Feature summary:
For Wikidata entities that represent a human person, I would like the person's years of birth and (if applicable) death to be displayed at the top of the entity page, near the person's name and description.
It could look something like this:
Johannes Bach (1604–1673) | Q252919
German composer and musician
Or like this:
Johannes Bach (Q252919)
German composer and musician
Born 1604. Died 1673.
The exact formatting doesn't matter as long as the years of birth and death are clearly visible near the top of the page.
The years of birth and death would not be directly editable. Instead, they would be taken from the relevant properties, P569 (date of birth) and P570 (date of death), which are editable.
The aim is to discourage the practice, common among some Wikidata users, of editing the person entity's name or description to display the years manually.
Use case(s):
Showing the years of birth and death provides a quick and easy way to distinguish between individuals with similar names and descriptions. For example, the person above is not to be confused with his more widely known relation, J.S. Bach:
Johann Sebastian Bach (Q1339)
German composer (1685–1750)
Notice that J.S. Bach's entity page already has a date range in the description (true at time of writing), as do many other pages that represent people:
- Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
- Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788)
- Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
- Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
- Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Clearly there is demand for having this information near the top of the page.
Notice, however, that sometimes the year numbers are separated by Unicode's En Dash character (–), and sometimes by ASCII's Hyphen-Minus (-). Also, the date ranges are often given in the English description but not in other languages. And of course there is always the possibility that manually entered dates in descriptions will get out of sync with P569 and P570.
Not all person entities have dates in the description. Here are some that do not (again, true at time of writing):
This is another source of inconsistency, as some human entities have dates in descriptions and others do not.
All this inconsistency creates serious problems for applications that use information from Wikidata. For example, I have an application that displays summary information about music composers. I had to write code to filter out date ranges from Wikidata descriptions to avoid the years of birth and death being duplicated when I construct my own descriptions based on P569 and P570. Had I not done this, some of my descriptions would have looked like this:
Franz Schubert
Austrian composer (1797-1828) (1797–1828)
For the sake of consistency and reliability, it would be better if date ranges were omitted from descriptions and instead displayed automatically based on the values of P569 and P570.
Benefits:
Displaying years of birth and death on human entities prominently and by default should:
- Enable easier disambiguation of people with similar names and descriptions
- Discourage Wikidata users from entering these dates manually in names or descriptions
- Improve formatting consistency and data reliability
- Make life easier for application developers who use Wikidata's APIs.