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This talk page is for discussion of the page WP:Manual of Style (dates and numbers). Please use it to make constructive suggestions as to the wording of that page.
  • Anyone wishing to discuss the issue of IEC prefixes for quantities of bits and bytes should use this subpage of the main talk page.
  • Anyone wishing to discuss date linking should consider doing one of the following:
1) Make proposals at the talk page of WP:CONTEXT, where the issue is addressed most fully;
2) Check the archives, as this topic has been discussed in extremely great detail in recent months.

RfC: Linking of dates of birth and death

Template:RFCstyle

Proposal: to add the words

These dates should normally be linked.

to the section WP:MOSDAB#Dates of birth and death, and to link the example dates, so the section would read

At the start of an article on an individual, his or her dates of birth and death are provided. These dates should normally be linked. For example: "Charles Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was a British ..."

  • For an individual still living: "Serena Williams (born September 26, 1981) ...", not "... (September 26, 1981 –) ..."
  • When only the years are known: "Socrates (470–399 BC) was..."
  • When the year of birth is completely unknown, it should be extrapolated from earliest known period of activity: "Offa of Mercia (before 734 – 26 July 796) ..."

...

Rationale There are some - most vocally perhaps Tony - who believe that pretty much no dates should be linked; and this seems to be what Lightbot was trying to achieve, too. But I don't believe that is the view of the majority. On the contrary, I think the balance of opinion, even amongst those who don't want to see pages becoming a "sea of blue", is that it is useful to have at least some date links on a page, to let people establish a broader context for the times in which a person lived, by clicking their way through the date hierarchy especially via pages like List of state leaders in xxxx or xxxx in the United Kingdom, etc. The proposal that at least the date of birth and date of death in a biographical article should be linked has been made independently in at least four different threads: by Scolaire in the section above #Dates are not linked unless; by Carcharoth in the section above #Concrete examples (year links); by Eleassar, relaying a question raised to him in talk, at WT:CONTEXT#Birth dates?; and by myself at User talk:Lightmouse#Date linking request (birth and death years). It therefore seems appropriate to put up this proposal specifically as a formal well-advertised RfC. Jheald (talk) 11:03, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

  • Support. The date page hierarchy, and pages rapidly linked from it, provides a useful link to historical context for biographical articles. The biographical articles are stronger for such context; and the birth date and death date are the most obvious choice of dates to link. Jheald (talk) 11:03, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose. (1) You're linking an anniversary day and month that is useless to our readers (please demonstrate some that are useful, and not just a magic carpet for discretionary browsers); and many editors will confuse this with the old autoformatting function. (2) Did you mean to "nowiki" the laborious constructions above that are concealed behind the piped linking ((] ] – ] ])? I'm sure this will go down very well with editors, who who will not only have to memorise how to do this, but will have to actually do it in every article. (3) You haven't demonstrated why it is worth forcing editors to make a link to a year page (birth/death): while it might be possible in a few rare instances to argue that the year of death page is vaguely useful (e.g., 1963 for the death of JF Kennedy, but even that example demonstrates how the fragmented facts about JFK in that year are better in the JFK article itself, or a daughter article on the assassination). (4) The "year in X" links are fine, except that concealing them behind what looks like a useless year-link is self-defeating, isn't it? Already, at least one WikiProject says not to use them. MOSLINK recommends the use of explicit wording to overcome the concealment. Tony (talk) 11:49, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
    • No, this has nothing to do with autoformatting. I'm proposing that such dates - the year, and the day - in the opening words of a bio article should be linked, end of story; something a number of other editors have also raised. The principal value being for the context that these links, and onward links from such pages, allow readers to click through to and explore.
      I'm not talking about "Year in X" articles, I'm talking about the bare year articles themselves. And I'm not intending to particularly mandate the &nbsp; characters - they were there already, so I just left them. My proposal is very simple: as a rule, the days and years in those opening words should be linked. I want to see where the balance of the community rests on that question. Jheald (talk) 12:06, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose, per many of Tony's comments, and just the fact that these year articles (much less day of the month ones!) don't provide useful historical context, they provide an often enormous list of trivial crap. If a large and well-organized WikiProject were capable of producing actually useful year articles that summarized the truly notable happenings in those years, I could maybe see the linking of years (only) for birth/death/establishment/disestablishment dates (only, for the most part). The problem with this though is that editors will see them linked in the lead sentence and then go around linking them all over the place, and we'd be pretty much back where we started. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 11:55, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Support. I opposed delinking dates in the first place and I still do. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:57, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose, I've never seen much sense in date linking, and links to day-of-the-month articles result in triviality amost by definition. Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:41, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • CommentSupport. I agree this is a good question to work out. My question is whether we should use what I think you are proposing, the well known and much disliked, "link to the day of year", "link to the year" (which is why people are asking about autoformatting), or if we should be suggesting {{Birth date|yyyy|mm|dd}} and {{Death date and age|yyyy|mm|dd|yyyy|mm|dd}} which provides protection against lightbot and allows for more flexibility in the future. As for those who oppose the "trivia dumping grounds", I suspect that if the links are to specific types of narrowly defined data (such as Births on January 15, 1900 or People who share a birthday on 15 January) most people would be fine with that. dm (talk) 12:43, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • ;;partial Strong Support. In that case, the first example should be ""'''Charles Darwin''' {{DL|y=1809|m=February|d-12|mode=eng}} – {{DL|y=1882|m=April|d=19|mode=end}}) was a British ...", with the details of the template worked out later. (And yes, if the question is whether the dates be linked in the lead sentence, my answer is strong support.) Disagree with secret links to 1990 births or 15 January birthdays / January 15 birthdays (if, for no other reason, we'd need staff monitoring which of the latter is linked to.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 13:22, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
    • Changed to neutral on the day of the year, even if the day of the year article is the one that links back to the person, and the year article does not, because of inadequate notability. It should, however, be pointed out, that ] ] would block autoformatting, and the only consensus we have is that autoformatting is bad, not the linking. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 01:58, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Support with comment There are many who do click and want to click on a date link to look at a reference in context, and whether that is trivial, banal or whatever is not my business, nor mine to judge. I can understand that someone may wish to click on a link to find out the context of a date of birth to the world around them at the time. Do I do it? No. Should it be allowable? Yes. For instance a child born during a battle in the local area, or being named Victoria, and that being the date of the coronation of Queen Victoria, or some other event that may have an effect on that person's environment. This information can be quite relevant. So the issue then becomes managing it, and making it useful. Is there 'overlinking' on dates, most definitely, and the information should be most specific, however, the request is specifically for Dates of Life. With regard to the comments about triviality ... for goodness sake, the difference between trivia and excellent knowledge is solely your own virtual framework and environment. If some people thrive on trivia, good luck to them, WP is here for all types. Not asking for extreme, let us find the median position. -- billinghurst (talk) 13:54, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Linking some, but not all full dates in the article will be confusing. I don't see birth and death date-linking to be valuable at all. Most biographies do have categories for year of birth and death that would get your average browser to the year page anyway. Karanacs (talk) 14:21, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
    • Query to Billinghurst: Your assertion that many people click on and want to click on a date link seems unlikely—do you have sources for this? Tony (talk) 14:42, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
      • Thanks Tony. wikt:many Anecdotally from reading, especially the commentary when it was on User_talk:Lightmouse; some (light) discussions with genealogists, who are a little date focused. I too would love to see evidentiary information about date links and whether they are followed or not. If someone has the right wand to produce that data, it would be lovely. To Karanacs the proposal is just Dates of Life, not all dates. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Billinghurst (talk • contribs)
      • For tony to make such a statement that it is unlikely only proves that he is not paying attention to the comments being made against delinking of dates. I have stated on several occasions (as have others) that I do click on dates (sometime only to see if the article is associated to the date). As for evidence I recommend that someone does a query on the toolserver for all the date articles and see if the hits reduce over the next few months as more and more articles have the dates delinked. I believe we will find a marked reduction in the traffic to those date articles do to their delinking.--Kumioko (talk) 16:27, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose. It adds complexity and I just don't see the value. Haukur (talk) 14:59, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Support I never agreed with Tony's 2 dimensional view that date linking is bad. Misplaced Pages is a 3 dimensional database of articles and is not bound by the 2 dimensional rules of a paper article. If we have an article in wikipedia that is linkable to an article then we should link to it (whether ir directly relates or not). That doesn't mean that it should be linked 4 or 5 times but it should be linked and the birth and death dates to me are reasonable. If we go along with this delinking of dates argument that tony presents then next we will be delinking the city and state of birth, military ranks, allegiances and any other link that is not directly related to an articles content. I think that this date argument sets a very ugly precedent. Additionally, given the volume of arguments for and against this venture it should be obvious to everyone (regardless of how they feel about whether dates should or should not be linked) that this does not meet consensus, regardless of how the vote previously came out.--Kumioko (talk) 15:06, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Strong but partial support I believe linking the year to the bare year articles for births and deaths in bio provides useful context information. I'm actually in favour of linking years (decades etc.) where ever the historical context is significant to the subject of the article, even if the subject itself is not significant to the period of time linked. However, I am not as convinced of the value of linking the month and day, especially since those links would not seem to add much context without the year. PaleAqua (talk) 15:53, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
    • Two simple points to PaleAqua: (1) Where was the consensus to link these items in the first place? (2) No one is suggesting a slippery slope to no wikilinking; rather, I sense that the motivation is the direct opposite: the encouragement of a stronger wikilinking system through the avoidance of extremely low-value dilutions. Tony (talk) 16:45, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
      • 1) Rhetorical statements are unhelpful. Where is so much of the information and documentation of templates, convention, etc. Wikis evolve, we are talking about a controlled evolution. 2) No, you are correct, no slippery slope suggested, it was Dates of Life only. Low value to you, statements to the contrary by others that dates of linking are not of low value seem to be ignored or derided as of low value. :-( billinghurst (talk) 17:12, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Support. It certainly does no harm. Also usefull for lovers of trivia. Let readers decide what they want to read. G-Man 19:55, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose. One of the dates in the example, 26 July 796, would be displayed to those who have selected the "2001-01-15T16:12:34" date format preference as 0796-07-26. The unique format in the preference menu clearly defines this date as an ISO 8601 date, even though that term does not appear on the menu. Also, the discussion leading to the implementation of date autoformatting makes it clear this format was intended to be ISO 8601. ISO 8601 requires dates to be in the Gregorian calendar, and requires mutual consent before information exchange partners exchange any date before the year 1583. Since the date 26 July 796 is in the Julian calendar, both requirements are violated. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 20:15, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
    • Comment: this discussion is not intended to be about autoformatting. This is about hard-linking of the dates, rendered as written, which is how 99% of readers will see them. If there are bugs in autoformatting, then there are bugs in autoformatting. User beware. But we shouldn't let the tail wag the dog. The question is, regardless of autoformatting, should these dates be linked? Jheald (talk) 20:50, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose Just because an article exists on Misplaced Pages that can be linked to, doesn’t mean it should be linked to. Links should be topical and germane to the article and should properly anticipate what the readership will likely want to further explore. Linking of years (1982), isn’t germane most of the time and should be limited to intrinsically historical articles like French Revolution—in which case, the linked dates would be older, like 1794. What the bot is doing that I find really valuable is the de-linking of dates (October 21). If someone was born on that date in 1982, no one gives a damn if “On this date in] 1600 - Tokugawa Ieyasu defeats the leaders of rival Japanese clans in the Battle of Sekigahara, which marks the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate, who in effect rule Japan until the mid-nineteenth century.” This isn’t not proper technical writing practices. Greg L (talk) 20:25, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
    • I just want to clarify that just because you don't "give a damn" doesn't mean knowone does. If knowone cared then there would be no need to have a On this day section in the main page.--Kumioko (talk) 20:39, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
      • Indeed. Maybe some people are interested in who else shared the same birthday, or that an English rugby union star was born on the feast-day of the patron saint of McDonalds. If WP has these pages, I think it's inappropriate to presume that because WP:YOUDONTLIKEIT, nobody else should be allowed to find them. Jheald (talk) 20:50, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
        • To Jheald: So you cite WP:YOUDONTLIKEIT. That’s sort of a “if it’s blue, it must be true” argument; if there was a WP:I REALLY REALLY LIKE IT AND IF AN ARTICLE EXITS ON WIKIPEDIA, IT SHOULD BE LINKED TO essay, I might “prove” my point. To Kumioko: I have no problem with the “On this day…” on the main page because all readers know what they will be taken to if they click on a link; they aren’t Easter eggs. And to both of you: This isn’t an issue of right or wrong; it’s a grey area centered around the issue of not desensitizing readers to our blue links through excessive linking. These are links to trivia. Too few readers, after they’ve stepped on these date land mines, want to bother with them any more. Greg L (talk) 21:24, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
          • I agree that date and year links can be land mines and unhelpful to readers. Let's make that clear first. However, I seriously doubt that links that are clearly birth and death years will mislead readers in your "land mine" sense. Take this example: "Charles Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was a British ..." In my view, people may wonder what the links are, but when they click on them will realise "ah, an article on the year, that makes sense". They will then know this when they see it on future articles, and either click through as desired, or ignore them. What they won't do, in my opinion, is click on the link and think "oh, I was expecting an article on this person's birth" or "oh, I was expecting an article on this person's death". i.e. when clearly linked in a specified and limited context (birth and death years), year links are not Easter egg "land mines", and they are not excessive linking (two links per biographical article). Carcharoth (talk) 04:17, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
            • I have observed that articles tend to be more heavily linked in the lead section; birth and death dates also tend to be the first to appear after the subject's name. Linking to these date articles would strongly contribute to the strong sea of blue in the opening paragraphs. While death dates may be consequential in certain cases, the only possible exception birth dates being generally a non-event is Jesus Christ, and nobody knows JC's exact birth date or year anyway, so I think this is a red herring of a debate. 219.78.19.154 (talk) 15:47, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
              • Well, Alfonso XIII's birth was probably an event... Anyway, your overlinking argument is a good one. If we are to link some dates in a biographical article, then it would make sense to link birth and death dates, but doing it in the lead is not very good. If we say "do it only in an infobox", plus get rid of the autoformatting, then I like it better. -- Jao (talk) 15:57, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
                • Actually, Darwin's birth did involve a minor event; it was the same day as Abraham Lincoln's. I should prefer to have this trivium availabe behind a link to restarting the proverbially WP:LAME edit war about whether it should be in the lead...
                  More seriously, the year of birth does provide context, and would provice more if the year articles were better. On medieval articles, it is often of some interest on what saint's day a given person is born; and so on. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:59, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Support - While I believe that most dates should not be linked, I believe that, in biographical articles, dates of birth and death would serve as helpful links. We link to the biographical articles of persons born on a particular date on that date's article, so why not link back to the date from the biography? – PeeJay 20:45, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose - I don't see the value of linking the dates of birth and death. The previous objections to all date linking still seem to apply. Day-of-the-month linking is still trivial even when the date is someone's birth date EdJohnston (talk) 21:17, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose - extremely low value links. If someone is interested in the "context" of who else was born on September 12, they can type those few characters into the search box themselves. These are trivial connections that clutter articles needlessly. Ground Zero | t 21:42, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

*Oppose - I have yet to see any argument that comes close to convincing me that these date links provide any sort of relevant context. Yes, they provide context, but the context is so general that it seems useless to me. And yes, I have heard the argument that "just because it seems useless to you, doesn't mean it's useless to everyone." This is a valid argument, but only to a point. Linking every word in every sentence to Wiktionary would probably be more useful than this, in my view. And I don't think that one would get any massive rash of support, either.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 22:31, 29 September 2008 (UTC) (Changed !vote: see below)

  • Oppose That would just makes everything more complex. Besides, I have yet to read a convincing argument on why date-of-birth and date-of-death links are necessary to aid the reader's understanding of the article's subject matter. Dabomb87 (talk) 02:20, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Support linking of birth and death years once at the appropriate place in an article (with the second option being a formal written support in the manual of style for using the birth and death year categories). Oppose linking of dates as these are, in my opinion, trivial links. This was my position in an earlier thread quoted above, though I may not have made it clear enough. I obviously disagree with those who think birth and death year links are trivial in biographical articles - it is my opinion that birth and death years are integral metadata information for biographical articles. Currently, such information is found either as: (a) plain text in the lead sentence, with some articles still having the dates linked; (b) birth and death date categories; (c) entries in the infobox; (d) entries in the Misplaced Pages:Persondata metadata information. Until the Manual of Style specifically mandates that the information for birth and death years needs to be in a form that can be analysed by computers (ie. metadata - and yes, linking is a form of metadata when used correctly), then delinking birth and death years without checking for the existence of the other metadata is a destructive process. I support reduction of overlinking, and avoiding a sea of blue links, but also support the retention of some form of clickable links to take the reader from biographical articles to our chronology categories and articles. Carcharoth (talk) 03:54, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
  • I'd only support this as a reversion to the policy of all date linking, in other words linking dates of birth and death are no more or less valuable than any other date links. Either the standard should be to link all or to link none. - fchd (talk) 05:37, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
    • How so? Can you provide an example? I think the article with wikilink dates, eg. "He was promoted to Captain on 1 March xxxx ..." shows that THE date has only has relevance within the article itself, not to the world events at the time.
      At the moment, the issue with much of the discussion is the value judgments rather than relevance or usefulness. Many say it is of low-value where it means it is of low value to them. Whereas many of those supporting, say they find it useful, and they find it is of relevance for their research. I understand my biases, I would like the nay sayers to consider that it this is about relevance and perspective, not their values. --billinghurst (talk) 08:54, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose Firstly, we already have consensus that wikilinking of dates is deprecated, so having this as part of the guideline would be a seriously retrograde step, and make a mockery of it, IMHO. Secondly, I would would be somewhat horrified at extensive wikilinking of birth and death dates: the vast majority of biographies I have come across have had these dates linked, and I just feel that these links add nothing to any of the articles. What I am talking about includes EIIR, where the only date I would probably retain is the date of coronation; I might also consider linking the dates of death of Mao Zedong and John F. Kennedy and other leaders who died in office, or other world figures who died at the height of their influence - for example John Lennon. However, we already have articles on the Coronation of the British monarch, Assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Death of John Lennon, which renders the linking unnecessary in the examples given, also proving Tony's point. I would say that even Albert Einstein's birth and death dates are but biographical facts which add little significance to the world if linked to date and year articles. If somebody really wants to look up 18 April 1955 for a context surrounding Einstein's death, they can just as easily type it in the search box or the address bar. It seems to be rather bureaucratic to oblige editors to add wikilinks to these whilst removing all the other wikilinked dates, when there is so much to do here on WP. Ohconfucius (talk) 10:29, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
    • Consensus was only reached after being repeatedly opposed. Tony simply kept resumbitting it until it reached consensus. I have been editing for a couple years on WP and I have never seen any change that has been so hotly contested as this. Your right though in that consensus was reached, now it is up to all of us to refine the details of the decision so that it best supports the project overall. I can live with the decision that dates should not be linked (although I don't agree with it per se) but I do think that certain key dates such as birth and death should be allowed.--Kumioko (talk) 18:27, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Support I use birth and death links all the time , as well as links in other key dates to get an historical context to what I am reading. Misplaced Pages year articles give a continuous timeline of what else was going on in the world at the time an event happend. They provide useful context and background and allow the reader to get immersed into a particular historic point in time. They are an invaluable resource unique to Misplaced Pages. Removal is a retrograde step. Lumos3 (talk) 12:43, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Weak support. Clearly some readers do find these useful, and the wide support for doing it can be seen in the fact that it has been so widely done. (If it had been introduced by bot, of course, this would not follow, but I see no sign that it has been.) We encourage multiple ways of linking articles together; categories and nav templates and links; this is merely another. I would much more firmly support weaker wording; but it is already established that normally means most people do, but you don't have to even for FA and GA, which should be weak enough. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:58, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Support, in the cases described by Carcharoth above. A less obvious way I have found links useful is to use them to see what is linked to a given article & the birth/death dates are one important way this works. Further, until this latest push to delink all dates, no one ever raised the issue that linking birth/death dates was unnecessary. I believe it deserves an exception -- & the spirit of ignore all rules more than justifies us to make an exception to any rule when the exception improves the encyclopedia. -- llywrch (talk) 18:50, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Qualified oppose. I don't have a strong opinion on the autoformatting question. Personally, I've always thought that our readers were smart enough to correctly read a date whether it was presented as 19 Jan 2008, Jan 19, 2008 or 2008 Jan 19. But I know that others disagree and I don't feel strongly enough about it to argue.
    On the more important question of whether the links are useful as links, I think they should pretty much all be removed. Linking a birth or death day to a page about that day of the month is invariably trivia. While many books publish such trivia, I do not consider that to be a proper function for an encyclopedia. There is nothing encyclopedic about the subject of the biography that the reader can learn by following the link to a page of other trivia that happened on all the other 19 Jans in time.
    The argument for linking years is better but still not strong enough in my opinion. The general argument for it (repeated by several people above) is that it provides historical context and can provide a path to the events which influenced the subject of the biography. I consider this a weak argument because the degree to which a newborn can be influenced by events outside his/her immediate family is trivially low. Child-development specialists will tell you that influences in the first 5-8 years are almost entirely domestic or, at best, highly local. The appropriate link for developmental context would be to the appropriate decate article covering the ages somewhere between 10 and 30. Likewise, a link to a death year tells almost nothing about the person's life except in the rare case where the death itself was a cause for notability.
    My opinion is also influenced by the observation that the "year" pages are massively overlinked. The odds of finding anything useful either on the page itself or by following "what links here" is miniscule. I've never yet followed one of those links and learned anything useful. Rossami (talk) 19:25, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
    • There are at least two uses for these links on birth/death dates. The first is an example of data management -- to maintain the Categories "X births" & "Y deaths". Not everyone who creates or improves an article remembers to include biography articles in these kinds of categories. The second is an example of user friendliness -- it helps end users to determine who was born or died on specific days. There are a lot of people out there who want to know who was born -- or died -- on a given day, & these links help them to research this information. While the Persondata information could offer the same information, so far Persondata is manually created & not yet present in all biographical articles. -- llywrch (talk) 03:13, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Support - It's clear that not everyone finds these links useful, but it's equally clear that some do find them useful to a degree, myself included. Jheald's proposal seems like a fair compromise. I'm confident that linking a date or two in the lead won't turn the rest of the article into an indecipherable sea of blue. --Bongwarrior (talk) 19:38, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
    • Bongwarrior: OK, “some” find the links useful. Is that the test you think should be used here: (“some”)? Or do you think it is more than just some, and that the body of readers who would actually want to read through lists of trivia in “year” article are sufficiently numerous to merit yet more blue links in our articles? Greg L (talk) 22:14, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
      • My impression from the above is that those who find the year links useful are coming more from the metadata side of things, rather than the trivia side of things. It would also be nice to have some acknowledgement that birth and death years are less trivial (though some people do clearly see them as still trivial) than a random mention of a year in a random article. And also that linking birth and death years does not contribute to a "sea of blue (links)", but is actually limited to a specific place (at the start of the article) and to two specific links. To expand on the metadata side of things, I'd be happy if a sustained effort were made to bring biographical articles into compliance with some standard style, ensuring that all the articles had Misplaced Pages:Persondata (currently woefully limited in its application - to respond to Kaldari's point below), that all biographical articles had birth and death year categories (or the 'unknown' equivalents) and the "biography of living people" tag (where applicable) and that all biographical articles had {{DEFAULTSORT}} correctly applied (to aid the generation of a master-index, as well as categorisation). If half as much effort went into that as into whether to link birth of death dates or not, then some progress might be being made. As it is, biographical articles account for around 1 in 5 of Misplaced Pages's articles (and, I suspect, a significant fraction of newly created articles), but only a small fraction use Persondata, thousands and thousands of biographical articles are not sorted correctly in the index categories, and many lack birth and death year categories. Many biographical articles also lack the {{WPBiography}} tag on their talk pages. This is one reason why I feel as strongly as I do about not just removing birth and death year links until a proper audit of the biographical articles has been carried out (you can, if you like, think of it as the "date audit" clashing with plans for a similar "biographical audit" and the "date audit" removing metadata links that might have been parsed by the "biographical audit"). To take that one step further, I wonder if the contributions log of Lightbot can be analysed to reveal how many birth and death years were delinked on biographical articles where no birth and death year categories were present? I presume such an analysis would be possible? Carcharoth (talk) 23:27, 30 September 2008 (UTC) I asked Lightmouse here if he can help.
        • I suspect that the actual readers click on links much less than we think they do. There's no evidence for their popularity. The concept of wikilinking is great, but needs to be rationed carefully. No studies have been conducted on readers' attitudes or behaviour in relation to them (for example whether readers tend to read through as much of an article as they're ever going to and then consider hitting a link, or whether they divert on the spot), but common sense tells me that the utility is fragile. Tony (talk) 02:30, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
          • You are probably right. I would say it would depend on a combination of factors: (1) Whether the reader understands the term or knows about the object/event/person linked {information/definition); (2) Whether the article contains sufficient context to explain things and avoid the need for a reader to click away to another article (insufficient article context); (3) Whether the reader is bored by the article they are reading and whether any particular link looks more interesting (diversionary browsing); (4) Whether the reader (after reading the whole article) wants to read up further on a particular topic (discretionary browsing). It depends on the reader to a large extent. What we, as editors, can do, is ensure articles have sufficient context to reduce the need to link, keep articles interesting, keep metadata separate from linking, and try to ensure high-quality linking (linking to good articles and to the correct articles) and to avoid overlinking. If there was ever a push for levels of linking, then one good metric would be "if a fact in article A is mentioned in article B and vice-versa, then that is a primary link", with other links being "background" or "definition" links. Trouble is, there is such a spectrum of reasons for linking, that levels of linking just allows for edit warring. If some software thing like "there is a reciprocal link" could be enabled to turn a link a different colour, that might work, but then too many different colours makes things silly as well. Maybe a preference to only have reciprocal links display? Carcharoth (talk) 03:00, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
            • Wow. Tony, are you saying we should unlink everytihng, not just dates or a few countries, but everything? Links aren't popular? We need to ration them? This certainly explains some of your underlying motivations. dm (talk) 03:47, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
              • It’s not too complex Dmadeo. Links should be judiciously used. They should be highly topical and germane to the subject matter. They should invite exploration and learning for the intended audience. Linking to electron is perfectly fine for the Atom article but would be boring and desensitizing to readers reading up on Planck units; the majority of the visitors reading that article already know what an electron is. The litmus test shouldn’t be whether or not some readers will find it interesting, but whether a good number of the target readership would find it interesting enough to click on. For too long, too many links have been added to Misplaced Pages’s articles because an article existed and could be linked to. But with 6,930,527 articles on en.Misplaced Pages, hundreds of them nothing but date-related trivia, plus even more on Wiktionary, the number of articles to link to is now astronomical and our articles have become excessively linked, effectively turning them into giant, boring, blue turds. Tony is right. We don’t need links to mind-numbing list of randomly-generated trivia nor to common countries. Nor to Manhole cover in the street out in front of Greg L’s house (it’s at a latitude of 47° 39′ 9.1″ for those who would actually be interested in that). It’s not that nobody is interested in clicking on all these links; it’s just that not enough readers are interested in clicking on them. IMO, the reaction to often strive for in readers when we provide links should be “Oh, WOW. I didn’t know they’d have an article on that too!”. Greg L (talk) 04:31, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
                • Precisely. As an aside, you should subst that 'number of articles' template, otherwise in a year's time it will show the number of articles at the time someone reads the archives, not when you wrote this - what do you mean, "no-one reads the archives"? :-) Though there could be a useful distinction, I think, between levels of information on an article and what to link to. Not everyone reading the Planck units article will know what an electron is - that is why you could link it once at the first appearance, and then not link it again (which is normal practice anyway). Consider the reader who wants to click "electron" but can't. They will either edit the article and add a link, or they will look "electron" up by searching for it. But they will be thinking as they do so "why didn't they give me a link to click on?!". But even relevant links are uninteresting to some. The first link on Planck units is units of measurement. I have no interest in clicking on that, but because it is relevant, it stays. So relevance is probably more important than whether a link is interesting. As for links to common countries, there are exceptions to every rule. If you have a list of countries, sometimes it makes sense to link all of them, rather than just some of them. Your "oh wow" point is one viewpoint (and something I agree with). The other is the semantic web - see WP:BUILD. Going too far one way or the other (overlinking and underlinking) could be very damaging. How would you propose to avoid underlinking? Carcharoth (talk) 05:02, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
                  • I get the overlink problem, and it seems like a theoretical problem, but not really one in practice. I think it's a lot better to deal with a particular problem article with a simple MOS guideline and involved editors actually editing the articles. Trying to prescribe exactly how to do this in the MOS devolves into lists of what's acceptable and what's not (ie: unlink the United States, but not Australia). I've seen others describe this as overinstruction or instruction creep and I'm starting to feel that there's a small number of vocal people who really like the idea. I find it offputting. dm (talk) 08:19, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
            • This is exactly what I was afraid would happen, in Tony's opinion above wikipedia should be nothing more than a publically updated encyclopedia britanica with a few links sprinkled in the article for certain key events. Tony, THIS IS NOT A 2 DIMENSIONAL DATABASE, stop trying to force your narrow views on everyone else. I agree that many articles are overlinked and I understand what you are saying, but having the links is useful and they generate trafic to other articles perpetuating the cycle of publically updated information. If we start stripping off links then one of the primary selling points of wikipedia is lost and we might as well buy the paper set when the salesman comes to the door.--Kumioko (talk) 15:12, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
  • I have to respond when my views are being misrepresented. I'm sure people aren't deliberately making things up, so I wish they'd check their facts first. (1) I see little value to the readers, and much unnecessary blue in prominent positions, in the linking of common country names, especially English-speaking countries. Just why every single popular culture article should have a link to "British", "UK", "American", "United States", "Australian", "Australia"—I've counted seven to one country in a single article—is quite beyond me. This includes such little-known entities as "India", "China", "Russia", and some European countries. If it's a world map our readers require, they should be made well aware of its existence on the main page, since these country articles swamp the linking reader with huge amounts of information, most of it unrelated to an article topic. (2) It's easy to accuse me, in an exaggerated and frankly quite unfair way, of wanting to strip away all or most links; but in reality, I'm pro-wikilink; I believe people who complain about the notion of a more selective approach to linking are, without their realising it, working against the wikilinking system by diluting the valuable links to such an extent that they are ignored by most readers. It's a great way to kill of a great system. I'm trying to make it more effective. Tony (talk) 15:40, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
    • …there! Another link to mindless trivia. Why? I link, therefore I am. Greg L (talk) 20:47, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
    • P.S. I agree completely when Tony wrote “I believe people who complain about the notion of a more selective approach to linking are, without their realising it, working against the wikilinking system by diluting the valuable links to such an extent that they are ignored by most readers.”  Well said. Greg L (talk) 23:16, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
      • It may surprise you, but I agree with what Tony said as well. We just draw the line at different points. People will always have different ideas about what to link and what not to link. If you want to successfully persuade more people to reduce overlinking, it might be worth expanding WP:CONTEXT to explain things in more detail. I also think part of the problem is that editors often think "do we have an article on this?", and then try a wikilink to find out (using preview). When it turns out to be blue, they check it (hopefully) and then leave the link there because they are pleased that we have an article on whatever. The pleasure at seeing a wikilink work is such that it can be very hard to consciously remove it. By the way, thanks for the essay (I'm sure I've seen a similar essay somewhere before). It makes some interesting points, even if I think putting vomit in the "see also" section is a bit over the top and faintly insulting, as is linking to insanity, but it's your essay. I would add some footnotes to the essay, giving examples of "fascinating" trivia from the October 16 article (I didn't read all of it, but I did skim it), but that might not be appreciated. Seriously, have you ever thought of putting articles like October 16 up for deletion? You sound like you would be happy if they were all deleted. Finally, thanks for the photo of a sewer manhole cover. I've placed this photo in the sanitary sewer article - might as well use the picture to improve an article as well (did you know some people actually collect pictures of manhole covers? See here. There is also some interesting history behind some manhole covers. But then if you are recoiling in horror at the thought of this, then I guess you wouldn't appreciate things like Station Jim either. Carcharoth (talk) 23:56, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
        • Carcharoth: When you write “Seriously, have you ever thought of putting articles like October 16 up for deletion? You sound like you would be happy if they were all deleted.”. Perhaps I might come across that way but, no, I wouldn’t want them deleted. Just de-link them.

          There are just too few people who are reading up on, for instance, Hugh Beaumont (actor), who are really going to read more than the first two entries after they click on a date link. I’d bet that 99.9% of the time, the typical reaction is “Hmmm… that’s what these links do” and then they click their browser’s ‘back’ button. Even with my challenge in the essay, it will be interesting if anyone can ante up and actually read only two of those trivia articles.

          By better anticipating what readers to a given article will be interested in further exploring, we increase the value of the remaining links. If someone is in a mood for long lists of historical trivia, it’s easy enough to type them into the search field.

          And I agree 110% with you when you write about the litmus test many editors use in deciding whether to link or not: if it can be linked to, then link to it. Greg L (talk) 00:35, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

          • Thanks for the reply. I must admit that when I wikilink an article without wikilinks (sometimes a badly written one - the lesson there is that it is better to rewrite the article before wikilinking), I have tended to add links to find out if we have articles on certain things, and only then winnowed the links down to those that are most relevant (and sometimes not even that). I will, in future, be trying consciously to increase the quality and 'impact factor' of any wikilinking I do. I still think that wikilinking tries to do too much - acting as (among other things): a dictionary/glossary; a 'related topics' section; and a further reading section. Carcharoth (talk) 02:08, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Support, I think the above comments provide a variety of compelling reasons why editors might want to link dates. What I would actually prefer is for editors to be given explicit discretion in whether to link these dates on any given article. Within the context of the rest of the MOS I think the proposed language is closer to that ideal than the existing text. Christopher Parham (talk) 02:01, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
    • I have five articles in mind already for an insertion of a link to Greg's essay on the sewer cover outside his house. Seriously. Link as much as you can, wherever there's a tiny opening to do so; after all, in today's world, everything can be related to everything else by one, two or three steps. it won't hurt the valuable links.Tony (talk) 02:27, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
      • The October 16 article has nigh on 12,000 incoming links. The same article has some 260 lines/events listed. The 364 links to other date articles created by {{months}} hardly dents the total. There is a serious imbalance here. 'October 16' is only one of 366 such articles with a very similar problematic. I am not saying that all articles should be back-linked from the date page, or that the majority are related to biographical d-o-b or d-o-d, but I would contend it is one valid perspective on the rather pandemic overlinking to date articles. Ohconfucius (talk) 04:22, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
        • If one looks only at links from article space and further exlude the 1199 lists, 1403 titles of the sort "2008 in medicine", 366 days, and 12 months, the count drops to 7425. Still high, but less outrageous. Looking closer at, say, XACML we see it is only linked by the date on a cited reference. I see no reason for linking citation data that is already well-structured, as in this date= field of a cite tag. On the wild assumption that only 2/3 of those are date= or accessdate= instances, that gets the number into a reasonable range.LeadSongDog (talk) 20:21, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose. For the same reasons as other opposition. Lightmouse (talk) 13:36, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Come on… At least a couple of you “Support” editors ought to be taking me up on my challenge. If you can actually read four whole date and year articles, you can be the first recipient of your very own Sewer Cover Barnstar. Are there no takers? Greg L (talk) 03:03, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
    • I looked at your four date articles. I'm sure it's not going to convince you, but they didnt seem that bad. Someone had gone through and organized them enough to make them interesting. They arent going to be everyone's cup of tea, but I'm not sure why you're so offended by them either. I suppose suggesting you just don't look at them won't help either. dm (talk) 23:43, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
      • Dmadeo, when we, as editors, are deciding on whether or not to link a word or topic in an article we are writing, I would suggest setting the bar a bit higher than, “that didn’t seem so bad.” I might even be so bold as to suggest that we set the bar a bit higher so that in many cases, the reader’s reaction to seeing a blue link would be “Way cool… I didn’t expect they’d have an article on that too!” Greg L (talk) 00:14, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
        • With respect, I'd suggest setting the bar at whatever level makes you feel like contributing to articles. That level will be different for me and for anyone else, but thats fine. I encourage you to link however many words you'd like, as long as you dont mind when I do as well. dm (talk) 01:31, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose. As illogical, fussy and confusing as when we decided after prolonged discussion not to autoformat, just a short while ago. 86.44.28.60 (talk) 18:36, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose as confusing, since the policy is now *not* to link dates without particularly compelling reasons. "saving some curious readers the trouble of typing a year/date into the 'seach' gizmo" just doesn't seem sufficiently compelling. Sssoul (talk) 17:22, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Support linking years at least once. It is a powerful way to update and expand the year pages to use the 'what links here' button and see what pages refer to a particular year. Jcwf (talk) 00:23, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
  • I don't know if this has been mentioned above, but there is a very relevant CFD discussion at Misplaced Pages:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2008_September_30#Category:Deaths_by_age. Some people, who seem to be in the majority, want to create a series of categories, automatically generated, of Category:Deaths at age 28, Category:Deaths at age 29, and so on. Whether they need the links being discussed here I don't know. Johnbod (talk) 00:59, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose Not needed, per very many above. Johnbod (talk) 00:59, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Support (changed from oppose): I've changed my stance here because, while I frankly still can't see how linking of dates is useful, it is clear to me that there is a significant minority of editors who do find it useful. If it's useful enough for even a few editors, then it is something which we should be linking.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 04:26, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment strange recursive reason for changing an opinion. You now support because you have seen a "significant minority" of other editors support? Do your previous convictions not amount to anything? Ohconfucius (talk) 11:18, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Support the proposal. I find it useful. Deb (talk) 13:55, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose I have been very pleased to see a plethora recently of edit summaries reading "date audit per MOS:NUM" and I strongly feel that no wikilinks should be used for ornamental purposes which is what these links are. The next step would be linking full stops. (<- wikilinked) People are used to these links but they should go. People will get used to not having them, and if in one instance out of approximately 163 times reading the number 2008 they actually wanted to check out that page, they will not be annoyed at having to type it into the search box. __meco (talk) 17:32, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose I think it's a horrible idea and will encourage even more pointless wikilinking. I agree with Meco and most of the others who oppose this proposal (sorry, no new reason I can think of for opposing, it's more or less all been said.). Doug Weller (talk) 09:55, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose- this has been debated to death -- linking these dates will confuse the issue for many editors, who will take the date links in the opening para as licence to link all dates. Let's keep it simple and clean: no dates linked unless htere is a compelling reason. Ground Zero | t 18:53, 2 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Strong support. Who are we to decide what the reader should or should not click on, just because some people believe it to be "trivial". Let freedom of choice reign I say. G-Man 19:56, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
I'm starting to be swayed by this argument. Who are we to dictate that readers shouldn't be able to click on anything they want—including things such as: clutter, trivial, unnecessary, waste-of-time, or even (horrors) something like 12 February 1809. :-)
  • Comment I have just found out that there is the {{persondata}} template, which is placed in many bios by the biography project. It is invisible to the average reader but contains all the metadata that people have been talking about above. Because it is invisible, not many people actually know about it. The good news is that you can get rid of all the wikilinking of the date within the body of a biography, and the metadata is not affected in any way. The whole thing about wikilinking birth and death dates is therefore largely moot. We've been wasting our time with this one. The answer must be for those interested to step up including the template to gather this data, rather than dogged insistence on keeping the blue links which bore and confuse. Ohconfucius (talk) 13:33, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
  • On the contrary, those who support keeping these links in the !votes above predominantly do so because they think (i) these links can be useful - people do want to know the context of a year, and what else happened on somebody's birthday; and (ii) they are an appropriate way to advertise the existence of the date pages, per WP:BUILD, so people can know they exist. Neither of those arguments have gone away, so the issue is anything but moot. Jheald (talk) 13:51, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
  • As I just wrote, there are readers do want to know the context of a year; and also, what else happened on somebody's birthday. People do value these list articles, as the recent utter rejection of your AfD to remove them demonstrates. Jheald (talk) 14:34, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Why are birth and death dates more significant than any others in terms of what else happened on those dates? It should be all or nothing, and I vote for nothing. Finding out what else happened on a day/month (e.g. 23 February) is pedantry unworthy of devaluing more important links in an article. Finding out what else happened in a particular year (e.g. 1685) is easily achieved by simply entering that year and performing a standard WP search.  HWV 258  21:34, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I haven't seen any compelling reason to think that birth and death dates are more worthy of linking than any other dates. EdJohnston (talk) 22:00, 13 November 2008 (UTC)


Infobox templates

  • BTW: up to this point it's 14 support and 13 oppose (if I counted right and ignoring any weak/partial distinctions). Sounds to me like there's no consensus either for or against this particular point. But it does point out that there is a large contigent of people who do want limited date linking, especially for something such as birthdates. As far as I know, lightbot is not unlinking the {{Birth date|yyyy|mm|dd}} and {{Death date and age|yyyy|mm|dd|yyyy|mm|dd}} templates, so perhaps we can say "In biographical articles, limited use of {{Birth date|yyyy|mm|dd}} and {{Death date and age|yyyy|mm|dd|yyyy|mm|dd}} may be helpful" dm (talk) 08:27, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
    • Strong comment: What this tells me most clearly of all is that we have lots of !votes from incoming parties totally unaware of the rest of debate (over three years worth) and thus largely-to-totally unaware of the negative aspects of date autoformatting. As just one example among many, I doubt that more than a handful of them have considered the fact that around 40% of surveyed articles had inconsistent date formats in them. This is largely because editors assume that the autoformatting just "handles it", and forget that 99.99% of Misplaced Pages's users are IP address readers, not editors, with no date preferences to set, who are all seeing "3 July 1982" in one sentence and "August 7, 1983" in the next – all because autoformatting ensures that most editors themselves simply don't notice the difference. This is happening in nearly half of our articles. That alone is enough to end this debate right now. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 05:00, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
    • Do these templates render the dates in bright blue and have all of the disadvantages of the date autformatting system? Tony (talk) 08:33, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
    • One or other of the two "birth date" templates MUST be used in infoboxes, if the birth-date is to be included in the emitted hCard microformat. Whether or not they link those dates does not affect this; and can be set according to whatever is the final community consensus. One or other of the two "death date" templates will be needed, when the hCard spec is updated to include "death date".Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 10:15, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
      • I don't have the expertise to understand this. What I can tell you is that it's great that many of the infobox templates have recently been modified so they don't augoformat the dates. Tony (talk) 10:48, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
        • In short: the templates are needed for technical purposes (related to metadata). It doesn't matter (for those purposes) whether they link the dates, or not. But people shouldn't be discouraged from using them, because of formatting, as not doing so will break one of the functions of the infoboxes in which they're used. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:12, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
          • For the record, these templates are currently not emitting links (since 1 September). Jheald (talk) 11:29, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
            • The birth and death date template age calculation may be wrong for a person who was born under the Julian calendar and died under the Gregorian calendar. They also provide no way to indicate what calendar was used for the dates. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 14:42, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
              • Those are valid concerns (and are being discussed elsewhere, I believe) but are unconnected to the issue of linking; also, such cases seem to be vastly in the minority. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:50, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
                • Not being a template programmer, I don't know if the concern can be fixed. I am reluctant to recommend a template that cannot fulfil its intended purpose, and might not be repairable. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 16:07, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
                  • Forgive me for jumping in here, but can you explain something in simple terms to me? What is the purpose of the metadata, and the parsing thereof? I have seen countless mentions on this talk page that if dates were linked, such as birth and death, the collection of metadata would be made easier (am I right here - even if this can be achieved through plain text). This maybe the case, and several editors above wish it to be so, but I don't understand why. Maybe this issue isn't relavent here, but could somebody humour me. Dates should/would/could/may (whatever) be linked to allow for the easy collection of metadata. But why? (I'm not criticising metadata, or those who use it - I just don't understand it's purpose.) In anycase, for birth/death dates, is that not what {{persondata}} is for?–MDCollins (talk) 21:47, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
                    • It should be possible to generate a list of every biographical article on Misplaced Pages, along with the biographical data (where known). To do that, you generally need mature and comprehensive metadata coverage. Unfortunately, the maintenance of metadata on Misplaced Pages (en-Misplaced Pages at any rate) lags severely behind the rate of article creation (persondata, as you say, is one of the places where metadata should be placed, but as there are other places as well, such as the hcard format Andy mentioned above, and since persondata is used in only a small fraction of articles, there are problems). Wikilinks are sometimes analysed as a form of metadata, and certainly a mature and well-developed system of date markup would allow for applications. Geographical co-ordinates are given in a standard way - maybe dates should be as well. It is possible to go too far with this, though, since Misplaced Pages is primarily an encyclopedia, not a database (yes, I know the underlying software uses database tables, but I'm talking about the content here). It's a question of getting the balance right. I'm perfectly happy for dates and years to be mostly delinked (with a few exceptions), but the metadata concerns also need to be addressed. Carcharoth (talk) 23:34, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
      • No one was talking about removing those templates, anyway. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 05:00, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

a compromise/interim proposal?

this whole date-link thing is like a Passover situation: since the linking of dates for autoformatting is now discouraged, it's pretty clear that bots and scripts that can assist with the huge task of unlinking that kind of date-link are really needed (otherwise it'll take years, and meanwhile editors who imitate what they see will keep adding them). the question is how to designate certain linked dates as *intentional* so that the bots, scripts and/or editors unlinking dates manually will leave those alone. one proposal (discussed here) was to designate such "intentional" date-links by putting them in the "see also" section with nondate words in them to let the bots and scripts know they shouldn't unlink them, for example:
]
]
]
some editors feel that solution is "too much trouble", but it's nowhere near as much trouble as leaving the massive job of unlinking now-deprecated links to be done by hand just because a bot might undo a link someone cherishes - and even if people are doing the unlinking job manually, they still won't know just by looking at them that this link here is cherished by someone, but that link there is free to go.
the editors who want birth/death dates linked at the start of biographies are proposing that that positioning should designate those dates as "cherished/untouchable". the trouble is that bots can't be taught to recognize position in an article; for a bot to understand that it should leave a link untouched, the link needs to include a non-date word. it's not easy to think of a non-date word to insert in birth/death-date links without making the sentences awkward - especially considering that the formatting breaks whole dates up into two parts: ] ].
but: would the people who want to keep birth/death dates linked in the first lines of biographies be satisfied if the years remained linked - at least until we think up a better solution - and the calendar dates were unlinked? i understand that some editors feel the birth/death year links are potentially of interest for the context they might provide, but the calendar-date links don't provide context - they provide what amounts to historical trivia, which (i posit) *is* very adequately relegated to the "see also" section where the few readers who want to know what mishmash of events went on on that date throughout history can easily find it, marked explicity as "].
if that would satisfy the people who cherish these birth/death-date links in bios, then the gallant bots that are waiting to assist with the necessary task of unlinking meaningless/now-deprecated date links could at least proceed with the unlinking of calendar dates. in good Passover fashion they would leave alone any calendar date link that includes a non-date word, like "]. so if some calendar dates that someone cherishes do get unlinked, that can be repaired by adding a non-date word or phrase to the link to shield it from the next "pass" of the bot and moving it to the "see also" section so that sentence flow is not encumbered.
and meanwhile we could think some more about how to designate linked years for "Passover purposes".
i hope someone sees what tree i'm trying to bark up here. Sssoul (talk) 12:52, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
The major problem with this idea is that users should never have to alter their behavior to accommodate the bots; in fact the situation is always the reverse, in that bot behavior should be modified to accommodate the editors. If a bot cannot be written in a way that does not require human editors to modify the way they are editing to make the bot's task possible then the bot should not operate. This also raises the issue of existing articles - requiring users to go back and "mark" existing dates in order to prevent the bot from removing links is placing far too large a burden on the editors. In short : bots are created to make editors' tasks easier, not to force them to do more work. As such I find this proposed compromise - while a valiant attempt at finding a middle grounds - to be unacceptable. The central question that must be answered (and has not yet been significantly explored) is whether or not a retroactive removal of now deprecated links is acceptable to the community. Shereth 17:25, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
thanks first off for recognizing that i'm trying to be constructive. maybe i haven't made idea clear enough, though: i don't mean that any editors would *have* to mark any dates in any special way; everyone would be free just to leave the calendar-date links as they are and let them be unlinked. perhaps that wouldn't be a problem for anyone, since the argument that some date links provide historical context doesn't apply to calendar-date links. it seems plain that the vast majority of calendar-date links were created purely for autoformatting, and since linking for autoformatting is now discouraged/depracated, i don't understand (at all) what the resistance to removing those links is based on.
but meanwhile in case someone really feels it's valuable, encyclopedic, etc, to offer readers a link to ], they *could* create something like that if they wanted to, knowing it wouldn't get unlinked by a bot. (maybe by another human, but that's a different question!)
also, policy/guideline changes very often *do* entail people changing the ways we edit. in this case the policy deprecating links for autoformatting is the source of the changes. the bot is just meant to assist with making them. Sssoul (talk) 17:59, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
If I might just co-opt something you said, which I believe to be the very root of the problem : "The policy deprecating links for autoformatting is the source of the change." This whole mess gets fixed when one very simple question is answered, that question being, "Does the deprecation of certain types of year/date links necessitate the subsequent (and retroactive) removal thereof?" If the answer is yes, then Lightbot should resume, and the above idea can be implemented to allow editors to retain some links with some changes. If the answer is no, then the bot should not be resumed and the fate of now deprecated links left to the editors of the articles in which they are found. That question has yet to receive any community-consensus based answer, and I believe answering it would fundamentally solve the problem. Shereth 18:27, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
... i'm really struggling to fathom how the policy deprecating linking for autoformatting could possibly be interpreted as implying "but let's keep all the existing date links that have no purpose except for autoformatting" - but if that indeed needs clarification, how do you suggest seeking clarification - another RfC? mediation? or ...? Sssoul (talk) 19:07, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
ps: having slept on this ... Shereth, when you wrote "the major problem with this idea is ...", it seems to me that what you actually meant is "my main objection to this idea is ..." your view is as important as anyone else's, of course, but it seems to me that it would be fair to hear some other people's reactions to the idea before labelling one aspect of it a "major problem". Sssoul (talk) 08:53, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
  • There is a fundamental flaw with Shereth's argument and objection. Humans are endowed with intelligence, while bots are not. In order for things to be automated/automatable, things have to be done according to a certain logic. Economists realised that long time ago, and Taylor invented the concept of the production line; the vacuum cleaner was invented so we no longer clean floors the same way as before, the same applies to almost every labour-saving device you can think of. To say that humans should go about and be humans in exactly the same way as before is, with all due respects, bollocks. Ohconfucius (talk) 09:23, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Re Ohconfucius: You have completely missed my point. See the response by Lightmouse below which catches my sentiment exactly. Software should simplify the tasks undertaken by humans and not complicate it. I do not mean to imply that we shouldn't adapt the way we do things to accommodate new technological advances. If that's what you got out of my statement then you completely misunderstood what I was saying.
  • Re Sssoul: Fundamentally I'm not opposed to removing date links. Fundamentally I really don't give a crap one way or the other. What's got me so animated here is that as an administrator I see (and deal with) complaints from sundry editors who have got their knickers in a bunch because of Lightbot removing some links and they do not see any consensus to remove links. I'm somewhat tired of having to deal with/respond to the situation. The reason I am so adamant about getting consensus is so that next time I see someone pitch a fit on a noticeboard about Lightbot removing date links, I can just point to the consensus and be done with it, rather than having this debate re-ignited for the umpteenth time. Shereth 13:51, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
thank you Shereth - so how do you propose seeking the consensus you consider necessary to clarify whether the deprecation of date-linking for autoformatting includes the premise that existing date-links that serve no purpose anymore should be undone? Sssoul (talk) 15:35, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
An RFC, coupled with a clear and unambiguous statement (such as "Does the deprecation of bare year links mean they should be systematically removed via bot") would establish a sufficiently strong consensus on the matter. Shereth 15:41, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
well ... why just "bare year links"? the now-depracated autoformatting also involved calendar-date links. maybe both questions had better be asked at once, to avoid someone saying yet *another* RfC is needed. Sssoul (talk) 15:59, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
The wording was just an example suggestion, naturally it would make sense to cover all of the bases. It might also make sense to keep the individual points as discrete questions to keep folks from getting confused about what they are or are not supporting, but it definitely would make sense to cover all of the issues in a single RFC and get it done with. Shereth 16:05, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
thanks for clarifying. would it be worth making the "by bot" question a distinct point from the other two? as in (and i hasten to add that i don't mean this is exactly how they should be worded):
  • 1] does the depracation of autoformatting mean existing calendar-date links that served no purpose but autoformatting need to be systematically undone?
  • 2] does the depracation of bare-year links mean the ones that exist need to be systematically undone?
  • 3] if yes to either: is it desirable to enable a bot to do the systematic unlinking, or should it be done only manually? (i feel like it would be fair to point out right away that there are ways to "earmark" both kinds of date-link so that a bot would not undo them, but that that part *would* need to be done manually - a link to a brief description of the suggested ways to "earmark" the links could be included.) Sssoul (talk) 17:04, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
I like this approach. Shereth 17:27, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

You make a fair point, Shereth. Software should eliminate, reduce or simplify human tasks. If only such reasoning had prevailed when auto date formatting was proposed ("its easy, all you have to do is link some but not all dates and in this exact way"). Now we have to find a way of clearing up mess attributed to autoformatting. We can do it with or without software assistance. Lightmouse (talk) 17:35, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I won't disagree with you. I just have to repeat my insistence that community-wide consensus regarding the fate of said deprecated links be cemented prior to taking any sitewide actions. Shereth 18:27, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Sssoul proposed bot delinking of calendar dates such as ] and described some other features of his proposal. You are making yourself very clear that you think it requires the expressed opinion of many people. That is clear. You are one of the many people and your opinion is valid. Would you personally accept Sssoul's proposal? Lightmouse (talk) 18:51, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I do not oppose the de-linking of calendar dates, no. This does not mean I personally accept Sssoul's proposal in its entirety Personally I do not see the need for such a compromise if only a demonstrable consensus could be reached one way or another. For all I care you can turn Lightbot loose on calendar dates, as I believe the primary objection that keeps coming up is regarding years, not the calendar dates. Shereth 14:01, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
I do object. Linking calendar dates should be even rarer than linking years, but there are occasions where it adds value. The link from Pope Sylvester I to December 31, St. Sylvester's Day, should stay. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:15, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
Pmanderson, do i understand that you see no possibility of designating that particular calendar date as valuable/meaningful in that article by inserting a nondate word in the link - for example ]? Sssoul (talk) 15:35, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. That's clear, as usual. I agree that the ideal solution would not be a compromise. I also agree that the heat of the debate is about years. I hope we can both agree that it has been about 'solitary years' (blah blah ] blah blah) rather than the year that was linked to enable autoformatted of a full date (blah blah ] ] blah blah). Thus I would summarise Sssoul's proposal to turn into a bot specification such as:

  • leave solitary years alone and delink all other date components/compounds unless they contain a non-date term.

Many articles must be exempted as a whole e.g. date related articles themselves. Lightmouse (talk) 14:51, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

for the record, i personally would also prefer a non-compromise solution - i'm just seeking to help editors who are saying they want to keep particular dates linked as exceptions to the current policy deprecating date-linking. what i'm trying to do is point out how they can "protect" the links they want to keep, if they want to. and i focussed this latest suggestion on calendar-date links because i think there's less distress about/resistance to unlinking those. and i still hope a satisfactory resolution can be found for dealing with year links. Sssoul (talk) 15:35, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
It's already "marked as valuable/meaningful"; it appears three times in the infobox: once as his death, once as the end of his papacy, and once as his feast; also in the sentence: In the West, the liturgical feast of Saint Sylvester is on 31 December, the day of his burial in the Catacomb of Priscilla. At least the last two should be linked; they should not be convoluted to satisfy some piece of MOScruft. Both mean, and should say and link to, 31 December. When MOS ordains bad writing, as it does all too often, it is malfunctioning. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:27, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
thanks Pmanderson - i understand what you're saying. i just want to note in passing that no one is suggesting eliminating calendar dates from any articles - only asking whether all how many of them need to be linked to lists of miscellaneous events that happened on the same date throughout history. i understand that you feel this one *does* need to remain linked to such a list for the article to be understood, but that stating explicity in the link what it's a link to would not be okay with you in your opinion be detrimental to the article. Sssoul (talk) 17:40, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
I don't support linking all of them - and have said so at least twice; the effect of this proposal, however, is to link none of them, and substitute (for some of them) see also links which many readers will not know exist. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:05, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
okay, i've amended my statement above. i don't understand why "many readers will not know" that there are links in the "see also" section, but please note that the bot will leave intact any date-link that has a non-date word in it, wherever it appears; such links could appear in the body of the text, for example:
i feel that making date-links that you consider important explicit that way (and eliminating the masses of meaningless date-links) will have the advantage of clarifying for readers that your link really *is* worth following. Sssoul (talk) 06:40, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
  • I would still tend to believe that, even in the case of Sylvester, '31 December' is a low value link. It is infinitely more informative to link to the appropriate Name day article, because that's where the true meaning is. Ohconfucius (talk) 07:57, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
i agree, Ohconfucius, but unless i'm misunderstanding Pmanderson, he/she takes a different view. i'm just pointing out that the proposal *does* accommodate date links that an editor truly feels are essential to understanding an article. Sssoul (talk) 08:09, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Pmanderson's just pointing out the exceptions which should prove the rule. There will always be exceptions, and we just need to agree on a way of treating them. His opposition to delinking by bot appears to be a bit Luddite to me. Is there an agenda? Ohconfucius (talk) 08:39, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
    • Then I suggest Ohconfucious look up Luddism: opposition to machinery on other grounds than whether it will work better. (Sometimes those grounds are also valid; harmony between editors is a good, and one which bot reversions tend to corrode.) But in this case, the bot will work worse: bots should not be used where there are exceptions, because they will not notice them, and (if reversed) they will come back and edit war for them. (He might also look up exception proves the rule; that saying has two senses: the legal one is irrelevant here, and the other is destructive testing. Enough exceptions blow up the rule.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:42, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
      • Incorrect. The original legal definition is the exact relevant one. If the rule is to remove all square brackets which surround 'mmdd', 'ddmm' or yy, then it is evident that all others are deliberate and are to be kept per the intention of one or more editor. It is a rule which humans and bots alike would have few problems in policing. Ohconfucius (talk) 08:51, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
"bots should not be used where there are exceptions, because they will not notice them" - again, the point of the proposal is that bots and human editors will notice exceptional date-links that are "earmarked" as exceptional. without earmarking them somehow, neither bots nor human editors have any way to recognize that the links ] or ] should remain linked in one particular article. the proposal is pointing out a way to earmark the links that some editor values highly and wants to keep. if a link isn't worth the trouble of earmarking it, one might well ask whether it's really a high-value link. Sssoul (talk) 07:31, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
Quite correct. (2 messages up). The bot should not be run until a convention for "earmarking" dates is established and published, preferably for at least one month. You're claiming your argument is to the contrary? — Arthur Rubin (talk) 21:54, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
  • If you accept that deliberately linked dates must be formulated differently to just placing square brackets around calendar dates and calendar years (and you do, don't you?), then it is the very next logical extension that we can resumed delinking all those which are ], ], ], ] or ], delinking by bot or by script regardless of where they are placed. I just fail to understand what further objection there could possibly be to restarting the delinking by bot? Ohconfucius (talk) 23:34, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) The root question one should be asking is whether or not the benefit of having superfluous/deprecated links removed is worth the cost of having editors manage the exceptions to the rule, a question I sincerely hope to see answered by a broader audience. Shereth 17:53, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
I think most of us (but probably not all) would be perfectly okay with mass catch-too-much delinkings if we were somehow certain that the relinkings we made to the article after this bot-edit would not be reverted again by bots. Sssoul's suggestion is one way of ensuring that, but I'm sure there are others. -- Jao (talk) 18:04, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
  • I agree with the questions/statements by both the above. I see no real issue to un-doing (whether by bot or by script) the date links which currently exist. Those date links which are 'deliberate' need to be re-made in another way which is obvious to bots other editors alike. Ohconfucius (talk) 08:46, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
Anderson and others, if it means so much to you to link a certain anniversary day or year (and I haven't yet seen one that is useful, frankly), then simply make an explicit piped link in the "See also" section. It is as simple as that, and everyone is happy. Tony (talk) 08:38, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
  • The 'why should we put in extra effort to put "special" date links in? argument' is exactly as Tony says. If it's worth putting in, it should be worth the effort. And if it's worth the effort, there should be no complaints about needing to put the work in ;-) Ohconfucius (talk) 08:46, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
putting "highly-valued date links" in the "see also" section should perhaps be regarded as a "strongly encouraged option", since some people have expressed anxieties that a reader might somehow miss that section. the main point (as i understand it) is that making "highly-valued date links" explicit by including a non-date word in them is what will designate them (for both human editors and bots) as "this link is highly valued by some editor, not merely a remnant of autoformatting or overlinking". and that "earmarking" will serve its purpose no matter where in the article the link appears. if some editors really strongly prefer to add For more historical context see the list of ] or For whatever reason, see the list of ] to a paragraph instead of to the "see also" section, it's no skin off my nose. bots will leave those links linked thanks to the non-date words they include; human editors might debate whether or not the links are really useful and/or what the best position for them is, but they'll know someone feels they are valuable links. Sssoul (talk) 09:04, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
The (weak) majority that the year of birth and death in biographical articles should be linked seems as strong as the expressed argument (not consensus) that all years should be unlinked. Any bot needs to take into account appropriate exceptions. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 21:59, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
the bot - like human editors - will recognize exceptions that are designated as exceptions. the proposal is to designate "exceptional date links" by adding a non-date word to them. most people in the RfC above were talking about keeping the birth/death-years linked; all they need to do is add something like For more historical context see the list of ]. calendar-date links don't appear to be very high-value to most of the people in the RfC above, but if they are of value to someone, they too can be designated as exceptional. it's not that hard. Sssoul (talk) 23:11, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
That is clearly unreasonable. I would consider "(born July 4, ])" the maximal acceptable tagging to be required of editors if the RfC fails to reach a consensus for exclusion. (The status quo is inclusion.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 23:29, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
I suppose another alternative I would consider acceptable would to be to include:
  • {{for|other events occuring in the year of birth|1943}}
  • {{for|other events occuring in the year of death|2008}}
before the lead. You might consider that less acceptable than the status quo, as would I, but I would consider that an acceptable alternative. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 23:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
  • There are two problems: (1) these examples are piped in a way that conceals from the readers their destination. (2) Positioning this type of link before the lead is far, far too prominent for what is almost certainly a pathway to a sea of irrelevant material. I strongly disagree with this suggestion on both grounds. "See also", when spelt out, is both unintrusive and more likely to be clicked on by readers than a concealed solitary year link in the running prose. I have no idea why you find objection in this solution. Tony (talk) 01:12, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
    • The ] approach violates the guideline for the #See also section (so it needs to be discussed in the talk page of that guideline), and conceals the name of the article. {{for}} in the #See also section seems appropriate for some cases, but the status quo that birth and death years are linked requires a consensus to overturn, as no consensus has been established that year links are always inappropriate. {{for}} in the lead seems an appropriate option, if you insist that the bot should be allowed to run amuck without consensus. {{for}} at the start of any section would be allowed by my proposed modification to the proposal here, and I see no reason why the link to the birth year should be moved out of the lead. I'd accept , as an alternative, the infobox templates emitting the year link, although you seem opposed to that, possibly because you think the year link is misleading, even though it's the actual name of article. If that is your reasoning, I can't understand why you think it's misleading, unless you want to propose moving all the year articles (and handling the templates which link to them). (I've got some idea how many templates are in question, considering the 1900s to 1900–1909 moves.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 01:43, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
seeking common ground again: it seems that Arthur Rubin's concerns are with year links, not calendar-date links. it appears that so far only two people in this discussion object to unlinking calendar-date links that no one has "earmarked" as exceptional/high-value links. common ground is good.
as for year links (which were not meant to be the focus of this "compromise/interim proposal" - but so be it), they are currently misleading: autoformatting plus overlinking mean year links currently appear to be meaningless. a major part of the point is that when a year link *does* have meaning/value, "earmarking" it will make it explicit what the meaning/value is, which will increase the likelihood that readers might actually make use of the link.
if the main question is where exactly in an article the explicit/earmarked year links should appear, maybe suggesting recommended options would be sufficient: the "see also" section is one possibility - the info-box is another - adding a footnote would be another - a sentence added to the paragraph where the date appears would be another. Sssoul (talk) 12:42, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Question for Shereth: You say "What's got me so animated here is that as an administrator I see (and deal with) complaints from sundry editors who have got their knickers in a bunch because of Lightbot removing some links and they do not see any consensus to remove links. I'm somewhat tired of having to deal with/respond to the situation." You later talk of editors who "pitch a fit" about the issue at a noticeboard. I have not yet asked, but need to now, whether this is still the case. How many editors have "pitched a fit" in your experience (it's strong language, so we're not talking of just queries and requests for where the practice is mandated, such as I've seen at Lighmouse's talk page). I'd be pleased if you placed evidence before us so we can judge the extent of the problem in numbers, intensity and timeframe. I note that new practices and policies, especially those that change long-established practices, are indeed the subject of emotional reactions by editors who may have spent considerable time and energy in inserting square brackets. But that is not what should concern us here, since editors have now been spared that manual labour in their creation of new text, and are greatly assisted by automated and semi-automated means WRT existing text. Lightmouse and others, including myself, have had considerable success in engaging with editors who query, or even complain of, the removal of the links in question.

Please be more explicit in laying out the evidence so that we can discuss it in informed terms. Tony (talk) 15:16, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Oppose the linking of days of the year and years. All the proponents of these links should first earn their Sewer Cover Barnstar by honestly and truly accepting the challenge before coming here to run variations of this theme up the flagpole to test the winds. Absolutely no one actually *enjoys* reading these lists of trivia; the nearest I’ve seen an editor get to earning their barnstar was half the full challenge. And the opinion of that editor after that exercise was this: “That wasn’t so bad.” Well… that reaction comes up quite short of a ringing endorsement for linking to these God-awful articles. Step right up, you advocates of date linking; be the first to actually be able to stomach reading four entire trivia articles that the links take readers to. Then come back here and report to the others if your experience was…

  1. Worse than having a stick poked into your eye.
  2. Worse than getting on a bus and having to sit for five minutes next to a bum who smells like butt crack
  3. A thoroughly boring experience and you don’t really expect any reader to actually read more than 2% of what’s there before hitting the “back” arrow on their browser.

After one of you has actually earned the barnstar, then we can talk about why you really think linking to these articles is such a thoroughly marvy idea. Greg L (talk) 01:37, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Strong support Dates of births and deaths are highly important and linking them will help people find things that are relevent --Hamster2.0 (talk) 18:34, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Slam-dunk oppose. Articles are overburdened with blue and red links already.--Goodmorningworld (talk) 13:47, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

  • Support. User:Greg L's peculiar and overly hostile obsession laid out above notwithstanding--did a date article shoot his dog?--the date-linking is useful for templates, it's useful for formatting purposes, and it's useful for general information purposes to explore a little deeper into history. And no, I decline to play along with User:Greg L's utterly pointless 'challenge': substitution of any random selection of non-stub articles would pretty much guarantee the same 'result', whatever that result is supposed to be or signify. --CalendarWatcher (talk) 10:31, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Unlinking of dates and years by bot should continue. Much has been made on this page of the fact that bots can't distinguish betweeen links for autoformatting and links on 'cherished' dates. Fair enough, they can't, but neither can human editors, except perhaps those very closely involved with the article. The vast majority of linked dates were linked en masse for autoformatting reasons, not in order to create a link (I know, I did a lot of them myself). If I thought that most dates had been linked after careful reflection in order to create a useful link, I'd be much more cautious about unlinking them. But that's not how it was (and still is among imitatve editors). Is a gnoming human editor supposed to read through the article history and its talk page (and its archives) to try to determine whether a particular date is 'cherished' before unlinking it in accordance with the MoS? A human editor, and a bot, can reasonably assume that the date is not linked for any special reason - in those few cases where that's the wrong decision, a human editor can revert the change with a single click, and can easily mark a date link as 'cherished' by including some non-date words in the link, as has been suggested many times. That's the best of all worlds - it provides protection from well-meaning human editors and bots, and alerts the reader to what they can expect to see (a list of random unrelated events) if they click on that link. There seems to be a presumption that a bot should not be allowed to run if it could ever make the wrong decision. That's unrealistic - human editors make mistakes too. The key questions are "how likely is it to make the wrong decision?" and "how much work would it be to fix the problem that wrong decision caused?". It seems to me that for a date-unlinking bot, the answers are 'rarely' and 'very little', but the benefits are substantial. Colonies Chris (talk) 13:21, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Can the MOS be changed because an RFC to change it failed?

Moved from Lightmouse talk page:begin
 Since the RFC at WT:MOSNUM shows no consensus on this, please stop using automatic tools to impose a change of status. Jheald (talk) 19:07, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

The rfc was a request to obtain special treatment for dates of birth and death. It failed to establish consensus. If you think it succeeded then we are so far apart in our interpretations that we won't make much progress on my talk page. Let's see what other people at wt:mosnum say. Lightmouse (talk) 19:23, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

The RFC asked people what should be done. It was split almost equally down the middle. Plainly, that means no consensus. Jheald (talk) 19:26, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Moved from Lightmouse talk page:end

I can't parse this. If what Jheald says it true, then the failure of an RFC can be treated exactly the same as its success. Have we entered a world of doublethink? Lightmouse (talk) 19:41, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

It seems plain to me. There was an RfC to ask what people thought about linking dates of birth and death. If it had gone one way, we would have clear consensus to "link always". If it went the other, we would have clear consensus to not link. But the truth is, it split right down the middle. So, plainly, that means there is no consensus.
It is long established that bots shouldn't be used to make mass changes for which there is no consensus. Jheald (talk) 20:03, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
That RfC could have had three outcomes:
  • A positive consensus would mean that links should remain in birth/date fields even if there was a clear consensus to delete them here.
  • A negative consensus would mean that the links should be deleted from birth/death fields even if there was a clear consensus that autoformatted links should not be deleted.
  • What we have, is no consensus, which means that, in the clear absence of a consensus to delete datelinks, they should remain in place. In the case of new person-articles, the existing (arguable) consensus is that the date links should not be added, but the RfC provides a specific reason for linking, so for delinking to be done, there would have to be a specific reason for delinking. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 20:12, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Your interpretation is "interesting". As with all previous instances of consensus, not achieving it means a revert to the status quo - the RfC was to add "These dates should normally be linked" to the guideline. The action on achieving consensus would be to start linking. It failed, so it must mean it is not added, and no birth and death dates should be linked (if not already explicit enough, is strongly implied by the absence of the phrase). AFAIK, there are no bots going around doing anything against any established consensus, so what exactly are you referring to? If you are referring to the script-assisted date-delinking, it is done consciously by humans with the aid of a machine. Ohconfucius (talk) 02:59, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
Arthur, stop churning the same old mantras. No one out there cares about this confabulated WP:IDONTLIKEIT retro-screeching by a tiny minority about what was a bad solution for a non-problem. The decision was made in August, and it enjoys wide support. Now, why don't you help with the year articles? That would be welcome. Tony (talk) 03:05, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
    • The status quo is "all such (birth and death) dates are linked, except those which have recently been removed."
    • There is no consensus to remove the links, so the link removal bots such as Lightbot were operating against consensus. If Lightmouse and Tony were looking at each link they removed and determined there was no specific reason why each of them should be there, they were following consensus. Otherwise, not. I'd like to WP:AGF, but considering the edit rate, I would have to assume they have Chloe Sullivan's (current) power. I could assume that for one person, but not two.
    • The consensus for deprecation of autoformatted links is real, (among MOS wonks), but weak, as it was not advertised on the VP.
    • Specific reasons why they should be linked were given in the arguments in favor of linking, so that removing the year links is not supported or opposed by the MOS.
    • No, I think my interpretation is credible; certainly more so than yours that there is a consensus to remove the links. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 03:18, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
It sounds like that 'I was playing with that toy first' sort of argument. Ohconfucius (talk) 05:36, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

The RFC was a request to add a piece of text to the MOS. The text would have provided special treatment for dates of birth and death. The RFC failed. The failure of the RFC does not create an invisible clause in the MOS that provides special treatment for dates of birth and death. The MOS contains no invisible clauses and users of the MOS do not have to check with the proponents of failed RFCs if pro-MOS edits are ok with them. Lightmouse (talk) 11:18, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

It demonstrates that there is no consensus either way on this matter. The text of MOS should not state rules which are not consensus; therefore this warrants toning down the language which one moiety of the participants would have liked. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:17, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
There is wide consensus—far beyond the bounds of any styleguide talk page. Tony (talk) 13:23, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
{{fact}} — Arthur Rubin (talk) 14:10, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
Tony your imaginary consensus doesn't count. Various comments taken from talk pages don't count. You need a community discussion for this type of change not some disjointed discussion that anyone concerned with couldn't have found if they wanted to. —Locke Cole • t • c 00:38, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
You're not simply constructing "consensus" in a way that suits your feelings on the matter, are you? Tony (talk) 00:43, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
Amusingly enough, this appears to be exactly what you are doing. Most consensus seeking is done in one centralized location, not in various article pages (which nobody but those interested will be watching) over a long period of time. What you've presented is not consensus, it's a random sampling (which may not, and I posit, is not, representative of the communities view). —Locke Cole • t • c 02:33, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

The RFC was a request to add a piece of text to the MOS. The text would have provided special treatment for birth/dates. The RFC failed. Arthur proposes that the MOS should contain a clause for 'old links good, new links bad'. I think it is silly but have no objection to people making proposals for MOS modification. In the meantime, many editors will continue to operate on the basis of the existing MOS. As an example, I have fully delinked the dates in Princess Eléonore of Belgium. I think it is an improvement to the article and is in accordance with the MOS. Many editors are continuing to make similar edits in line with the MOS. Either accept the MOS wording or change it. Lightmouse (talk) 10:26, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but however you slice it there is demonstrably no consensus either to link or to delink dates of birth and dates of death. The WP way is to put questions like this to an RfC. We did, and the result was split right down the middle.
The argument that these dates had to be delinked for consistency was made in the RfC, but it did not achieve consensus. Jheald (talk) 16:18, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
If the MoS page wasn't locked, I would happily add to the MoS that "currently there is no consensus either to link or to delink dates of birth and dates of death" -- since that is what the RfC has demonstrated. Jheald (talk) 16:21, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

The RFC was a request to add a piece of text to the MOS. It was not a vote about existing text. You can't change the terms of the RFC after people have voted. Lightmouse (talk) 16:55, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

PS, I have fully delinked the dates in Shakir Stewart. I think it is an improvement to the article and is in accordance with the MOS. If you think the birth/death dates in that article need linking, please let us know why. Lightmouse (talk) 16:59, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
That's fascinating that you think it's an improvement (FWIW, you also fail to note "why" you think it's an improvement). I don't. —Locke Cole • t • c 22:38, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
Amusing. So because he runs around removing dates from articles he's never edited before, I'm not allowed to undo that because I disagree with it? No, I don't think so. And I'm not the only one going around undoing edits. The MoS does not reflect consensus, and until it does, these types of edits should not be getting made on a massive scale. —Locke Cole • t • c 18:32, 9 November 2008 (UTC)


  • Nonsense again. If, for example, WAREL were to consistently make nonsense and mathematically incorrect edits and incorrect links to ja.wikipedia, it wouldn't be "stalking" to check his edits and revert the ones which are clearly wrong. (This is a real example, where I was one of the "stalkers" before I became an admin. He's now banned from both en. and ja.) The question of whether the edits are clearly wrong obviously must be up to the individual editor. Now, I'm not saying I'd do that, but if Locke Cole honestly believes that Lightmouse's edits are not supported by policy and are harmful to Misplaced Pages, it's not stalking to find them by looking at his contributions and revert them. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 08:07, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
Lightmouse brought Shakir Stewart up here; Locke Cole disagrees with him on the links. (I would take an intermediate position: November 1 is material, the others aren't.) That's not stalking: it fails to meet even the first test, that Cole have been watching Lightmouse's contributions. As Arthur points out, one can watch and revert someone's contributions and still be behaving perfectly civilly; but jumping from this very section cannot be stalking at all. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:41, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

I have just fully delinked the dates in John Hermon. I think it is an improvement to the article and is in accordance with the MOS. There is nothing relevant in the four date links:

  • 6 November
  • 1928
  • 23 November
  • 2008

other than a collection of random trivia. If one of those articles has something relevant about 'John Hermon', it should be in the 'John Hermon' article itself. Lightmouse (talk) 14:19, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Reverted. Per the reasons in the RfC above. Script-assisted tools are not appropriate where there is not consensus. Jheald (talk) 14:46, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
I suggest we look for an outside arbitrator here, that isn't committed to their own dog in the ring. Jheald (talk) 14:47, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
Do you mean arbitrator or mediator? — Arthur Rubin (talk) 20:00, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
I don't think either mediation or arbitration would be effective. First, they are conduct-oriented and only put on notice the people directly involved; this problem involves all editors. Also, in part the dispute revolves around whether date autoformatting will ever be fixed, but mediation and arbitration are confined to Misplaced Pages and does not bring in the developers. (I recognize that many editors, perhaps a majority, don't want date autoformatting even if it works perfectly in even the most arcane situations. But some editors might change their position if they had definite information that date autoformatting would be either abolished or fixed by a date certain.) --Gerry Ashton (talk) 20:18, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
Certainly arbitrators could look at the conduct of users such as Tony1 and Lightmouse who, despite being asked to stop, seem intent on removing date links (and the accompanying formatting) anyways. Coupled with the lack of consensus (demonstrated by the various people who have wandered in here over the past three months only to be bullied away), I think the conduct of those pushing this through is appalling. —Locke Cole • t • c 05:46, 11 November 2008 (UTC)
Locke, there's a tendency to personalise the issue. My arguments have concentrated on technical issues that place our readers, not editors, at the centre. The exception has been my pointing out that the complainers here sit by and watch while others work hard to improve this aspect of the project. It appears to be still the case. Tony (talk) 14:02, 11 November 2008 (UTC)
Just because you concentrate on the technical issue doesn't give you the right to dismiss others opinions out of hand as you've done over the past many months. Especially when it comes to trying to ignore comments simply because people aren't doing "work" because they "sit by and watch" (in your view). You might consider reading fallacy (particularly ad hominem) if you get a chance. —Locke Cole • t • c 14:27, 11 November 2008 (UTC)
Tony, that is completely false. For example (and there are many more), you have accused me on various discussion pages of having a mental disorder. If that isn't "personalizing" the issue, I can't imagine what would be. Tennis expert (talk) 04:33, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Tennis expert, on the contrary, I was most concerned that your behaviour in relation to a number of people was the result of something more than everyday stress, and asked you whether I could be of assistance. At the time, I was more concerned with your personal well-being than your technical/administrative dispute over WP's now-widely-accepted decision to largely dispense with double square brackets around dates. If that is what you mean by "personalising", I think you've misinterpreted my words. Locke Cole's accusation above that Lightmouse and I are bullies, and our behaviour "appalling", can't be excused in the same way as your past behaviour. Again, I encourage you both to lend a hand to clean up WP's date formatting, and perhaps even its chaotic year and date pages, rather than attracting the limelight by sniping from the sidelines. Please try to be cooperative; I'm keen to collaborate and move on from this adversarial environment. Tony (talk) 08:35, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Edit proposal

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I'd like to clarify the section Misplaced Pages:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)#Quantities_of_bytes_and_bits a little, without significantly changing its content.

Old verion

  • Disambiguation should be shown in bytes or bits, clearly showing the intended base (binary or decimal). There is no preference in the way to indicate the number of bytes and bits, but there should be consistency within a given article with the notation style used (e.g., write A 64 MB (64 × 1024 bytes) video card and a 100 GB (100 × 1000 bytes) hard drive, A 64 MB (64 × 2 bytes) video card and a 100 GB (100×10 bytes) hard drive or A 64 MB (67,108,864 bytes) video card and a 100 GB (100,000,000,000 bytes) hard drive are all acceptable; but not A 64 MB (67,108,864 bytes) video card and a 100 GB (100 × 1000 bytes) hard drive). Footnotes, such as those seen in Power Macintosh 5500, may be used for disambiguation.

New version

  • Disambiguation should be shown in bytes or bits, with clear indication of whether in binary or decimal base. There is no preference in the way to indicate the number of bytes and bits, but the notation style should be consistent within an article. Acceptable examples include:
A 64 MB (64 × 1024 bytes) video card and a 100 GB (100 × 1000 bytes) hard drive
A 64 MB (64 × 2 bytes) video card and a 100 GB (100×10 bytes) hard drive
A 64 MB (67,108,864 bytes) video card and a 100 GB (100,000,000,000 bytes) hard drive
Avoid inconsistent combinations such as A 64 MB (67,108,864 bytes) video card and a 100 GB (100 × 1000 bytes) hard drive. Footnotes, such as those seen in Power Macintosh 5500 may be used for disambiguation.

Needless to say, I think these changes are non-controversial, but since the page is protected I thought I should do this "by the book" rather than just editing away. Comments? SHEFFIELDSTEEL 15:59, 6 November 2008 (UTC)

Heh. I never get tired of trying to sneak the :- symbol into articles. It is allegedly known in English typesetting as "the dog's bollocks". I'll go ahead and make the change... without that :) SHEFFIELDSTEEL 15:15, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
  • I know this is going to be shouted down, but how infinitely more clear would have been:
Acceptable examples include:
A 64 MB (64 MiB) video card and a 100 GB (93 GiB) hard drive
−woodstone (talk) 20:41, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
That would have been significantly less clear, given that everyone understands bytes, and very few readers understand MiB. SHEFFIELDSTEEL 21:15, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
Do you seriously think that people intuitively know how much 64 × 1024 is, or are going to count the zeroes in 100,000,000,000? Disambiguation is best done by converting to a simple unambiguous unit of the same magnitude. −woodstone (talk) 06:42, 11 November 2008 (UTC)
What you and I think is irrelevant. This isn't a proposal to alter the MoS guideline. It's the tail end of an uncontroversial edit proposal, and to be honest, since the edit was made, this discussion is closed. SHEFFIELDSTEEL 14:32, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Full dates with articles...

Hi, (Getting lost with all the threads, so starting a new one.) Apologies if I've missed part of the discussions (or just forgotten about them), but what is the plan for articles such as November 20, 2003 which seem to collect half a dozen random news articles of the day? A quick scan of the Category:Days in 2003 shows that some have been redirected into February 2003 etc. Surely full dates aren't going to have their own articles from today ad infinitum? I'm tempted just to prod it as meaningless and pointless drivel, but I'm not doing that for 365 days - and that's just for 2003 that I've stumbled across.

—MDCollins 01:09, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

A bit more digging shows that November 20, 2003 transcludes onto November 2003 and a warning comment at the top of the edit box warns about editing or doing anything drastic to it. What's the point?—MDCollins 01:11, 11 November 2008 (UTC)
  • PMAnderson: Don’t gloat. Keeping the articles is an entirely different issue from linking any old date to them. We need an iron-clad “truth in advertising” clause that prohibits non-aliased Easter egg links. If we wrote,

Angela Brigid Lansbury, CBE (born October 16, 1925) (click here for a list of pure trivia that occurred throughout history on October 16) is an English actress and singer whose…

…then it would be far fairer to our readership. The most vociferous defenders of these lists are (not surprisingly) some of we editors since many of us work to expand and improve them. By any objective measure, whereas these lists of trivia certainly have their utility (disk jockeys, for instance, can refer to them), they are clearly not  generally sufficiently germane to article content to merit linking to them.

Suppose one was reading a mathematics-related article and came across a “December 25” link. One entry to that trivia article might be “On this date in 1968, Apollo 8 orbited the Moon” and another article might say “On this date in 1939, J. Edgar Hoover and his life partner went shopping and bought some pretty smelling cologne and a leather bustier. This stuff has absolutely nothing  whatsoever to do with mathematics. Nor is there any common thread to each other than the fact that each entry is a “Capricorn.” So, keep the articles. Loose the links. Greg L (talk) 04:35, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

I arrived here accidentally; FWIW here are my views. I completely agree with Greg L that indiscriminately linking dates to these "list of events" articles is pointless. Having used Misplaced Pages for some time now, I long ago "forgot" the fact that "blue dates" are actually links. Originally I probably clicked on one or two, discovered that the target articles contained no relevant information, then stopped bothering. Now I just subconsciously think "Oh yeah, in Misplaced Pages dates are usually blue". I understand that date linking is also used somehow to tailor date formatting (not something I've ever consciously benefited from, not being a user who bothers to log on very often). But if such a formatting feature is to be provided then it surely needs to be decoupled from date linking. I don't see any reason to delete the "lists of events" articles though. They are mildly interesting to browse (e.g. you can look up your birthday), a lot of people have put in a lot of time and effort to create them (why hack them off?), and they aren't hurting anyone. So I say leave them alone. Matt 81.151.231.150 (talk) 15:13, 13 November 2008 (UTC).
  • Thank you for weighing in Mat. As an I.P. user from London, input such as yours is valuable in helping to determine what the current consensus is on this issue since the usual crowd of regulars can—at times—be a little too close to the issues. Greg L (talk) 22:13, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Now I understand why some have suggested adding formatting to dates now that links are no longer the norm. It's the "I've grown accustomed to your face" type of nostalgia. Ohconfucius (talk) 02:29, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Autoformatted dates broken by concealed links

There is a discussion about autoformatted dates being broken by concealed links. Please see Wikipedia_talk:Only_make_links_that_are_relevant_to_the_context#suggestion_re_year-in-X_links. Regards Lightmouse (talk) 17:52, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Administrators that don't like the MOS

Administrators that don't like the MOS are threatening blocks. How do we define the term 'involved administrator'?

See: Misplaced Pages:Administrators'_noticeboard#Proceeding_from_here. Lightmouse (talk) 23:16, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Don't like the MOS? Talk about grasping at straws. More like "administrators that are responding to numerous complaints about a bot" are threatening blocks, and even then only blocking the bot, not the users. There's no need to exacerbate the situation any by trying to make this a personal sort of thing. I have no specific desire to see Lightbot blocked, except that it is causing numerous complaints. I really fail to understand why you (or the other editors who are stridently pushing for the bot's continued operation) seem adverse to putting this issue to bed once and forever by opening it up to public discussion. RFC has been suggested previously, the Village Pump has come up as a viable option - I simply do not understand the resistance toward gathering some real consensus that could circumvent the need for this kind of discussion again. Please stop trying to paint me as being the enemy here; I in fact supported your request for a bot performing similar date-delinking when you tried to get Cleanbot off the ground. Shereth 23:32, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Absolute poppy-cock. The issue is that some administrators do not feel that Lightbot has the neccessary community approval to delink autoformatted dates; not that they don't like the MOS. That is pure rubbish. I think Mlaffs comment in #Proceeding from here sums up the situation perfectly. Woody (talk) 23:36, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Shereth, you are employing the wrong criteria in deciding whether or not to block Lightbot. The criteria is not whether the bot is operating “in the midst of a dispute over its use”; some disputes absolutely never  end—even though a consensus has been reached—just because there are impassioned editors on the loosing side of the dispute who are willing to climb the Reichstag over it. Virtually nothing could be accomplished on Misplaced Pages if action could be paralyzed because there is still controversy. And we certainly can’t have admins jumping into this and deciding issues based on who shouts loudest and cries that there is still an ongoing dispute. By your logic, Lightmouse wouldn’t have been able to modify his bot to help convert instances of “mebibyte (MiB)” to “megabyte (MB)” because doing so would have had it operating in the “midst of a dispute”.

    These issues of dates and links have been discussed for a very long time and the editors who’ve stayed in the thick of it the entire time have witnessed a clear consensus form amongst informed editors to deprecate certain practices. But once deprecation starts, new editors come here with a WTF reaction and we have to start all over again to explain the rational. We’ve found ourselves saying the same thing over and over with each new editor to come here. That is the very reason I wrote WP:Why dates should not be linked (to automate this education process). But with 48,464,098 users, there will always be new editors coming here with their hair on fire wondering why their blue this or blue that is no longer blue. We’ve now got some essays to point them to but there are a lot of users to educate and—even if we could educate them all—there will always be holdouts.

    It’s important too to remember that general consensus is determined in large part by the weight of rational arguments; the pendulum doesn’t swing back one iota just because a half-dozen brand new editors come out of the woodwork a few days after a bot goes to work. The only decision here that is relevant is whether or not there clearly was—and continues to be—a general consensus for a policy and whether or not Lightmouse’s bot is fairly operating within the scope of that consensus decision. Please limit yourself to those criteria.

    Respectfully, if you can’t see the truth of this, then you should recuse yourself. Greg L (talk) 03:55, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

  • If this were an isolated incident then I would not be in the position I am. However this is far from isolated; it is a recurring problem. In the last week or so alone over half a dozen independent editors have requested that Lightbot be paused while arguments are considered, and numerous others have chimed in on the discussion, be it here, with Lightmouse directly, and at the administrator's noticeboard. There may well be other locations I am unaware of, but those I named are sufficient to illustrate the breadth of the problem. I agree with you wholeheartedly that we cannot have anyone - admin or otherwise - jumping in and dashing what appear to be longstanding practices merely at the whim of a loud complaint. At the same time, we cannot allow the direction of the debate to be steered by a small but persistent cadre of voices, either. The reason that this is a repetitive problem is because, when this debate keeps rising to the fore, instead of attempting to gain some kind of community consensus, the complainants are inevitably driven away by reams of well intentioned but unwavering discussion from a cohesive group of editors who have a keen interest in the subject. I daresay that if we were to lump all of the arguments against the removal of date links that have accumulated over time against the arguments for the removal of links, there would be an overwhelming lean toward the side against. This is not how consensus is achieved, but neither is consensus achieved by drowning out every lone complaint. This issue desperately needs a real consensus one way or another. As I have stated and continue to state, I really don't care which way that consensus goes - I just want to see it. That's all. Why are you so opposed to this? In any event, while it may seem abundantly logical to you and a few others that removing these links is in the best interest of the project, there is no demonstrable consensus to that effect. If you are keeping tabs on the discussion at WP:AN you would see that I am by no means alone in this assessment of the situation. To go back to your point: no, we cannot have admins jumping in on issues and deciding the outcome based on loud voices. I am in now way attempting to decide an outcome or even influence it in one way or another; I am merely enforcing a moratorium on the issue until an outcome is reached. As such, I see no need to recuse myself at all. If it can be demonstrated that the community does, indeed, want these links removed then I will be all too happy to enforce the will of the community by responding to complaints with a link to the discussion that generated said consensus. Until then, I must treat the complainants with equal respect to the operator of the bot and its proponents. Shereth 05:26, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Shereth: "we cannot allow the direction of the debate to be steered by a small but persistent cadre of voices"—Yes, well that is just what it seems you're relying on to support your pursuit of administrative threats and actions. These threats and actions appear to breach basic tenets of the policy on admin behaviour. Casting my eyes down the policy page, I see:

If you are granted access, you must exercise care in using these new function

Administrator tools are also used with judgement

and more pertinently, the policy on "Failure to communicate" (WRT your initial blocking), and on "Conflict of interest", which involves the use of admin tools "where a significant conflict of interest is likely to exist", and requires that "administrators should ensure they are reasonably neutral parties when they use the tools".

I believe that you have demonstrated a personal interest in the issue of dates and linking, and that the risk of a perceived conflict of interest requires that you desist from further involvement except as a registered editor. This is a serious issue that involves the reputation and respect of the system of administrators on WP. That is why the policies are in place. Tony (talk) 06:20, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Can you (or anyone) point this "initial blocking" that was performed with or without a "failure to communicate"? I doubt it, because I have yet to issue a block in all of this mess. In fact I have been extremely patient and communicative here - I have issued numerous warnings and have given Lightbot the benefit of the doubt every single time and have in fact refrained from making good on those warnings. I won't do that any longer, as my patience in the matter is exhausted. Your dire talk about "serious issues" and the "reputation and respect of system administrators" is little more than a red herring, Tony, and I for one am not going to be dissuaded by it. My position has been supported both here and otherwise. My "personal interest" in this situation is to ensure that all editors, bot or otherwise, respect the rules of Misplaced Pages with regards to edit disputes. This is, in fact, a protracted edit dispute between numerous editors in the population at large and less than half a dozen extremely persistent editors here at MOSNUM. I cannot stress enough that I am not taking sides in this debate, but I am going to use my authority to ensure that the situation is placed on hold until a resolution is found. That's a key tenet to the process of dispute resolution and is one of the basic functions of an administrator. Trying to call my interest in seeing consensus develop a "conflict of interest" and demanding I recuse myself from the matter because I have shown a keen interest in seeing the conflict resolved is pure nonsense. I won't further entertain this kind of hand-waving and will not further respond to baseless accusations of a "conflict of interest" unless something substantive comes up. The cycle of this issue has gone on long enough and I'm going to be the stick in the mud if I have to and insist that it be resolved. I don't care what the resolution is, and I'm not going to bother repeating that point any further - it's been made here countless times. Again, my position is neither novel nor unique. Stop trying to derail an attempt to gather consensus by casting aspersions of improprieties about. Shereth 13:48, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Yes, but you are taking sides by riling against the legitimate work of a bot to assist the project in complying with the style guides—very much taking sides. You do thus show your personal stake in your dogged persistence in this matter, over many many weeks. You need to admit this and resist the urge to use what you call your "authority" to pursue what is a conflict of interest. If you do act, be aware that you expose yourself to further and more serious claims of such.Tony (talk) 14:22, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Yes, administrators who don't like the changes you've made to the MOS without a clear consensus are threatening to block bots acting on an extension of the (changed) MOS. So? As for "involved" admins, if Lightbot edits a date article and removes links specifically mentioned in the appropriate WikiProject, (and I happen to notice it), I'll block it, even though I'm involved. If have avoided blocking Lightbot because of my involvement in the issue, but restricting admins who are involved pretty much restricts admins who have a clue, in this instance, considering the number of megabytes of argument. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 14:55, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Whatever else you're uttering, at last, here's an admission that admins "are pretty much involved" (you could only be referring to Shereth et al.). This is a clear indication that if they threaten to use their tools, or actually do use them, they need to be brought to the appropriate disciplinary forum for breaching the conflict-of-interest policy (not guideline, but policy). Thank you. Tony (talk) 15:10, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Tony - in a dispute over a single page where two sides continue to go back and forth without resolution, it is common practice to temporarily protect the page from further editing while the dispute is resolved. Such protection is never an endorsement of the status of the page when it is protected. This dispute does not involve a single page and thus there is no page to protect. My insisting that the bot be temporarily halted (up to and including blocking) is not an endorsement of the side who is against date unlinking but is the only way to place a temporary lid on the pot while it is boiling. It is standard procedure to cease editing in a contentious manner when the situation is being assessed. I am sorry you interpret this as as taking sides, but your insistence that it is such does not make it so. I cannot make this any more clear so I will not continue to try. If the bot is resumed prior to a resolution it will be blocked, that's all there is to it. Shereth 15:05, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Unlinking safe harbor

Can we agree it is acceptable for an editor to unlink all the dates in an article, except the following (date means full or partial date unless otherwise stated)?

  • One mention each of a birth date, death date, date of founding of an organization, date of dissolution of an organization, date of publication of a book, CD, etc., and analogous dates
  • One mention of the year of an important event
  • One mention of the date of anything commemorated annually
  • One mention of any full or partial date in a date related article, such as 2007, February 29, or an article about a full date (I can't find one to give as an example).
  • One mention of a date that is of particular interest in the article (e.g. February 30 in an article about calendars).

Such an edit (or series of edits) should make the dates within the article consistent, except for dates within cite xxx templates or citation templates, since the date handling in those templates is in a state of flux and difficult to deal with.

Other edits may be acceptable too; this is just intended to be a statement of some of the edits that are acceptable. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 15:24, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

I can't really foresee any serious objections to this. Thus far I have not dealt with any real complaints dealing with editor supervised delinking of dates; I don't think that they fall within the scope of the ongoing dispute regarding date unlinking. Shereth 15:30, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Gerry, I can't imagine why these should be linked if the rest are not. It's like one foot on either side of the fence. I've yet to see evidence that any date links are of the slightest use in the context of a content-article. The proponents of turning back the clock on DA certainly don't seem to be able to provide an example. Tony (talk) 15:32, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
I doubt that Gerry's suggestion was meant as endorsing the existence of certain kinds of links, but rather as a compromise. For what it is worth it is likely a bit over-cautious. As I stated previously I do not believe that user-supervised removal of any date links, provided the user in question believes they do not contribute to the context of an article, are subject to the same "moratorium" that I am subjecting automated edits to. Shereth 15:35, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
I doubt that a bot could be written to follow those guidelines. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 16:02, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Templates can be used to tag dates that article editors feel are necessary to keep, allowing bots to overlook them. This of course would require a period of time to announce that if you want to keep any date in an article (per any pending allowances), you need to protect them before the bot comes through, or to provide instruments after they are delinked to keep them linked. --MASEM 16:04, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
We shouldn't be aiming at a "compromise" solution. The concept of linking certain types of dates will lead to trouble as there will be a never-ending battle about what type should be in or out. My belief is that we either link all dates or none (and preferably none).  HWV 258  03:30, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
I basically agree with this, but I think that there may be some other articles where broader linking of dates should be considered. For example:
  • Lists of dates - eg timelines, year articles, day articles. A rationale being (i) these are already lists of events, so the reader may be unusually appreciative to other lists of events; and (ii) rather than reducing readability, the systematic linking can actually enhance readability.
  • Historical articles sufficiently far back - eg links to centuries and millenia BC.
and perhaps others. Jheald (talk) 20:15, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Hell, no! Some of these timeline articles (and lists) are among the very worst offenders of the 'sea of blue' date links. Of the hundreds of articles I have delinked, many are in this group because they yield the biggest bang for my delinking efforts. I have noticed that these are amongst the most densely linked category of articles in the WP universe. At the same time, I feel the dates linked have very limited relevance, except (marginally) for the very first date in the time-line series. Ohconfucius (talk) 02:56, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

"Involved" admins

I think we have a complex application of WP:IAR which has to be made explicit. Considering the number of megabytes of ranting arguments on date linking, it is unlikely that an admin who actually read it would remain uninvolved. If it is philosophically impossible for an informed admin to be uninvolved, does that mean no admin action can be taken? I think not.
However, I don't have a solution. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 15:59, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

There is no prohibition against an "involved" administrator performing administrative actions. Such a thing would be nonsensical, as an administrator who takes action is, by definition, becoming involved in the situation. I believe that Tony et al. are referring to the conflict of interest prohibition on the use of administrative tools. The pertinent section of the policy is as follows:
  • Conflict of interest/non-neutrality/content dispute — Administrators should not use their tools to advantage, or in a content dispute (or article) where they are a party (or significant editor), or where a significant conflict of interest is likely to exist. With few specific exceptions where tool use is allowed by any admin, administrators should ensure they are reasonably neutral parties when they use the tools.
Specifically, I believe they claiming that myself (and perhaps other administrators, though none have been named) have a vested interest in the outcome of this debate. I'm not sure where they are seeing it - I have never professed an interest in prohibiting the de-linking of articles. What is happening is an unfortunate conflating of "pausing the bot during the dispute resolution process" with "creating an advantageous atmosphere for those who want to overturn the MOS". This confusion would not exist if the editors in question realized that a temporary pausing of the bot is not tantamount to handing the anti-delinking crowd a victory. Shereth 16:29, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
I don't see any dispute resolution process, or even any properly formulated dispute - there's one group of editors trying to get on with the job of making Misplaced Pages better in line with properly established guidelines, and another group trying to obstruct that effort in any way possible, for reasons that aren't entirely clear (possibly out of pique that some of "their" articles have been altered). Clearly admins have to sort this out, but they should remember that the ability to create drama is no substitute for valid and relevant arguments.--Kotniski (talk) 17:11, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Quite. Now, if only we could agree which group is which.... — Arthur Rubin (talk) 18:18, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Unnecessary. It would proliferate the slagging war which is going on. Ohconfucius (talk) 02:32, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Ending the cycle : formal RFC

I for one am tired of the recurring and repetitive complaints about Lightbot's removal of date links. I am certain that the maintainers of this page are also tired of having to address these complaints on a regular basis. While I remain frustrated and confused as to why no real attempt has been made to gather consensus to date, I have decided to draft a request for comment that will hopefully address and finalize this problem once and for all. As has been mentioned previously, consensus is not the same thing as majority rules; reasoned and logical debate trumps numerous unfounded complaints. A centralized discussion on the matter will allow for such reasoned and logical statements to be collected, judged, and archived for future referencing. A formal discussion on the matter will allow for the following points to be addressed and resolved:

  1. If there is consensus for the recent wording change to MOS:SYL
  2. If the deprecation of linking for autoformatting purposes means existing links must go
  3. If there is consensus that bare linked years are generally low-value links and should be removed
  4. If there is consensus that automated (bot) removal of these links is acceptable

I have drafted a formal request for comment on the matter; the draft is currently User:Shereth/MOSNUM. I would like to get input from the folks here at MOSNUM on how well formulated the questions are and how it might be improved. I will then file a formal request for comment using the wording, move it to an appropriate section of this talk page, and broadcast the existence of the RFC in appropriate places (WP:VP, WP:CENT, etc). This will allow for a firm discussion on the nature of this dispute and provide the community with a solid foundation to preempt future disputes. Shereth 17:44, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

the wording of it looks pretty good to me, Shereth - a couple of minor changes that might make it clearer to people who haven't been following the discussion might be:
  • "... the systematic, retroactive removal of existing linked dates ..."
the use of the word "retroactive" seems potentially confusing (and/or redundant). i suggest: "... the systematic removal of existing linked dates ..."
  • "... a mechanism for creating exemptions, such that the bot would ignore certain links ..."
i'm not sure it will be clear to people that means a] some kinds of "exemptions" might need to be designated manually, and b] that "ignoring" means "leaving them linked". how about something like: "a way to designate certain date links as exceptions that the bot should leave linked"?
my other doubt is whether the aim is to take a "vote" or to actually get more people involved in a consensus-forging scenario. the birth-and-death-date-link RFC above seems to have been treated as a "voting" process, and even though i'm fairly new around here, i've read that that's not the way wikipedia is meant to operate. Sssoul (talk) 18:35, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Excellent points all around. I'll modify the wording accordingly. Shereth 18:38, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
smile: with that encouragement, i'll try two more suggestions:
  • "... it has been requested that the community consider the following points of concern"
it seems worth specifying right from the get-go how many points of concern there are - "the following three points of concern" - and then numbering each of the points.
  • "removal of existing linked dates" and similar phrases really ought to read "removal of existing date links". it's the links that are up for possible removal, not the dates themselves - which should be obvious, but more than once during the discussions it's seemed like some editors are afraid a bot or script would obliterate the dates themselves. Sssoul (talk) 18:49, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
I would suggest numbering the points of concern, since the discussion will refer to them (and we could use labels), but not specifying how many. New concerns are likely to arise during the discussion. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:30, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Could I suggest we add:

5. If there are classes of exceptions where date linking should be allowed?

-- since the RfC above, on whether people thought there was value in linking dates of birth and dates of death is so far split right down the middle; and since, if we do have date pages, then per WP:BUILD there should be at least some links to them. Jheald (talk) 19:45, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

  • I’m not following the atomic-level procedural details of this but understand the four-point subject matter and like what I see so far. Someone please let me know when general input (or “voting” or whatever you want to call it) is needed. I’ll add my 2¢. I’ll also take the liberty of copying the input of Matt (I.P. 81.151.231.150), which speaks straight to this issue of linking dates. Greg L (talk) 23:28, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
Shereth, might I suggest we conduct a poll/RFC on whether date linking/autoformatting should be deprecated to begin with? This change to the MoS was enacted with a straw poll involving twelve editors but is impacting many many more. I do think your RFC format is great and would keep the existing questions. But I think we should determine if the community wants to part ways with autoformatted dates before asking if they should or shouldn't be removed by automated means. —Locke Cole • t • c 00:42, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
  • That's very nice and clever. And I'll continue reverting edits which remove date links until I'm shown there's actual consensus in the community at large and not amongst a dozen editors who are regulars here on this obscure talk page. kthx bye. —Locke Cole • t • c 07:57, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

There is a split discussion going on... Shouldn't a single integral discussion be concentrated at User:Shereth/MOSNUM? Ohconfucius (talk) 02:25, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

  • FA I believe goes by whatever is currently written at the MoS, so it's understandable that new FAs would have no date links. However, go back further and I'm sure you'll find FAs with date links being successfully promoted. —Locke Cole • t • c 02:06, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
  • And I'm saying that a small consensus here does not force the rest of the community to deprecate date links/formatting. Hence why the question is relevant in a community RFC. More so, I think, than the question being discussed so far (whether automated tools should be used to delink dates). —Locke Cole • t • c 07:52, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Come on, why do we have important discussions going on in user space? Are we not trying to determine a true consensus now? If so, it needs to be in a high-profile area and there needs to be a big-print notice here on WT:MOSNUM on where to go. Without the above post by Ohconfucius, I wouldn’t have know about it. Greg L (talk) 03:38, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
  • I think it's appropriate - it's all about framing the discussion we ought to be having. The real point I was trying to make was that it makes absolutely no sense for there to be two parallel discussions, in the same way there should not be two separate articles on this issue to avoid Content forking. Ohconfucius (talk) 04:28, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Ohconfucius is right. At the moment all we are doing is tweaking the wording of the RfC, not conducting the actual formal commenting. In a few days, when we believe we're asking the right questions, it will "go live" and be filed in a proper location, moved out of its temporary home in userspace. Shereth 05:12, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
From what I've read, it seems ready to go now. Let's get this going before any more editing energy is wasted on this issue.--User:2008Olympianchitchat 05:54, 15 November 2008 (UTC)
It still lacks the primary question: do we want to deprecate date links/formatting? There's no consensus on that core issue, so the secondary question of automated vs. gradual isn't as relevant. —Locke Cole • t • c 07:52, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Full date formatting

The "full date formatting" section includes the following statement: Dates in article body text should all have the same format. I think that is a poorly considered notion, whether it is more appropriate to write "14 February 1990" or "February 14, 1990" can very much depend on the context and flow of the sentence. I also submit that rigidly using the same format throughout a piece of text is not actually conducive to variety of expression or textual rhythm, both of which are important to good prose writing. It's just plain unnatural to try to impose such rigid rules on prose. Can you imagine any creative writer imposing such rules on himself? Gatoclass (talk) 23:26, 14 November 2008 (UTC)