy Koufax, Fanny Blankers-Koen, Katamari Damacy, Denis Law, Ted Radcliffe, (Seabiscuit), Suzanne Lenglen, Jim Thorpe, Karl Dönitz, Husein Gradaščević, Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, Erich von Manstein, Richard O'Connor.

Phew! I'm sorry to take up a lot of talk space with this, but probably this list is useful to you! Anyway, we are looking for your suggestions for good articles, there must be hundreds of good biographies that are publishable quality yet not FAs. Can you suggest some? What about the ones that have gone through your Collaboration of the Week, are some of those A or B-class? Please post your suggestions here. Thanks a lot! Walkerma 06:50, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

PS: If the list looks to be long, feel free to set up a separate page if you wish, like they did with Business & Economics. Walkerma 06:53, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Discussion of 1.0 bio list

 * Thank you for the valuable list, which i am applying in order to aid me in remedying the absence of many FA bios from the List of people by name tree. I'm reformating it into several forms that have some hopefully useful flexibility of application: 1st, WikiProject Biography/1.0-List v.0 (but rather than view it directly, either do so via its edit page, or set up the template first), a merely illustrative list but a step toward one that will accelerate my
 * _ _ detecting instances already listed, and
 * _ _ setting up the inverted-name-order piping that LoPbN uses, for those that are not.
 * It relies on putting appropriate content into template sandboxes like Template:x2, and i will exhibit here all my interesting versions of that content. One set of template versions is available via http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:X2&oldid=31618768 (but of interest only for viewing the page & illustrating the concept); see below, by editing from that old-revision page & saving, in order to rv to that revision . I'm preparing an alpha-by-surname version of the list, with the bands, animals, and any fictional char i catch, grouped , at the end.
 * (If interest is expressed here, i will post progress reports more often than otherwise.) --Jerzy•t 16:38 & 20:31, 16 December 2005 (UTC) 

_ _ The v.0 list is done; it uses 7 of the X templates. (The file that is the target of the preceding Related-changes lk, WikiProject Biography/List of sand-box templates, is an aid for checking the status of those templates.) Any of them that have been reset by the Sandbot (or are in use by other editors) will produce an annoying result, and if X2 (or to a lesser extent X3) has been reset, you may be swamped by the copies of the half-screen-ful that the default produces. I am setting up lks to old-revision screens for the most recent versions; editing and re-saving the sandbot- (or otherwise-) clobbered ones among them will make the respective dummy templates work again. _ _ Here are lks to the best old revisions; the copies of their summaries may be helpful for a while.
 * X2: Dec 15 good version (restoration of old one)
 * X3: Dec 15 good version (correct dummy tmplt title to match its own X3 title)
 * X4: Dec 15 good version (correct dummy tmplt title to match its own X4
 * X5: Dec 15 good version (correct dummy tmplt title to match its own X5 title)
 * X6: Dec 15 good version (correct dummy tmplt title to match its own X6 title)
 * X8: roughly "{<{ {x8||||||||}}
 * X9: Dec 15 *probably* good version (correct dummy tmplt title to match its own X9 title; show both versions of paren; extend to 8 inputs)

(Yes, the dates in the summaries are wrong.) --Jerzy•t 20:31 & 07:22, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

LoPbN (list of people by name)
On the main page for this WikiProject, in the "Hierarchy and classification" section the following statement appears: "There shall be a List of people which will act as a main source to list the various biographies." I do quite a bit of work on disambiguation pages and the disambiguation of personal names is a sigficant chunk of this work; related to this, I've done some thinking and work related to cross-communication between List of people by name and related disambiguation pages (baby steps, that's all). I am wondering if there is any relationship of working, interest, or scope between this WikiProject and the (vast) set of pages devoted to listing people by different criteria, in particular by name. My primary aim is to find the appropriate set of people to include in discussions in order to minimize impact of changes that might take place or to maximize the utility of such changes. Thank you for the input. Courtland 01:13, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
 * This relates to a pilot effort i've just begun at Talk:List of people by name: Bau-Baz. In contrast to the discussions of templates for use both in LoPbN and (i suppose one or more) Dab, this forgoes automation but facilitates orderly copying in at least one direction. Each LoPbN page with names on it it would, if a scheme like this is extended, have a corresponding section "Dabs (etc.) for More Names" on its talk page, providing lks to pages (almost exclusively Dabs) that could use periodic checking for new names.  This doesn't directly help readers, but may in the long run be the most effective way of encouraging a more efficient propagation of data into LoPbN.  It could be extended to sort of work in both directions by including in its explanation at the top something about adding a cmt on the Dab page, and the Dab page's talk page having a lk to the LoPbN names & talk pages (esp'ly if the Dab page doesn't have a lk to LoPbN -- a practice whose prevelance and appropriateness are unclear to me). --Jerzy•t 20:35, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

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