Template talk:BD

Approximate years

Although I had added this note

• The template accepts approximate years,
  • decades, for example "1940s" if the exact year between 1940 and 1949 is not known
  • centuries for example "20th century", for years between 1900 and 1999

I have commented it out. Perhaps it would be better to encourage editors to leave the field blank. This would redirect the event to the Births or Unknown deaths categories which would be easier for other editors to check and correct. ---barliner--talk--contribs- 10:02, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I don't see a problem with classifying them as, for example, 1940s deaths or 20th century births. A lot of times that that is the case, it's not a matter of the user not knowing, it's that no one knows when the person was born or died. I've seen this for a lot of the really old (i.e. BC) births and deaths. · Tygrrr^·talk· 14:02, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

On the more recent ones (20th century people) focusing on finding the correct date would be a better choice, but as Tygrrr says with a lot of older bios it is often that history has forgotten the date (especially for BC births and people from more rural areas were details are almost as valid as folklore). Also some recent people just do not publish their date of birth and that privacy should be respected. Each person does not need a birth and death cat, but if one is known to exist, it should be used. Unually in these cases {{BD}} isn't the best option (or even a viable one). -- Creol(talk) 16:18, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Date of birth unknown

Okay, this'll probably sound really lame (because I don't know how to do it myself), but I was wondering if we could make it so that if the birth section is left blank (i.e. {{BD||2007|Smith, John}}) it will place the person in Category:Date of birth unknown. We'll still have to do Category:Date of death unknown manually, but this could save us some work. · Tygrrr^·talk· 21:59, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

 Done -- Creol(talk) 01:36, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

After reading the note from en:user:Komusou below, it seems to me that maybe it would be possible to not have to do Category:Date of death unknown manually. Might it be possible that when "unknown" is entered into the death section that it place the article in Category:Date of death unknown rather than Category:Unknown deaths? It would be nice to have the unknown birth and death dates use the same wording (i.e. Date of birth/death unknown). · Tygrrr^·talk· 16:11, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

 Done-- Creol(talk) 17:50, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Sort order must always be specified

Hello. It looks like the sort order must always be specified. If it is not, the page will be sorted under '{', ehich is ugly.--Eptalon 10:55, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

This should now be taken care off. There was a problem in the #if statement for the individual sorts (it default sorts and individually sorts if option 3 is present, and only individualy sorts if it is not). The Pagename attribute was also including an extra set of braces which caused it to always resovolve as {{{PAGENAME}}} and hense sort as {. I cleaned up both issues and the template actually seems to work better than it did originally. It now works perfectly fine with just {{BD|year}}. -- Creol(talk) 19:47, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Bugs and interwiki

Hello. This BD template was recently exported on en.Wikipedia. It is very interesting, but please note that your current version has various template code bugs, and missing features:

• I've hopefully fixed them there, you can see:
  • The code and enlarged documentation of en:Template:BIRTH-DEATH-SORT
  • The progressive changes and their rationales through the diff history of its sandbox development from your version to v2.0.
  • How to test easily a sandbox copy at en:Template:BIRTH-DEATH-SORT/testcases
• Also, it's been renamed BIRTH-DEATH-SORT with aliases BORN-DIED-SORT and BD-SORT, because a lot of editors will just not know that DEFAULTSORT is embedded without some clue in the template's name, else it could cause confusion or errors or redundant DEFAULTSORT, etc.
• (A possible enhancement I've not implemented is to file all articles not specifying an explicit sortkey into a dedicated category, à la en:Category:Biography articles without listas parameter, so as to find and fix them. An explicit sortkey claims an assessment of the sortkey, whether a Western "Lennon, John" or Eastern "Mao Zedong" name.)

Also, please insert the interwiki: [[en:Template:BIRTH-DEATH-SORT]]

Thanks. en:User:Komusou 00:33, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Actually, the version which was exported was several revisions ago. The missing {{{1}}} issue and defaultsort problem have been corrected since that time. I originally conceived the template as just a way to speed up the mass bio pages I had to categorize and intended it for mainly personal use only. Over time, others started using it as well, so other options cropped up (unlisted births) and were added to the mix. Overall, with our small number of regular editors, there is only a handful of editors here that use the template and each has a good understanding on the simplicity of how it works. I can understand on En:wp this would not be the case and there are certainly upgrades which would be handy or even essential there which just are not needed here. Honestly, I was surprised to even hear that my little toy got exported over there..

BD was originally just used for people with Births and Deaths. It was used in conjunction with {{LP}} for living people. Shortly after creation, LP was added as a part of BD and made the default case for people without a death date listed. The template was never meant for use with people who have an unknown date of death (or births actually) although an extra #if statement could handle checking for UNKNOWN and placing it that way. Expanding it to force using LIVING each time in its usage here would just make it less handy to use. -- Creol(talk) 02:29, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I hadn't examined the current code of your version. The "toy" is useful because all bio articles need birth/death, and it wraps and centralizes the handling of known/missing/unknown dates and the bunch of related categories, without having to know or remember them all. Also and for instance, if we had used it from the start, then the split of en:Category:Year of birth missing (living people) from en:Category:Year of birth missing would have been effected project-wide with a mere tweak of this template's code.

Please note that "LIVING" isn't required at all, it works the same with an empty field, I just added it to leave choice of a more explicit syntax, but made it the default if empty. Since BD was already in use on hundreds of articles at en.WP when I found it, I extended it with a syntax fully backwards-compatible with the original. I.e. you can write either:

{{BD-SORT|1945||Body, Some}}

{{BD-SORT|1945|LIVING|Body, Some}}

{{BD-SORT|1945|LiVinG|Body, Some}}

And the three work the same. But the "LIVING" option makes it more clear to other editors, and also explicitely asserts that "Living people" is the intended value rather than an omission. Cheers. en:User:Komusou 15:31, 26 November 2007 (UTC)