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So what IS the deal with birth/death locations in the opening?

An editor has replaced "John Smith (January 0, 0000, Somecity, Somecountry - January 0, 0000, Somecity, Somecountry)" with "John Smith (January 0, 0000 - January 0, 0000)" and moved the birth and death locations to the body of the article, with an edit summary of "WP:MOSDATE". (There is no infobox in this case.)

So which of these is correct:

  • This is indeed per WP:MOSDATE (in which case the changes should or indeed must stay), or
  • It is just his personal preference (in which case the edit can be reverted, and the editor advised to not incorrectly cite MOSDATE to justify his personal preference)?

Apparently, MOS:DOB used to say "Locations of birth and death are given subsequently rather than being entangled with the dates." However, it doesn't say this anymore.

On the other hand, at MOS:DOB it says "At the start of an article on an individual, his or her dates of birth and death are provided..." and the main example given is "Charles Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was a British..." (no locations given). It doesn't state ""At the start of an article on an individual, only his or her dates of birth and death are provided...", but it would be possible to infer this from the the example. (But if it is policy, why is it not stated but rather left for us to infer?)

So what it is? I'm not asking what it should be or what one personally prefers, but whether another editor can properly change with an unassailable cite of MOSDATE.

((There are some discussions of the matter at these places: Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Archive 85#Use of place of birth/death and Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Archive 124#Birthplace in opening and Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Archive 127#Dates and places of birth) Herostratus (talk) 04:46, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

IMO it should be handled case by case. IIRC, someone argued that the town of birth is not always so relevant to someone's life as to deserve a mention in the first sentence (and I agree), but then it is even rarer for the month and day of birth to be relevant enough and yet I don't remember anyone suggesting that normally only the year should be provided. (Personally, in over 60% of the cases I'd say (19xx, Town, Country–20xx, Othertown, Othercountry) or (born 19xx in Town, Country).)A. di M. (talk) 13:21, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
I think the consensus was "it all depends", so maybe there should be something that indicates to an editor that just because a place of birth & death is or is not shown in one biographical article doesn't require following the same practice in the piece that he or she is writing or editing. However, I don't know how many editors would consult the Manual of Style, or know where to look. —— Shakescene (talk) 13:30, 11 October 2010 (UTC)
Given no rule to the contrary, my personal preference is put only the dates in the parenthetical comment; it's far easier to read. To pacify those that want easy access to the place of birth and death, why not add an appropriate person infobox that includes the appropriate information? Those things are appropriate to an infobox; adding them as parenthetical comments in the first line of the lead seems to be tantamount to a list of trivia to me, and we don't like those... // ⌘macwhiz (talk) 20:50, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
It probably does all depend on context, but usually it is ungainly and cluttered to squash full dates and locations within parentheses right at the opening. Tony (talk) 00:55, 13 October 2010 (UTC)
Yes, it's something that struck me reading professional biographies, that start with the birth place and date of the subjects grand-parents, or the exact time of birth - these things occupationally summon an image, or might be considered making a researched fact widely available, but in general they are irrelevant to the story and would be better relegated to a footnote, and if you read several biographies in a row, come across as as amateurish as the geographical texts that begin "XXXX is a city of contrasts" - and there are many. Rich Farmbrough, 10:40, 13 October 2010 (UTC).
I would be inclined to say: neither. The style isn't in MOSDATE, so it can be discussed. The editor should just be told "that's not in MOSDATE any more" not "advised to not incorrectly cite MOSDATE to justify his personal preference" - this might appear rather short on good faith. Rich Farmbrough, 10:33, 13 October 2010 (UTC).
Oh goodness no, I wouldn't put it like to the other editor. I was just being succinct, here. Herostratus (talk) 17:01, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

I still say just put the years in the lead, since the people that want birth and death details in the lead have not come up with any good reasons to have an exception to the Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (lead section) guidelines. My compromise is to put the full dates and places in the infobox and the body of the article first, then use only years in the lead section. The lead needs to be a summary of the body and infobox, not the other way-round. At least that is WIkiedia convention. Older encyclopediae made a point of emphasizing exact dates and places perhaps, but they also took pains to use proper forms of address, like "the honourable", "the right reverend" "esquire" etc. which generally we do not require. The years give a quick summary and context, all that a lead section is supposed to do. And sylistically long parenthetical lists with dashes make readability worse. W Nowicki (talk) 16:25, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

I fully agree. Compare the following:
George Washington (February 22, 1732 – December 14, 1799) was the dominant military and political leader of the new United States of America from 1775–1797, ...
George Washington (1732–1799) was the dominant military and political leader of the new United States of America from 1775–1797, leading the American victory ...
George Washington (born February 22, 1732 in Pope's Creek Estate, Westmoreland County, Virginia; died December 14, 1799 in Westmoreland County, Virginia) ...
The first is what we have in the article George Washington right now (Misplaced Pages's standard convention for biographies), as seen from Google. The other two are approximations to the Google snippets we would get with the two major alternatives. I think the second line is superior and the third is the worst of the lot. We don't need to prove that we are a serious encyclopedia by using an old-fashioned but impractical convention. We are already encyclopedia #1. It is our job to innovate. Our articles have lead sections (many if not most encyclopedias don't), and that makes certain changes necessary. This is one of them. Hans Adler 16:59, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
I don't fully agree; dates should not be removed from the lede unless they are both in the infobox and in the body. If that's done, although I still think the dates should be in the lede, I wouldn't object to their removal.
However, I don't think the place should be in the lede unless important; if, for example, the person was executed, then the place of execution probably should be in the lede.
In either case, this article WP:MOSDATE is not the appropriate guideline to cover places. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 17:13, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
I agree with Arthur. Readers routinely skip sidebars and infoboxes. So any key information that is mentioned in a photo caption or sidebar (like an infobox) may (should?) be duplicated in the main body text if so desired; that includes linking the first occurrence of a word. 19:50, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
"Readers routinely skip sidebars and infoboxes.". --Walter Görlitz (talk) 20:58, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
Technical writing 101. That’s all you’ll get. Sidebars, as our own article describes them, …often include small bits of information such as quotes, polls, lists, pictures, site tools, etc.. By definition, they aren’t intended to be part of linear body text. You may read to them first; others read them last (or not at all). Greg L (talk) 22:01, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
I agree. (But I don't think that the day and month of birth and death constitute "key information" in most cases.) A. di M. (talk) 22:23, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Huh?? This thread started out as one of birth and death locations. Now, the trouble with infoboxes is they often don’t have the information I seek. I would have expected that the infoboxes for cars like Porche 911 would list “Top speed” but it doesn’t. If the article is a biography, including birth and death dates in the first sentence of the lede are standard practices for all encyclopedias. Why would we depart from this convention? Because that information is in the infobox? Is that what this is about now? If so, I very much disagree.

For instance, our ‘George Washington’ article says this:

George Washington (February 22, 1732 – December 14, 1799) was the dominant military and political leader of the new United States of America from 1775–1797…

Are you suggesting that we abandon this practice? Greg L (talk) 23:31, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

I certainly would. "February 22" and "December 14" are of minor importance;

George Washington (1732–1799) was the dominant military and political leader of the new United States of America from 1775–1797…

is much better. His dates (and places) of birth and death would of course come later in the article. -- Hoary (talk) 23:50, 17 October 2010 (UTC)
That seems very sensible. Citing just the years is entirely consistent with the summary register of a lead, and avoids the ugly clutter of the full number/spacing tragedy. Surely the dates appear later in the detailed sections. Tony (talk) 00:52, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

To clarify, I do agree with above that any details in the infobox or caption must be in the body of the text too. The place I do not think they are required is in the lead section if they are already in both box and body. And to answer the question as to why we are different than many (not all, I bet one could find one that does not) printed encyclopediae that put all sorts of details in parentheses: Yes, it is because we have infoboxes! That seems exactly what infoboxes are for. No need to a bot or massive sweep, just allow the cleaner style in the lead since it is a minor issue IMO. For example, do it when adding infoboxes to a previsouly infoboxless article. W Nowicki (talk) 02:42, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Oh. I didn’t read what you wrote carefully enough, A. di M. I agree that providing just the birth/death years in biographies {George Washington (1732–1799)} in the lede of the body text seems perfectly fine. (Hmmm… I like it alot.} Greg L (talk) 03:18, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes I don't have a problem with that either. Can we either 1) put this into the manual of style or 2) at least write this up as a short essay and make it a subpage of this page, so that people don't have to reargue this six months from now? Herostratus (talk) 06:34, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

In the particular cases of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the exact days of their birth are significant to many people because, before the institution of the portmanteau Presidents Day, February 12 (Lincoln's Birthday) and February 22 (Washington's Birthday) were separately and specifically celebrated national holidays in the U.S. So it wouldn't surprise me if a casual reader would go to Abraham Lincoln just to check the date quickly after running across a literary or historical reference to Lincoln's Birthday. Washington presents the additional difficulty that on the day he was born, the calendar didn't say 22 February 1732, but 11 February 1731. (See a similar difficult at Alexander Kerensky.) —— Shakescene (talk) 12:35, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Straw poll

Could we have a show of hands for a recommendation (rather than compulsion) at MOSNUM that where birth and death dates appear elsewhere in an article, just the years be provided at the opening of the lead? (This would not apply to an infobox.) Compulsion would mean rendering many articles non-compliant, but a recommendation would make it ok for an editor to change without gaining consensus at the talk page first. The exception to this recommendation would be where the actual dates of birth or death are significant per se.

Links to this straw poll have been posted at WT:MOS and and have posted a notice at the Village Pump and Centralized discussion. Tony (talk) 03:37, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Examples

One of the things you want readers—especially students—to absorb about historical figures is where their lifespan fits into the scheme of things. I have enough trouble remembering the lifetimes of the major figures just in years. Which of the following "big picture" expressions of lifespan is more likely to be held in readers' minds, just where they're embarking on the topic at the outset of the lead summary? I've chosen two composer articles, but the principle goes for all bios.

  1. Aaron Copland, a significant 20th-century composer: here and as it was. In the first, I've moved his full date of birth down to the opening of "Early life", where it fits nicely and complements the full date of his death, which was already in "Later life", just where you'd expect it.
  2. JS Bach—the mess at the top has been an irritant for many years, worsened by the need to refer to the calendar change in Thuringia at the start of the 18th century. The proposed option is here; the previous version is here. The old-style calendar reference is now shifted from the very opening of the article to the start of the "Childhood (1685–1703)" section, without using the distracting small font size that I suppose was an attempt to minimise the clutter at the opening. Again, the date of death was already stated in the "Death (1750)" section. Tony (talk) 02:32, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
    ¶ Most of the leading clutter in J.S. Bach comes from the phonetic transcription that of course most readers can't understand even if it is neutral between their different accents. I know that's a different argument of equally-long standing, and I realize that how to pronounce "Bach" is a common and natural question for ordinary readers. On the other hand, another question of many ordinary, common readers is "when is Bach's birthday?" and others might well be "where exactly was he born?" (was he, for example, an Austrian?) and "where did he die?" (in England, like Handel? in a big German city? in the countryside?) —— Shakescene (talk) 06:59, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Your opinions

  • Support Tony (talk) 08:00, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support for the reasons I have given above. Hans Adler 08:19, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support Dates of birth and death never have great relevance unless they are an observance (ie perhaps only in George Washington's case). Less clutter by minor information for the lede must be welcome. --Ohconfucius 08:33, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support Messy opening to an article and can be provided in infobox and later in main article. Adabow (talk · contribs) 08:43, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support with very rare exceptions (e.g. the death date of Saint Patrick). A. di M. (talk) 09:21, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support, with the same caveats that Ohconfucius and A.di M. mention, that sometime, especially when it's a well-known date that has been memorialized, it may indeed be relevant. But that's case-by-case and should be decided on the article's talk page. Must be careful in the wording that no one uses it as a cudgel against any use of full dates, as well.oknazevad (talk) 10:58, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support, with Ohconfucius's and A. di M.'s caveats. I don't think that George Washington's birth and death dates are important enough to include in the opening of the lede, but St. Patrick's death date certainly is. Ozob (talk) 11:19, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support As the proposal is worded: where birth and death dates appear elsewhere in an article, just the years be provided at the opening. It is a simple recommendation that results in a clean-reading article. Greg L (talk) 13:05, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support. Birth and death day-month is very seldom important. If this is put back into the MOS, I would support something like "...except in particular exceptional cases, where there is a reason for including the month and day, and a cogent reason is given on the talk page" or something. (I am the person who started this thread, but I was not objecting to having birth/death year be the only info included, only to the lack of clarity.) Birth and death location is another matter, and more arguable in my opinion - a person's country of birth (not so much the city, usually) can be pretty important. But, overall, I am OK with an MOS that proscribes including the birth/death location either, in the interest of not cluttering up the lead sentence with parenthesized detail. After all, the info can go right into the second sentence or so, with better detail to boot. For instance "John Q. Somebody (born Somedate, Riga, Latvia...)" tells one story, while "Was born in Riga of ethnic German parents" or whatever tells another, and the first example is actually somewhat misleading. Herostratus (talk) 16:22, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support. Keep it simple. Lightmouse (talk) 18:05, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support. The lead is meant to be the summary and not contain every fact. Including the exact date and location details, adds undo emphasis to these items and moves the actual text on the individual further into the text. Vegaswikian (talk) 18:28, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose. WP is an encyclopaedia—not an advertising brochure that has to look tidy to sell the product. The day and month currently sit neatly in the lede in thousands of articles which means that readers have learnt that there is a consistent place to obtain that information (and the information is bracketed and easy to skip while scanning). I don't believe WP is improved by having inconsistencies between articles (e.g. if a reader wants to determine if someone was born early or late in a year, they would have to go looking through many paragraphs for what would be essentially a random placement—if there at all). Other respected publications have no problem including the day and month information (Grove does it). I would only support the removal of the day and month information if that information were to be contained in the infobox (as a consistent approach for readers), and not at a random point in the article. The proposal will also make it impossible for script to detect the precise dates of birth and death—something that at least has a chance if placed in the first brackets in the first sentence of an article). I feel that this proposal will lead to increased tension and debate on many, many pages.  HWV258.  19:25, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
Funny, "(1912–2002)" rather than "(January 15, 1912 – August 31, 2002)" doesn't look like an advertising brochure to me. It has to look tidy for ease of reading and good organisation (lead vs. the more detailed sections), not because it's trying "to sell a product". Tony (talk) 02:06, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support, because it will make the articles more readable, especially for biographies where one also needs to specify one or more alternative forms of the subject's name in a different language or writing system—which is also done parenthetically. However, I agree with HWV258 that we should also stress the suggestion to use an infobox as well, and that the infobox should be as precise as possible and use the appropriate templates to generate metadata. Failing that, we should point users toward instructions on how to encode the full birth/death dates as metadata manually. Yes, I know that many people would ignore such a suggestion, but if the extra link gets even a few people to do the right thing, it's still a worthwhile win. (For that matter, could we create a template that would take the birth/death dates in as precise a form as available, generate the desired parenthetical output, and still generate the needed metadata?) // ⌘macwhiz (talk) 20:09, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Strongly oppose. Discussion/proposal belongs at MOS:BIO. Relates directly to the first section there, i.e. what information is included not how it is formatted. wjemather 20:30, 18 October 2010 (UTC)
    • Thanks. I just put a note there to bring the posse around. --Ohconfucius 02:45, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
      • Since this seems like it going to stay here all I can say is that sometimes the bad ideas are just right there in front of you. It is long established practice to include birth and death dates as accurately as known in the opening paragraph and there is no reason to change other than a desire to provoke mass edit wars (we've seen those before and don't need them again). In any case it would do our readers great disservice to bury key information in the article body. As has already been stated, the infobox is not a substitute and these details should be as accessible as possible. wjemather 21:32, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose I believe that dates are very important information that should be included at the start of an article, and I sure as heck don't want people mechanically deleting them like was done with birth/death places. I also agree with Mclay below: Ideally, the lead could be a stand-alone summary, which includes the dates. Reywas92 03:39, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Weak Oppose Should be on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes the exact dates have particular historical significance; many times they do not particularly crowd the lead. --Cybercobra (talk) 04:17, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
    The proposal is not do ban them, only to discourage them when there's no good reason to put them in the first sentence. A. di M. (talk) 14:55, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose. Full birth and death dates should always appear in the lead, as they do in any good encyclopaedia. They should not, in my opinion, appear elsewhere in the article, as this is completely unnecessary. Infoboxes should be a supplement (if used at all - I personally dislike the things, as I feel they are ugly and unbalance the article) - they should never, ever contain information that is not contained elsewhere and should never be the primary source of any piece of information in the article. -- Necrothesp (talk) 08:19, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
    • You mean that Johannes Kepler#Early years should start with "Johannes Kepler was born in 1571 at the ..." and the penultimate sentence of Johannes Kepler#Rudolphine Tables and his last years should be "He died in 1630 and was buried there; ..."? What's the point of that? Surely someone reading about the details of someone's birth of death is more likely, rather than less, to want to know the day and month, so the dates in the body of the article should be retained whether they're also in the lead or not. A. di M. (talk) 15:04, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
      • No, I mean that it should start "Johannes Kepler was born in the Free Imperial City of Weil der Stadt..." The dates are already in the lead and don't need repeating ad infinitem, which is a trend that has, in my experience, begun fairly recently on Misplaced Pages. People are generally intelligent enough not to need spoon-feeding. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:13, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose. My comment above was to suggest it should be allowable not to have the dates of birth and death in the parenthetical section of the first sentence, even they appear both in the body and and infobox; I still think they should occur in the parenthetical section, or should be linked in the body (contrary to current guidelines.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 08:57, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose – the first paragraph is meant to be a summary of the article. An reader should be able to read the summary and know all the basic information. Birth and death dates are essential information about a person and do no harm sitting in brackets after the persons name. McLerristarr / Mclay1 15:48, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
We all agree that the lead should be a summary of the article, every single one of us. The question is whether the lead should be a brief and readable SUMMARY that gets users on target or an all-inclusive summary that includes mention of every significant tidbit. Give me clean, fast, short, concise leads over meandering messes that say too much every time. See the lead for Communist Party USA for an example of a technically by-the-book, practically atrocity of a lead... Giving the years alone enables readers to know whether they are looking at the right John Smith at a glance and his general era. If they want to know what day and where he died, that's the place for the main article. The sole rationale that advocates of the current Officially Specified Cluttered Format seem to tout (see below) is "that's what other encyclopedias do." Show me just one paper encyclopedia with a short summary lead, followed by a table of contents, followed by a main article and I might agree with ya... Carrite (talk) 15:30, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support. With caveat as stated above, the details should go in the infobox and body, and only then removed from the lead. Years are certainly a summary, so do not understand the previous comment at all. The proposal is not to eliminate the dates totally from the lead, just cut down specific dates to two mentions instead of three. And yes, belongs in the bio style guide. W Nowicki (talk) 15:51, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support. One of the main functions of a lead is to summarise the article without unnecessary detail. In most cases the day/month is detail and the year a sufficient summary, so the default recommendation should be to discourage them. Where the day/month are significant, then of course that is an justifiable exception. Although it's out of scope here, I'd venture in an analogous way that the exact location is usually detail, while the nationality is summary, so the same would apply. For what it's worth, I certainly do not think it is appropriate to have information in the lead that is not contained in the body of the article. --RexxS (talk) 17:17, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Comment – Just to clarify something here: does first paragraph mean just the first line or the entire first section before the contents? McLerristarr / Mclay1 17:24, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support: the first sentence should give the most important information about a person, and that is what that person did and in what period he lived, not on what days the person happened to be born and die. Of course, there may be individual cases where it is appropriate to give the dates. Ucucha 01:36, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose Dates of birth and death are at the top of the ubiquitous information about a person; they are bookmarks of the human condition; they are vitals like name, gender and profession, and so they loom large when we tell the story of a life. We ask that ideally leads be able to function as stand-alone documents that summarize the important aspects of a person's life, and we do so not just as an empty exercise in summarization, or style, but because people often read just the lead as a mini-article and stop there. I cannot imagine a good biography that does not provide these vitals, so if we truly mean that the lead should pass scrutiny as stand-alone, then this information must be included there.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 03:58, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Comment – I often find birth and death dates are not referenced to citations; where they are cited adjacent to the first sentence to the lead, they often lead to clutter within the already busy parentheses in the lead section. Unless it's from an obit, it's extremely likely ever to have a single cite for both birth and death dates. So I think it's better to have all that detail in the body –. --Ohconfucius 04:00, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Comment. There's nothing wrong with presenting significant detail like place of birth in the lead, but if a great deal of readers (not editors) say it reduces usability, let them have their way. There are two caveats that I'd like to see in the final decision - taking care of another round of "lamest MOS wars":
  1. Editors who remove dates and places from the lead should check if they are clearly mentioned elsewhere in the text (not infobox) and, when necessary, carefully re-insert such info where appropriate.
  2. Deletion of dates and places from the lead is not an excuse for the addition of an infobox. Infobox wars... been there. East of Borschov 06:37, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose: Keep dates of birth and death in the lead parenthesis, to the month and day. Locations, however, should appear later in the article. /ninly(talk) 07:23, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose. This is basic information. If you want to remove superfluous info from the lead, it would be better to remove the full name of people from the lead and only introduce that in the body. I don't want the first thing in the article on Stephen Hawking to be that his middle name is William, nor do I believe that the fact that he is a fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce needs to be introduced so soon. Considering that we normally have such minor infotmation prominently in the lead, I don't think excluding the exact date of birth and date should be our priorities. Fram (talk) 08:47, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
    • I really don't think a person's full name is superfluous. Neither, in Britain, are their postnominal letters. -- Necrothesp (talk) 08:49, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
      • That's basically the problem. You believe that where someone is born shouldn't be in the lead, but that someone has the middle name X on his birth certificate should be, even though in many cases the first had a profound influence on his life and career, and the latter may be a totally irrelevant bit of trivia. Everyone has his preferences, opinions, things that pique the interest or that are totally irrelevant to you. I don't see why the exact date of birth and death should be singled out. I could see the need for a total rethinking of what to put in the lead, or what to put in the first sentence of a lead, focusing solely on what was essential to the person (which would certainly be the commonly known name and the claim to notability (usually their job), and may include their years of birth and death, their nationality or other regional affiliation, and a few other things. It would usually not include little-known middle names, postnomials unrelated to their main notability, dates of birth and death, ancestry (X was a Y of Polish-Italian-German descent? X was a Y will suffice for the lead)). Such a discussion and rewrite of the MOs for the lead, I could perhaps support. But as it stands, I don't see the reason for removing this from the lead when so much other clutter is allowed (and even encouraged) in it. Fram (talk) 08:58, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
    • Do I understand you correctly? Do you oppose removing birth and death day and month where irrelevant (while keeping the years in), because you think irrelevant details about the name should also be removed? That seems rather odd to me. Hans Adler 13:05, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
      • If we agree that some less relevant info can or should be included in the lead (first sentence) anyway, then I believe that the exact dates of birth and death are a prime candidate for such inclusion, as they are a natural extension of the years (which everyone, I believe, agrees should be included). I can accept the position that no less relevant info should be included in the first sentence, and a discussion on that may be worthwhile. But I can also see the arguments to include some more trivial or less relevant info in the first sentence, and in that case, I think that these dates should be kept. What I can't support is the exclusion of the dates coupled with the inclusion of other material. I hope that clarifies my position on this. Fram (talk) 08:36, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
        • Thanks. That makes perfect sense. I saw this proposal, which initially looked like a case of snow, primarily as a way to get started about removing the lead clutter. I'm a bit worried that your nuanced argument won't be taken into consideration when people later argue that because of the strong opposition to removing the dates WP:LEAD can clearly not be enforced for such content. Hans Adler 09:03, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Supportissimo. For the great majority of notable people, the details of the birth or death aren't important to their notability. This is just clutter. The demand for consistency makes it worse, in view of all the people whose dates arguably need to be spelled out in both the Julian and the Gregorian calendar (and indeed in years with old versus present-day year-division). There's talk above of how any good encyclopedia consistently does this or that; I don't have any large biographical encyclopedia conveniently to hand, but to me it would be one whose articles provided such details as dates of birth and death but whose leads were crafted by and for thinking humans, rather than by robotic application of a handful of rules that prioritized consistency across articles on people as diverse as physicists, murderers, novelists, film directors, explorers, and pop crooners. -- Hoary (talk) 09:47, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Fram. People are used to this and expect it as both readers and editors; and in isolation it is not an improvement. I would support, as Fram suggested above, a wider rethink on what information should be excluded from leads unless it is shown to be significant - and as part of that, it might be OK to say that in many cases the exact dates are a distraction rather than helpful. Rd232 11:07, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
    • But I'm a person, a reader, and an editor; and I am not used to it and indeed am irritated by it. Incidentally, I too would be happy to boot obscure matters of naming out of the lead. -- Hoary (talk) 11:39, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose I don't see a major change in flow, but I do see a lack of instant information. If I want to see a birthday, I look at the top and don't want to scroll down looking. Is this change OK sometimes? Yes, so do it on a case-by-case basis. But not always, please. How is this not important info, anyway? Can we exclude titles (OBE, etc.) too, as superfluous? What constitutes unimportant detail? I think presenting, in most cases, the specific dates at the beginning is helpful and relevant. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 12:57, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
    • How is this not important info, anyway? Because it's remarkably difficult to come up with examples for which the date of birth is significant. ("Oh, Mozart/Gesualdo/Ockeghem/Beethoven/Schoenberg/Bach/Zemlinsky was born in April/June/November?" Good grief, then no wonder he is/isn't performed much these days!") -- Hoary (talk) 13:25, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
      • Exactly. For illustration, let's take a few anonymous famous composers and experiment with various formats:
      A (born in Salzburg; died in Vienna) was an Austrian composer.
      B (born 17 December; died 26 March) was a German composer.
      C (born 31 March (O.S. 21 March) 1685 in Eisenach; died 28 July 1750 in Leipzig) was a composer.
      D (1685–1759) was a German-British composer.
      I know which format I prefer, and why. Hans Adler 14:45, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
      This is slightly disingenuous to say the least, since the normal format on Misplaced Pages at the moment is not any of these, but: E (31 March 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer. This is the format I and others continue to support. -- Necrothesp (talk) 15:59, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
      Me too. I, for one, consider that "E" conveys the most relevant information and is much faster for me to get that info from. I am truly interested in his birth date, not just the year. Being born in January vs. December is a pretty big difference time-wise. In addition, what do other encyclopedias do? Hey, look at Brittanica: we're not them, but I think the standard for encyclopedias is like what EB does, "(b. Jan. 27, 1756, Salzburg, Archbishopric of Salzburg —d. Dec. 5, 1791, Vienna)". /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 19:42, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
      Apart from answering trivia questions in a pub quiz, I can't see any use for the exact date, nor the relevance of day and month to the subject's life and work. I could understand that John Lennon being born in Liverpool in 1940 would be relevant, but why "9 October"? --RexxS (talk) 22:33, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
      I think it's an important biographical fact. We should, by your reasoning, exclude orders of chivalry (because no one says that in daily speech), cities of birth (because everyone knows that the country is what matters), pronunciations (because very few people can understand IPA), middle names, and full birth names for people like Lady Gaga. Does having the date of birth in the lede hurt the lede that bad? Why make information that is relevant to the subject's life (because that's when it started!) be harder to find? This is an encyclopedia; it is for reference. If I want to look up Barack Obama's birthday for an essay or article I am writing, I will look to Misplaced Pages, as will most other readers, including a large number of professional journalists and such. That page takes a long time to load for me. I don't want to wait an extra 30 seconds to see the rest of the article when I can just wait 10 to see the first part of the lede, and know the birth date. In almost every case, I see no harm in leaving the full date of birth in the first sentence. It's not really unnecessary detail; we're giving basic facts but not going into minutes or seconds and whatnot. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 01:55, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose. For one it is more convenient to our readers to have it readily available. Secondly, it is important in contributing to the summing up of the article which is the lede's purpose and nearly all of the 800, 000 plus biographical articles have the birth and dates dates (not just years) in the lede. To change this policy like this would require what I perceive to be 800, 000 unnecessary changes. --Kumioko (talk) 15:08, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
Yes, but it would be more convenient for readers to have everything at the opening; that is just not practical. What goes there has to be rationed, and at the moment we are forced to put birthdays in at the very opening—no flexibility at all. "To change this policy like this would require what I perceive to be 800, 000 unnecessary changes." Well, no: at the top it clearly says that the new advice would be a recommendation, not a compulsion, specifically not to render 800,000 articles in breach. Tony (talk) 16:41, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
What? It's convenient to have basic info that one expects to see (AKA the birth date) and a summary of the subject. I expect to see the full birth date, so it is convenient if it is there. If it's not, I am inconvenienced. Or is it actually easier for me to have to wait for the page to load more and then search lower? Also, if this is a recommendation, how is it determined when this should occur? The main contributor's discretion? Will we need different consensus on every single page? I like them all the current way, and so do many others; should there be a massive edit war over a ... recommendation? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 01:55, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support - The lead is supposed to be a simple, concise summary of the expanded content in the article below. Yet the Official Style Guide specifies for expanded dates in the lead (which are often times not repeated in the article below, human nature being what it is...). This is nutty. Fortunately, the number of people who follow Official Style instead of unofficial Logical Style is a small minority. Carrite (talk) 15:31, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

←(e.c.) Response to Hans Adler: Agreed, most readers, if asked, would instantly go for the clean, simple one. What is it about birthdays that makes people want to put them right at the start? May as well give the day of the week they were born, or whether they were right- or left-handed, first-/last-born, brown/blue-eyed, right at the opening, then. Aside from my poor attempt at humour, birthdays are a more significant problem than those trivialities when it comes to the impact on the reader of historical lifespan—almost always a critical concern. Because days and months are expressed in numerals adjacent to the years, they really do damage the easy accessibility of information that enables a reader to conceptualise their place in history—that is, the years. Ask any schoolteacher, any professor, any journalist, what really matters. Birth and death dates are details that are much more suitable in the body of the text, where whole sections are typically devoted to "Early life" and "Later life". And the infobox, where there is one, will still announce the full dates, usually. Days and months should be trumpeted in the first second of reading an article only where they have modern anniversary implications (St. Patrick's Day, for example). The clutter has been a serious shortcoming of WP's bio articles, and it is high time we gave editors the option of allocating macro- and micro-details to the summary and the sections, respectively. Tony (talk) 15:09, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

You are not entitled to speak for "most readers," only for yourself. Edison (talk) 15:56, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
Agreed, and please, can we stop this tiresome banging on about things being in infoboxes and therefore not needing to be in the lead. Infoboxes are not uncontroversial and many of us don't like their recent proliferation in the first place. In addition, who on earth has the right to decide what is an acceptable "modern anniversary" and what is not? St Patrick's Day means nothing to me. Indeed, it probably means nothing to most people outside Ireland and North America. -- Necrothesp (talk) 16:01, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
I agree that the insistence on infoboxes here is annoying. For articles without infobox it should be enough if the dates appear in the text in the obvious locations. Hans Adler 16:07, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
I guess the reason some editors insist on this is related to the reason why so many articles begin with the silly "X refers to" pattern and have an etymology section that only deals with the title, even though articles are supposed to be about (often several related) concepts rather than words. People use dictionaries more often than encyclopedias, and even many encyclopedias are organised by words rather than topics. So this is what editors are used to. Hans Adler 16:07, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose I expect to see the date of birth and death, and not just the year, at the beginning of a biography, consistent with paper encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries. If you don't care what Copland's birthday was, then skip over it. Many articles do not have an infobox near the beginning. If there is such as easily accessible infobox, then just years would suffice. (Addendum:) Britannica gives the date and place of birth and death in parentheses at the beginning of a biography, and I take that as a good model for Misplaced Pages. Worldbook, more of a "schoolkid encyclopedia," just puts the years of birth and death at the beginning. The place and date of birth are buried down around the third paragraph. The year of death may be down many paragraphs later, and they typically do not explicitly give the place of death. Edison (talk) 15:56, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose An encyclopedia should have the full information regarding birth and death. Day and year are naturals but even month brings meaningful info. To mention an upcoming one. Harry Houdini's death on October 31, 1926 summons up its own connotations. Use of the year "1926" by itself does not. MarnetteD | Talk 17:07, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose: This is a real-world standard for biographies, there's no strong reason to step away from it MBelgrano (talk) 18:42, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support. I don't see any real advantage to putting the full date in the lead sentence. Keeping it simple makes the intro more readable, IMO. Kaldari (talk) 20:23, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Necrothesp and Wjemather, full dates but no places in the parentheses, i.e. restore the line "Locations of birth and death are given subsequently rather than being entangled with the dates." Tewapack (talk) 22:36, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose in that this argument over very few cases like Bach would result in losing birthdates and deathdates in very many cases to wherever in the article the latest haphazard editor put them (including the infobox). Even the O.S. cases like Bach and Washington are already easily standardized. There is a much worse problem with the hyperinclusive multiscript spellings of various articles that often present a reader with browser-breakers before he can even parse the first sentence, and thus a date-related proposal is a bit time-wasting. IMHO I saw a very reasonable suggestion that if there are several alternate spellings, that can be explained in the first section. In that case it makes sense, especially if alternate spellings are bolded as per guidance, but if birth and death are moved (deathdate has NO other easy-to-find location in any article except the sometime infobox) there is no quick way to determine even if WP knows about the deathdate. JJB 00:02, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support if the birth date is easy to find elsewhere, e.g. in the infobox or at the start of an "Early life" section. SlimVirgin 00:12, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Strong Oppose. Misplaced Pages needs guidelines to ensure consistency. This "straw poll" introduces subjective criteria for a "whatever goes" mentality. The introduction presents the clause: "The exception to this recommendation would be where the actual dates of birth or death are significant per se." This is highly subjective, potentially leading to much discord between editors. What is useful, important, or significant to one editor may not equate to the next. We need to maintain consistency, rather than set a precedent for revising policy, guidelines, and Manual of Style at the whim of any straw poll. Cindamuse (talk) 06:47, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Can't we all just get along? "Misplaced Pages needs guidelines to ensure consistency" is one opinion; "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" is another. We don't seem to have a consensus, and so I don't think we can mandate exactly what the material in the parenthesis following the person's name is. Let a hundred flowers bloom. As it stands, as far as I can tell, there is no prescription; that is the de facto policy. However, I think it's very important to make this clear. Lack of consistency is not a problem; lack of clarity is a problem and leads to long discussions such as this one (and this one, and this one and this one, and more in future if we don't pin this down now).

So how about replacing this:

At the start of an article on an individual, his or her dates of birth and death are provided. For example: "Charles Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was a British ..." En dashes are preceded by a non-breaking space, except between year-pairs when no spaces are used.

With this (or something like it):

Biographical articles should begin with the name of the person (bolded), an opening parenthesis, and a closing parenthesis. The parentheses must enclose the birth and death year, and may (at the author's discretion) enclose the birth and/or death day and month and birth and/or death location. For example: "Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) was a British ..." or "Charles Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was a British ... or Charles Darwin (12 February 1809, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England – 19 April 1882, Downe, Kent, England) was a British ...". En dashes are preceded by a non-breaking space, except between year-pairs when no spaces are used. For living persons and persons where all the information is not known, see the examples below.

And this would also have to be put in WP:MOSBIO. Herostratus (talk) 14:44, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

  • Comment. A lack of clarity leads to lack of consistency. There is most certainly a problem with a lack of consistency. If it were not so, there would be no need for this discussion. And yes, I agree, this discussion is taking place devoid of WP:MOSBIO, as well as WP:PEER. As such, it really holds little water outside of satisfying curious minds pertaining to style preferences. And please, I have seen nothing signifying "not getting along", outside of your "foolish, little minds" comment. Let's not go there. Maintain respect, while assuming good faith. Thanks. Cindamuse (talk) 15:51, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Comment – If the birth and death dates were removed from the lead, then you would have to go to the introduction for the birth date and search through the rest for the death date. That seems very inconvenient seeing as how birth and death dates are such basic information. I bet a lot of readers look at a biographical article just to find out the person's birth and death dates. We've got to remember that most people who read Misplaced Pages articles are just looking for some quick information. They do not want to trail through a large amount of text; if they have to do that, they'll look elsewhere on other websites. McLerristarr / Mclay1 15:23, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
    • People just looking for some quick information can find it in the infobox. That's what they are for. A. di M. (talk) 15:35, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
    • The lede paragraph of Millard Fillmore, for instance, is so full of trivia that it doesn't mention slavery or the Compromise of 1850. Those subjects explain Fillmore's importance much better than the exact date, not just the year, of his birth and death. Everything can't come first. Art LaPella (talk) 16:01, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
      • Agree with A. di M. and Art LaPella. Mclay1, when you say, "I bet a lot of readers look at a biographical article just to find out the person's birth and death dates", do you have any evidence for your punt? It's been pointed out a number of times above that the dates are inconsequential in defining the "big picture" summary that defines the role of the lead, and unhelpful to readers and students in extracting the critical lifespan in historical terms. Tony (talk) 16:06, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support (assuming it applies to living people too). The proposed recommendation would be a positive development. Mentioning just the year does suit the lead's "big picture" role. The actual dates can be found immediately in the infobox if required. PL290 (talk) 18:23, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support where birth/death dates appear in infobox, at least. Enhances readability, doesn't bog the reader down (especially where there's pronunciation and other junk making the first sentence unwieldy). If the birth/death dates are in the infobox, it's not as though readers will be disserviced by not having them in the first few words of the article. Calliopejen1 (talk) 19:13, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Comment. To make it clear for those who seem to have glossed over it, an infobox is a supplementary feature that summarises an article. All information contained in an infobox should also be found in the main text of the article. More importantly, some readers are unable to access infoboxes, so as far as this discussion goes please assume that they do not exist. wjemather 19:23, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
    • Nothing glossed over: exactly the same is true of the lead. All information contained in the lead should also be found in the main text. PL290 (talk) 19:35, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
      • If it is not being glossed over, why do infoboxes keep being mentioned time and time again? They are absolutely irrelevant to this discussion, and apparently that needs to be made clear. And yes, everything in the lead should be expanded upon later. wjemather 23:03, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
        • If there's an accessibility issue with infoboxes (btw I wasn't aware there was till you mentioned it; could you provide a link to the policy/guideline?), then I agree that makes infoboxes a slight red herring, but still not a glossing-over, for the reason just given: what's in the lead and the infobox should always be present in the main article text. PL290 (talk) 11:27, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support for those articles where date information is available in an infobox and/or later section. In some very short biographies, without infoboxes, the initial paragraph is actually the most appropriate place. (The theory that "everything in the lede should be expanded upon later is fine for featured articles, but realistically many articles are not going to respect this.) TheGrappler (talk) 00:46, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
    • To address this point I suggest the recommendation, if implemented, should include advice along the lines, "Ensure the details are present in the main text before removing them from the lead." PL290 (talk) 11:27, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support for those articles where date information is available in an infobox and later section. For all the reasons given above, but not to mess with those in WP:BIO. Walter Görlitz (talk) 01:25, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose because
  1. a person's dates of birth and death are literally vital and thus belong into the lead;
  2. making readers hunt through the narration for these dates is a disservice;
  3. the parenthetical presentation of these dates makes it at once easy to skip and easy to parse, depending on the readers' interest;
  4. many biographies don't have infoboxes, they are not universally accepted; in such articles, there is a chance for programmatic parsing for these dates if they are are presented as they are now;
  5. very short biographies would aquire an awkward phrasing if the dates were to be repeated in full in the articles' short body;
  6. I don't know of any Misplaced Pages in another language which uses this style; its introduction would make editing for multilingual editors more difficult.
Michael Bednarek (talk) 03:47, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  1. If it's in the article and infobox it can be found.
  2. The infobox is not narration.
  3. But not search engines.
  4. A good reason to add them and make them standard instead of a long date.
  5. not if an infobox is added.
  6. probably for this very reason. Once we start, they too will see how rational it is.
Walter Görlitz (talk) 05:18, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  1. Lots of facts might be constructed as "vital"—they can't all be shoved in right at the opening, which is by definite a rationing of information (please see WP:LEAD). We don't normally insert locations of birth and death within the parentheses, because editors have drawn the clutter-line against that. Many editors have felt for some time that birthdays are not sufficiently significant to warrant compulsory inclusion in the first second or two of the reading.
  2. Hunting for them: per Görlitz above; where there is no infobox (bless the fact), you don't have to hunt far, since the opening section is almost always the bio, starting with birth.
  3. "Easy to skip"? Well, no, the whole point is that the clutter of numerals makes the important bits, the years that define the lifespan, harder to extract; but they are of the essence in a summary. Readers read quickly ... we editors work on the text slowly.
  4. Where there is no infobox, it's up to the editors on the talk page, isn't it? As far as "programmatic" parsing, something in my non-programmer's brain tells me the location of the full dates makes utterly no difference, and please, putting the needs of programmers above the readers' needs is just not on.
  5. "Awkward phrasing in short bios"—no one is arguing for compulsory separation of the dates from the years at the top (although what we have at the moment is compulsory inclusion, which many of us object to). The full dates should be expressed according to local conditions. Editors need to have the flexibility to do this, not compulsion to do it one way.
  6. "editing for multilingual editors more difficult"—err ... why? Tony (talk) 06:24, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
It's difficult enough to keep track of which quote signs to use (typographical, chevrons, straight), in which order interwiki links appear, which titles are italicised, etc; the use of full dates in the first sentence seems to be so far universal among all language versions of Misplaced Pages. Departing from this practice here would make it more difficult, not only for editors working in different language versions of Misplaced Pages, but also for readers following the interwiki links. I can see a flood of edits by well-meaning editors wanting to correct a perceived lack of detail. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 07:59, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose for all the reasons listed by Michael Bednarek above. The argument that deleting the equivalent of four words in parenthethetical information makes the article "easier to read" is spurious. Likewise that it makes the article "look more attractive", unless the goal here is to write a magazine rather than an encyclopedia. Full birth and death dates (and places, for that matter) immediately following the subject's name are standard in all major encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries. There is clearly no consensus here for such a major and detrimental change here and I sincerely hope that it will not be made on the basis of straw poll in a discussion in an obscure corner of Misplaced Pages. Why was this discussion not notified to the many projects which deal with large numbers of biographical articles? I am informing the three projects I work with of this discussion (Opera, Classical Music, and Composers). Voceditenore (talk) 05:39, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
Nonsense. You don't understand the argument if you are under the belief it's to make the article easier to read. The reason is to make the summary easier to read in a Google search. --Walter Görlitz (talk) 06:00, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
It's not nonsense at all. Several of the Support !votes have suggested that it makes the article itself easier to read and/or somehow "cleaner". If the main thrust of the argument is that it makes the Google seach summary easier to read, it's an even more spurious argument. First of all, talk about letting the tail wag the dog. But more importantly, if people are only going to read the Google summary, it's often because they specifically want to know the exact dates of birth and death. Here's what "Rossini" comes up as in the Google search:
Gioachino Rossini - Misplaced Pages, the 💕

Gioachino Antonio Rossini (February 29, 1792 – November 13, 1868) was an Italian composer who wrote 39 operas as well as sacred music, chamber music, songs, ...

How is that summary "difficult to read"? How would the reader be "helped" by not being able to access the exact dates via a Google search summary? Voceditenore (talk) 06:40, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
Voceditnore, "The argument that deleting the equivalent of four words in parenthetetical information makes the article "easier to read" is spurious." Have you looked at the examples I provided at the top? If you don't think the cluster of numerals makes it harder to absorb the years alone, perhaps I'm wrong and I need new glasses. Tony (talk) 06:24, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
Nope, I don't think the old version of the Copland lede it made it harder to "absorb" the years of his lifespan at all. The mess in Bach is an extreme example, and as has been pointed out above, most of that mess comes from the lengthy IPA transcription which is useless to most readers and the unnecessary addition of the alternate Old Style date. The current "improved" version has thrown out the baby and left a considerable amount of bathwater. Voceditenore (talk) 06:56, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose - Standard biographical dictionaries have the full birth and death dates in the first sentence. Many Misplaced Pages articles cover the birth in an "Early years" section at the beginning of the article and the "Death" at the end of the article. Readers would have to search for both dates. Info boxes should not be required for biographies. -- SWTPC6800 (talk) 06:26, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
    I've just checked the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and they just give the years, as did the s:Dictionary of National Biography -- PBS (talk) 20:30, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose per HWV258 and Fram. --Arxiloxos (talk) 07:01, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Absolutely oppose. This is standard, essential, encyclopaedic information, whether or not individual editors are bored by it or it turns them off. --Smerus (talk) 07:19, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose for all the reasons listed by Michael Bednarek above. In addition I would like to see there the places of death and birth, to have all Persondata together, rather than collect them from various sections of an article. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:07, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose - Listing only the years implies that we don't know the specific dates, which makes Misplaced Pages look less reputable. It can be hard to find the information in long articles and many, like the two examples given, don't have infoboxes. Adoption of this proposal will surely lead to mandatory infoboxes, which are opposed by many. There are better ways to cleanup the lead than this proposal. —UncleDouggie (talk) 08:27, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose. This is not a terrible idea, but if there is no infobox (and I, like many editors, am not fond of them) then this would make birth and death dates too hard to find, and would unnecessarily surprise our readers. Mike Christie (talk) 12:15, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose. For all the aove reasons, principally the fact that so many articles contain the day-month-year of birth and death. Viva-Verdi (talk) 17:44, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose per reasons above. In this case, less is less. We should be copying the example of encyclopaedias and biographical dictionaries. --Folantin (talk) 18:07, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Comment Well this has divided the community! I can see this is going to be another saga like date linking. I've always put this one down to a matter of judgement. Indeed I have recently been a squabble over this issue in the article Walter Hungerford, 1st Baron Hungerford of Heytesbury although it was to do with sourcing rather than placement. As I had failed to notice the day of thee month of death in the text, it could be used as justification for including it in the first line. I think that this has a lot to do with ones perception of what an biography entry is for. As Churchill said of Chamberlain "He views foreign policy from the wrong end of a municipal drain" (The Chamberlain family made their political reputation in local politics in Birmingham). If a persons interest in a biography entry is primarily for genealogy, then the "Family" section is the major interest and having the full date in the first line and the article is most useful. If on the other hand one is more interested in notability of the person for what they did, then usually, unless the date of death is notable fact for historical reasons (eg see the Harry Patch article), the specific date is just clutter. To give another examples: The full date of death is useful in the Hitler biography because it was time critical in history (he is one of the few people were we have a specific article down to the minute that he died), his date of birth less so, but given one why not the other for aesthetic reasons? Likewise the deaths of Franklin D. Roosevelt and JFK are historically significant, but the specific DOB and DOD are not historically significant for Winston Churchill. There are a number of British reliable sources, such as Collins's Peerage of England; Genealogical, Biographical, and Historical (1812), that emphasise breeding and who married whom (very important for the society and clientele for whom Collins's was writing), rather than historical significance, so using such sources articles like this old version of the article Sir John St John, 1st Baronet can be constructed, which emphasise family, in comparison to this version that has the biography information placed first. I think the first thing that needs to be discussed is given the entry in WP:NOTDIRECTORY, how much weight should be given in Wikiepdia to readers who's interest is primarily genealogy? -- PBS (talk) 20:30, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Suggestion What about adding an infobox to every person article? This would help have the date/place birth/death info altogether, wouldn't it? -- Magioladitis (talk) 03:23, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
Not really. Even if you (it could not be done automatically) included the birth and death dates, they also need to be in the body of the article. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 04:17, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
Absolutely not. As has already been pointed out several times by several people, infoboxes are controversial and should not be added as a matter of course for the sake of it. I fail to see why editors would support the inclusion of ugly, article-unbalancing infoboxes, while opposing the appearance of two words and two numbers in the lead. Incredible! However, as this proposal clearly has nothing even vaguely approaching unanimous support, I suggest we knock it on the head now and agree to retain the advice to include full dates in the lead. -- Necrothesp (talk) 08:37, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Comment I actually have no strong opinions either way, but would prefer conformity. Either we use dates in all leads, or in none of them. Dates are important to many readers, hence I'd sit on the fence with their essentialness in the lead. Casliber (talk · contribs) 11:21, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support. A very sensible idea, logical proposal. Agree with Casliber (talk · contribs), that it is good to have uniformity. However, there should be exceptions, where the date itself of birth or death, is noteworthy. -- Cirt (talk) 15:41, 24 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support Seems to be a sensible idea to me; keep the lede as a summary, and leave the fine detail (and a citation, of course ;-) in the body of the article. Of course there may be outliers where an alternative approach is better perhaps due to some quirk of the subject or their lifespan; but editors may use common sense on that. As a general recommendation rather than an iron rule, I'm happy with it. bobrayner (talk) 13:20, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose The dates of an individual's birth & death -- where known -- are traditionally placed at the beginning of an encyclopedia article. This is where our users expect to find them, & these facts are amongst the most commonly sought facts in biographical articles. Putting them in the body of the article forces the reader to spend an unnecessary amount of time hunting for them, thus achieving a debatable improvement in aesthetics while making articles harder to use. -- llywrch (talk) 16:36, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
    Comment A traditional encyclopedia doesn't have a sidebar summarizing the biographical informtion. That is the equivalent of our infobox. Since you suggest that we be more like a "traditional encyclopedia" I suppose you want to get rid of the infobox as well? It is, afterall, redundant and not at all like a "traditional encyclopedia". --Walter Görlitz (talk) 19:48, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
    What an excellent idea. Now, getting rid of all infoboxes is something I would support! -- Necrothesp (talk) 12:04, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
    The contents of infoboxes are not standardized, AFAIK. And as at least one other commenter has pointed out, there is no guarrantee or requirement that infoboxes be part of an article. -- llywrch (talk) 17:04, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
    Also, traditional encyclopedias often also have the places of birth and death in that same place. A. di M. (talk) 22:06, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose for the same reasons as Llywrch. Angus McLellan (Talk) 17:38, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Comment My quick count as of now is Support = 25, Oppose = 30. -- SWTPC6800 (talk) 17:52, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
Reply. I counted it three times at Support=25, Oppose = 32.4meter4 (talk) 20:58, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Comment Several people in this survey have said that other reference books traditional include day of birth and day of death. But have not produced any evidence that this is true. As I pointed out above the ODNB does not do it, nor does the earlier DNB. I have just looked at EB1911 on Wikisource and the first obvious biography I could find was s:1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Adams, Herbert Baxter it does not include day or month of birth or death nor does the next article s:1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Adams, John, but Herbert Baxter Adams in the modern Britannica indicates that they use "(b. April 16, 1850, Shutesbury, Mass., U.S.—d. July 30, 1901, Amherst, Mass.)". I also checked the Catholic Encyclopedia and the first biograhpy they have is s:Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/Pedro Abarca which does include day of death, as does the next entry where this information is likely to be know s:Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/Jean Baptiste Abbeloos, but the format of their articles is somewhat different from ours. This quick survey neither confirms or reject the argument whether most do or do not, and I am not sure how anyone can argue unequivocally that including "day of birth" and "day of death" is standard unless they have information from a wider survey to support the statement. If so pleas share it with us. -- PBS (talk) 09:55, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Comment. So the narrow majority who opposed are quite happy to force all editors, no matter what the circumstances and the local consensus, to put all of the numerals right at the top, in the opening sentence and in the infobox where there is one, and often as not further down in the appropriate sections. Tony (talk) 10:11, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
    Since the majority rule does not apply here, "narrow majority" means "no consensus" and hence (depending on your interpretation) either "status quo" or "no rule, decide on a case-by-case basis". If it means "status quo", right now WP:MOSNUM has: "When only the years are known, or days and months would be irrelevant detail: Socrates (470–399 BC) was..." (italics added). A. di M. (talk) 11:09, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
    The part "or days and months would be irrelevant detail" was only recently introduced; I'm not sure on what basis. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:07, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
    It was discussed here and its implementation here. But that discussion was much smaller in size than this one. A. di M. (talk) 13:37, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
    Tony1 I don't see how you draw the conclusion you do from those who oppose you proposition. AFAICT the opposition is to your suggestion of adding a recommendation not to add full DOB/DOD, (although no doubt many of the current opposer would support a proposition to always have full dates at the start of the article). -- PBS (talk) 23:55, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
As one of the opposers, I would not be "quite happy" with that. Including the full dates in the lede would, in my opinion, obviate the need to include them later in the article. This is not an uncommon style in published encyclopedias (I know it was used in OUP's African American National Biography, for example), giving more room and easier parsing of geographic information.
A side note: the assertion of dates' irrelevance (or importance) in this whole discussion seems to come primarily from the whim of each particular editor, rather than any empirical or otherwise established standard. /ninly(talk) 15:31, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
  • (Response to PBS) Including the date to the year of birth/death is a practice I believed is the norm, enough to admit I was surprised that my copy of the New Columbia Encyclopedia didn't follow that practice. However, the NCE does not provide dates of birth/death anywhere in its biographical articles; I assume that is because the NCE's primary goal is to be a "one-volume" encyclopedia, & the editors believed that was something they could exclude. However Misplaced Pages is not paper, & we need somewhere to put this information that is easy-to-find. If having it in the first sentence -- for whatever reason -- is not acceptible, is there another location in an article where the reader would reasonably expect to find it? I am open to all reasonable, if not better, alternatives. -- llywrch (talk) 17:04, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Comment A number of editors have suggested that, if we choose to change all articles to the (year-year) format, we could take exceptions to it if the full date is important to that person's life. However, surely the point of this RfC is to create a uniform for all biographical articles—if we can take exceptions to the rule then all biographical articles will not be consistent, and this will leave the average user confused? Wackywace 18:47, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose Firstly, I do not believe that having a full date of birth and a full date of death adds clutter to the lede of an article. Having (1956-2004) is far less encyclopedic than having a full date of birth. Many ordinary Misplaced Pages users come here to look for the full date of birth and/or full date of death of a person, and they are one of the most important things about a person. Therefore, they should be in a prominent position in the article. Wackywace 18:47, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
    How do you know that "Many ordinary Misplaced Pages users come here to look for the full date of birth and/or full date of death of a person"? or that "they are one of the most important things about a person"? -- PBS (talk) 23:55, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
    Exactly what Philip says: how do you know, Wackywace? Do you have evidence supporting this claim? "I do not believe that having a full date of birth and a full date of death adds clutter to the lede of an article"—have you looked at the two examples I provided at the top? To you, and to Philip ... could I point out that this is "a recommendation (rather than compulsion)". It is now being construed as rendering hundreds of thousands of articles in breach of the MoS; that was explicitly not the intention. Tony (talk) 13:47, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
    Realistically, there is no way to know what looks good and what does not—it is a matter of personal opinion—and mine is that having a full DoB/DoD at the top of an article does not add unnecessary clutter. Philip, it is obvious that a DoB/DoD are two very important things about a person—if they were not, why would they feature in Template:Infobox person? Wackywace 19:37, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
    Presumably because everyone has a date of birth and death, and most such dates are known, so it fits well into a table. More important facts about a person, such as if he discovered America, go in the text, rather than leave an empty spot in an infobox for everyone who hasn't discovered America. Art LaPella (talk) 20:07, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
    "| known_for =" Wackywace 07:26, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
    Oops, you're right. But even so, most of us can remember much more about Columbus than what would fit in the infobox, without remembering his date of birth or death, and what we remember is the part that matters. As for dates, remembering October 12, 1492, is enough to understand the historical context. Art LaPella (talk) 21:17, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • If the only concern is for biographies of living people, this is already covered by the BLP policy: Presumption in favor of privacy. There's no need to re-write the current MoS to recommend that all biographical arrticles omit exact dates.

If we have the birthdate isn't it because it is published already?Munijym (talk) 07:27, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

  • Oppose - (1900-1990) is a short-hand for publications where space is limited or the person has died so long ago we don't have the data or it is meaningless to the reader. I expect an encyclopedia should have any known dates upfront and standardized not lurking awaiting discovery. Isn't that why the first sentence includes what country they are from and what profession they are? Munijym (talk) 07:27, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Alternative: This looks to me like no consensus for either recommendation. The dates of birth and death are an interruption in the first sentence; there is always a case, as Tony says, for shortening that bump. There is also always a case for adding more information; even where the year of birth is unknown, as with Alexander Hamilton, there's a case for saying why. We should acknowledge both cases, and recommend that both be considered; the relative strength of the two cases will vary from article to article. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:33, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
  • In Hamilton's case, as a reader I would expect there to be a brief statement to the effect the date of his birth is unknown/disputed -- if the reason is notable -- & a full discussion in the body of the article. In the case where we only know the date of an early event in the person's life (i.e., date of baptism), identifying that in the lead sentence (or the dates of holding a title) with the appropriate gloss is all that is needed. -- llywrch (talk) 17:04, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict): I agree with Septentrionalis's last comment (which is why I haven't yet put in a "support" or "oppose"). The same applies, I think, to places of birth (which is where this discussion first started, although this RfC is about dates). Sometimes the place of birth or death is significant enough (Napoleon, Hitler, Lincoln & Jefferson Davis both born in Kentucky) or wondered about often enough (e.g. Barack Obama, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger) to put somewhere in the first lead paragraph or sentence; often it can wait until further in the article (plus Infobox if one exists). There are conveniences to having a general rule, since a reader knows better what to expect, but the situations are so different that one can't really replace discussion between an article's editors. —— Shakescene (talk) 17:16, 27 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose. The guiding thought is what is most helpful to readers. If the reader knows the approximate date, or is only interested in learning the lifespan of the subject, then they will read through precise date, discarding the extra information and just picking up the years. However, if the reader is in search of the precise date, they will be sent through the article text to search for the detail, with no particular clue as to where it will be found in a long article. So I think this change will on balance be unhelpful to readers. Sam Blacketer (talk) 10:37, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Dates are very important to give context to someones's life. The only exception I can think of is where the dates are too vague and uncertain to be useful.Dejvid (talk) 11:13, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Firstly Mosnum is supposed to be a recommendation only. Secondly the value of the detail in the parenthesis depends on the person and the era, and of course the reader. In many climes, time of year indicates (or did indicate) a lot about the environment of a birth or death, weather, scarcity of food, prevalence of disease, for example, as well as creating a more vibrant picture. Locality is likewise important - there is more to London than "London" Cadogan Square, or Whitechapel are as different in past centuries as London and New York today, possibly more so. Rich Farmbrough, 04:17, 31 October 2010 (UTC).
Excuse me, it is only a recommendation. Why are you misreading the proposal and putting about a falsehood that is likely to turn people off it? Second, no one is suggesting that the full information not be provided in prominent places in an article; just not all at the top. Tony (talk) 04:22, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose; well-established convention in reference works. I'm all for keeping lead sections simple, but exact dates are essential information. Llywrch says it well. Antandrus (talk) 04:33, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Real-Wikiworld example: Purely by chance, I just had occasion to edit one of the few articles I've actually created from scratch, John G. Woolley, notable chiefly as the Prohibition Party's candidate in the 1900 U.S. presidential election. Although my natural tendency parallels the current instructions in the Manual of Style (include full dates of birth and death when known), which I'd forgotten, I started this short two-paragraph biography with "John G. Woolley (1850–1922), ...", beginning the short second paragraph with his full date and place of birth, and ending it with the full date and place of his death. The article's current depth and the subject's importance don't really merit an information box. So would that be sufficient for someone looking for fast vital statistics? It didn't seem important enough to include the full dates at the beginning of the lead of this particular article, but on the other hand, it wouldn't do great harm. So I'm no dogmatist on the question (in other cases, such as Abraham Lincoln (Kentucky, February 12, 1809 – Washington, D.C., April 15, 1865) or some of the other examples I cited above, I'd strongly favour including full dates and/or places of birth & death). But I tend to think that the Manual should be permissive without strong recommendations either way; instead it should point out the considerations that editors should balance. —— Shakescene (talk) 04:44, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Support; I actually like the suggestion to just put year of birth and death after the full name, and moving the specifics and places into the article proper and the infobox. Sometimes it does bother me that the information is not repeated later, but the other convention is to repeat it verbatim which seems equally pointless. This suggestion allows a summary (i.e. timeline) to fit into the lead, but the full detail (and related vagaries such as calendar changes) to come later. The only times it would feel odd is in a stub, where the duplication will be ridiculous. In those cases (often single paragraph articles), I would argue to leave the dates/places after the name, as much of the current practice is. As soon as a 'contents' box is generated, and the article is long enough to support it, the info should be moved to the personal life/early years/death section as appropriate.—User:MDCollins (talk) 09:58, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose. First, like it or not, something inserted as a "recommendation" in this manner will end up used as justification for removal of dates, then another editor will disagree and say "it was only a recommendation, please leave my text alone", and the other editor will say "well what's your justification eh? And BTW WP:OWN" and it will degenerate from there. The argument put at the start of this poll involving "mak it ok for an editor to change without gaining consensus at the talk page first" should be a red flag as to the dangers. Second (and on the other hand) it isn't the case that all biographical sources put a full set of dates at the start: I don't think one can argue for either option based on 'prevailing practice'. Why not have the worst of both worlds: here's the opening phrase from the Australian Dictionary of Biography's entry on James Cook: "COOK, JAMES (1728-1779), navigator, was born on 27 October 1728 at Marton-in-Cleveland, Yorkshire, England..." Both versions of the date in the lead! I think not ;-) Third, I can be pursuaded to support if someone can demonstrate to me that it will make the MOS shorter and simpler - but I'm not seeing that as a likely outcome :-) hamiltonstone (talk) 02:11, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose. The person's full birth and death dates, where available, is the kind of information readers would expect to find in a prominent place in any encyclopedia entry. If we didn't already have a standard of putting those dates in the lead sentence, we might not adopt it now if we were starting from scratch. But by now, Misplaced Pages readers may well expect to find that information there, so we should continue to recommend that such dates (if available) should be shown there for new biographical articles as well. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 04:25, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Strong spport - the article openning should give a general idea of the person, not all the details. While the time when a person lived is relevant the precise date is usually not. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 11:13, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose; The lead sentence of an article about a person should always give the most publicly desired, relevant, and core information about them. A person's DOB and DOD along with their nationality, gender and reason for notability are all crucially important to the lead IMO. Besides, if the DOB isn't in the lead where will it be? The "Early life" section? No can do — what about in stub articles that have no body? The infobox? Hell no, that's not prominent enough. We list a person's notability and nationality in the Infobox as well, does that mean we should remove that from the lead too? What would be left?... Michael Jackson was a...?. — CIS | stalk) 15:17, 5 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Weak Oppose I recall myself scanning biography pages to find when a person died. Let's add infoboxes to all bio pages and then we can discuss it again. -- Magioladitis (talk) 02:33, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
    Infoboxes make me vomit, I'm afraid. Let's not do that. Tony (talk) 03:30, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Support: It's good to minimise how much detail is contained in the intro. Birth and death years and nationality are important but the specific dates and and cities are clutter. Details should follow later whether they be in a seperate section or, in the case of a very short article, in a seperate paragraph. JIMp talk·cont 03:48, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Support with exceptions. The primary purpose of the lead paragraph is to establish context and provide a very broad overview of the topic. Birth year and death year almost always help to establish context by establishing the era the person lived in; birth place and death place may also help with this, but these are usually omitted in favour of adjectives as in "an Austrian composer" (I think either one or the other is fine). Birthdays/deathdays rarely help to establish context or to summarize the topic, unless the birthday is one of the most notable facts about the person - for example, if a major holiday was created to celebrate their birthday. I would limit their inclusion to such cases, and even then I would consider noting it in a separate sentence of the lead paragraph. I also agree that infoboxes should continue to contain detailed information. Dcoetzee 00:40, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose It is a convention on Wikipediat that doesn't need to change. Elmmapleoakpine (talk) 02:07, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Fram, Michael Bednarek et al. --Kleinzach 01:42, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose As far as known, full DOB/DOD information should be at the top. The lead consists of many things repeated further down the article, so why not in this case. And who decides when a specific date is important "of itself"? This proposal only confuses things that used to be clear so far. Buchraeumer (talk) 23:53, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose Theres no reason to change it. If only the years are shown, it looks like we dont have the exact date.--Metallurgist (talk) 04:24, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Discourage use of the ordinal suffix (e.g. th) in fractions

Should we make it clear in WP:Mosnum#Fractions that the ordinal suffix should not be used in numerically written fractions ( e.g. 1/100 is correct - not 1/100th)? Clearly if someone is spelling out one one-hundredth they will use the suffix, but I think we need to give clear guidance on whether they should use it when the fraction is written as a number. It is made clear in WP:DATESNO that we don't use it for dates.

I suggest we add the following to the Fractions section:

* Use of the ordinal suffix (e.g., th) in fractions expressed in numerals is discouraged (e.g. 1/100, not 1/100th)

Make sense, or not needed?  7  04:09, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the courtesy of notifying me about this discussion 7 but I am not an MOS expert, so I'll defer to the opinions of the local experts. The suffix is also used in article titles such as: Rule of 1/1000th common ancestry so we have to make sure we cover all occurences one way or the other. Take care. Dr.K.  04:42, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps the language should make it clear it's talking about fractions expressed in numerals, such as 1/100, as opposed to words, as in one one-hundredth or seven one-hundredths or five sixths of the world's population. —— Shakescene (talk) 20:29, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
Agreed. Added expressed in numerals above.  7  23:37, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
It should also be noted that there are cases where, e.g., 1/6th and 1/7th, not expressing fractions, are not incorrect, unless they go against some properly-agreed consensus and convention of the Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Military History. See Duke of Wellington's Regiment#6th and 7th Battalions and Duke of Wellington's Regiment#7th Battalion. So any recommendation, no matter how forceful, should not be so unqualified as to justify someone unleashing an automated unmanned 'bot. —— Shakescene (talk) 02:53, 5 November 2010 (UTC)
It makes sense to me. The suffix is not needed as it's just the way or reading out fractions. 1/2 is "one half", 1/4 is "one quarter", 1/5 is "one fifth", 2/5 is "two fifths", i.e. two 1/5s. All apart from 1/2 and 1/4 use the same word as the ordinal ("third", "fifth", "seventh", etc.) but they are quite different things. I would say is should be stronger than discouraged, though it might be good to get a reference for that from e.g. a style guide.
And I had a look at Rule of 1/1000th common ancestry. Going by both the text of the article and the reference it should be Rule of 1/1000 common ancestry so I moved it to there.--JohnBlackburnedeeds 21:06, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 Done I've gone ahead and implemented the change. If concerns arise feel free to undo.  7  03:33, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Problem with current era notation (Anno Domini/Common Era) guideline

While I understand that this issue has been visited more than once before, and that some may be irritated with digging it back up, but I feel that the indecisiveness regarding whether to favor either AD or CE on Misplaced Pages needs to end. Or, at the very least, I think we need to form a compromise that would dictate the use of one era notation for certain topics only (ex. Common Era for non-Christian religion-related articles), and the other notation elsewhere. The current recommendation—to use whichever notation you'd like as long as you are consistent within an article and do not arbitrarily change from one notation to another—isn't working. There are a couple of problems with it that I'm coming across quite a bit lately:

  • As seen with this diff, editors will often make a contribution using the B/CE notation when the article they are editing uses the BC/AD notation throughout. Often, these edits are not caught or reverted and we end up having an article with inconsistent era notations. This could easily confuse the average reader who might be unfamiliar with the Common Era notation, and who might then understandably assume that 500 AD and 500 CE do not indicate the same year, since they are both being used inconsistently in the same article, without explanation.
  • Needless edit wars over which notation to use, as well as completely arbitrary conversion of random articles from BCE to BC or vice versa that may go unnoticed for months. Here are just some recent example diffs where I was reverting arbitrary era notation changes and then informing the user about the WP:ERA guideline:
Blombos Cave — original edit, my reversion, second edit 2 days later, my second reversion
List of solar eclipses for century BC — 1st c., 2nd c., 3rd c.... 20th c.
Notifications to users — ,
  • Ugly compromises, as with Jesus, where both notations are used simultaneously at each instance to alleviate constant edit warring over which to use. An argument could be made that the use of both notations in Jesus helps to educate readers about the CE notation, but it's more cluttered and confusing than anything else.

I'm hoping to gather some responses and comments about these issues, and perhaps we will be able to flesh out our thoughts on what type of solution we want to go ahead with, if any.

My proposed solutions would be, either: (1) AD/BC ubiquitously; (2) CE/BCE ubiquitously ; or (3) One notation for specifically outlined articles, and the other notation for the remainder of articles. Thank you for reading and replying. — CIS | stalk) 16:11, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

The project page says "No preference is given to either style.", and I wouldn't expect that to change in the forseeable future. As a practical matter, noting the existence of the {{US English}} and {{British English}} templates, I'll suggest that a template something like {{Year style}} might take e.g., AD, BC, CE, and BCE as alternative parameters to define the consensus style for an article, could produce an informative hatnote, could appropriately categorize an article, and could provide a hint for bot-edits or assisted-edits to conform nonconformant articles to the expressed consensus style preference. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 01:47, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Discussion

This isn't going to find wp-wide concensus in any form, that's why we leave it up to individual articles. However: the idea that the articles about aspects of one religion or sect should be written only by and for proponents of that belief are not only deeply POV but also fail to address their full audience. If anything, I would say those editors should avoid using AD/BC most carefully in the religion-based articles. CE/BCE serves just as well without alienating any thoughtful readers. Save the AD/BC for use in the massive majority of non-religious topics such as movies, television, language, archeology etc. There hardly anybody will be bothered by them.
The issue of inconsistent choices by editors won't go away, but a talkpage header akin to {{British-English}} and {{American English}} can limit disputes by putting the chosen option for a given article on the record. LeadSongDog come howl! 18:18, 5 November 2010 (UTC)
I agree that it would be a better idea to use CE/BCE for all religion-related articles — Christianity, Judaism or otherwise. I've edited my original post to reflect that. What I had suggested in my original post was just an example of a possible compromise, not the only compromise I would support. I'm simply trying to strike up conversation here about what other editors think of these issues. As for the talkpage header you suggested, that could be a good idea, but I doubt any of the editors making the notation changes bother to visit the talk page beforehand. — CIS | stalk) 18:26, 5 November 2010 (UTC)
I doubt that this will be of much use or relevance, but I subconsciously read CE as Christian Era before making (when necessary) the mental adjustment to Common Era (and I don't happen to be a Christian; it's just that "Before Christ" to "Before Christian Era" is an easy conversion for my mind to make). There's nothing to stop Christian readers and editors from doing the same. That's not in itself an argument for replacing BC/AD with BCE/CE in any particular article or class of articles, but it might lessen the feeling by some Christian editors and readers that such a change need be necessarily positively hostile to, or dismissive of, their beliefs and world-view. —— Shakescene (talk) 18:59, 5 November 2010 (UTC)
I suppose that's a fair point, and for the moment I'm not strongly in favor of either notation personally, although I've traditionally been in favor of AD/BC. My arguments for that notation would include (1) they are the original notations; (2) as with Wednesday, Thursday or January, most modern terms in everyday use have religious origins. The only reason AD/BC tend to be singled out as being potentially "offensive" or "sectarian" while the religious names of the days of the week are not, is because Christianity is still a living religion; (3) BCE/CE do nothing to remove the era's bias, they only mask the religious reference; the dividing epoch of human history in the international calendar is still a 6th-century monk's estimate of the year of Jesus’ birth; (4) BCE has a bulky three letters rather than the simpler two, and it sounds confusingly similar to CE when spoken, while AD and BC look and sound comfortably different.
But all arguments for AD/BC aside, I would still prefer a ubiquitous use of BCE/CE over continuing with the current guideline. — CIS | stalk) 19:53, 5 November 2010 (UTC)
  • In writing, using the politically-correct BCE isn’t unusual. But I’ve seen that it is often avoided in narrated TV documentaries and science shows, “Bee Cee EEE” out-loud draws attention to itself, is distracting, and takes the viewer’s mind off the message point and momentarily focuses it on the way information is being conveyed. Since there is nothing wrong with AD/BC, I prefer to use the BC myself as I prefer to use a writing style that is most transparent and least draws attention to itself—which is a hallmark of all good technical writing. Greg L (talk) 17:49, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Here are my thoughts: Firstly, using BCE/CE on Christian articles seems completely illogical. BC/AD are the Christian form of BCE/CE, so if Christians can't use BC/AD, nobody should. Secondly, Since Misplaced Pages is a global project, using BC/AD could be offensive to non-Christians. Thirdly, BC stands for Before Christ because people used to believe Jesus was born in the Year 0 or AD 1. Modern historians do not recognise a Year 0 and now think Jesus was born around 5 BC (if he actually existed). So according to the notation, Jesus was born 5 years before Jesus was born. The idea that Jesus was more likely born before AD 1 was one of the reasons historians introduced BCE and CE. BCE and CE are more secular and make literal sense without having to change the year we live in. McLerristarr | Mclay1 20:36, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
    • Yup. That’s the reasoning underlying why BCE was invented alright. Arguments about who Jesus really was, when he was really born, and whether he rode a Schwinn bicycle or a donkey to work, or meets Zeus and Wiley Coyote in the morning while punching in on the ol’ time clock are all immaterial in my book and has no bearing on whether “10 BC” is somehow more or less ambiguous than “10 BCE” since they both mean precisely the same thing.

      The only difference between the two is BCE is the form for elementary schools and those who want to trip all over themselves to be as inoffensive as possible so that even Oprah and Jerry Springer couldn’t find someone crying all over their Hostess Twinkies at 4:00 p.m. over how they are so deeply offended for reason.

      I couldn’t really care less one way or another except for noting that BCE hasn’t caught on real well in the real world and that’s why the spoken version of it sounds so odd that it is seldom, if ever, used in narration on TV documentaries—no matter how modern they might be. I suppose those Jerry Springer whiners can’t fuss over TV science documentaries using “BC” because they don’t watch those types of shows (busy watching Dukes of Hazard). IMO, use of BCE appears awkward in written form as well and unnecessarily draws attention to itself and that’s why I would never use it myself as I find it interferes with transparent communication of thought.

      Since everybody has an opinion on this and Misplaced Pages’s MOS is in a near continual state of chaos as different volunteers here spout about how Their Way Is the Right Way©™®, it’s unrealistic to expect any change to the current guidelines (everyone has a half-baked reason to do as they do). So it would be best if we all just dropped it since, as in previous occasions this issue has come up, it’s not going to go anywhere. You are free to do as you like. Greg L (talk) 22:59, 11 November 2010 (UTC)


      P.S. I’d normally suggest we just do as the Associated Press, Reuters, and the Chicago Manual of Style suggest. However, that would no-doubt be met with the observation that en.Misplaced Pages—unlike all the other-language Wikipedias that suck by comparison—is an especially International encyclopedia and how things are done way differently above 12,000 feet of altitude in Tibet. Greg L (talk) 23:17, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

      • I use BCE and CE, not because I don't want to offend people – I'm proudly politically incorrect, but because AD and BC offends me. We've been using out current dating system for a very long time now so changing the numbering would be stupid but the fact that we still use something like "Before Christ" as an international standard in our modern world just seems silly. McLerristarr | Mclay1 05:58, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
Honestly? As an atheist, BC/AD offend you? Do Tuesday and Wednesday offend you too because they're named after pagan deities? I'm an atheist, and BC/AD come nowhere near "offending" me, nor do the nonsecular names of the days of the week. If you are truly offended by BC/AD, I'd hate to see how offended you would be by something that is actually offensive. — CIS | stalk) 13:49, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
There are different levels of offensiveness. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 0 being inoffensive and 10 being "I now have to kill you", BC and AD are a 2. There are no alternatives to the days of the week but there is a perfectly usable alternative to BC and AD. McLerristarr | Mclay1 13:58, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
So if there were secular alternatives for the days of the week, such as Firstday, Secondday, and so on, you would support using them? Because I don't see any inherent problem in the religious connotations of these types of everyday usages. If we secularize and sanitize everything that has a religious meaning, nothing will have any cultural significance anymore. We're getting a bit off topic and personal, but I just thought I'd put it out there — that I am indeed an atheist, but I see no problem in religiously-influenced commonalities. This is the Western world, and like it or not, Christianity and Roman paganism are a large part of our history. I don't think we should erase references to them in our culture for no reason other than that people are "offended" by the reference. But I suppose that if things like this are all we're worried about today, that's a good thing. You say that you consider yourself to be "politically incorrect", but what is the purpose of BCE/CE other than to be politically correct and unnecessarily euphemistic? Common Era and Anno Domini both refer to the same 6th century attempt to date Jesus’ birth; one just doesn't acknowledge that. — CIS | stalk) 14:45, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
Yes, well as you say, these things are part of our life and unavoidable, so I'd rather live in the year 2010 and disambiguate it from the other 2010 by using abbreviations that recognise it's a historical numbering system rather than still a religious numbering thing. I suppose the German pagan days of the week don't bother me because nobody is a pagan anymore so I don't feel I have to compete against it. The fact that we're having this conversation proves that everyone has a different point of view and the MOS guidelines should not be changed. McLerristarr | Mclay1 01:40, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Wishful thinking about standards - not a serious suggestion!

This isn't a serious suggestion - because I know that it won't be accepted - but I sometimes think life would be much simpler if we could just use ISO 8601's expanded representation. Ie, don't specify AD/CE or BC/BCE, just use +YYYY or -YYYY. Despite all the recent arguments about how most of our readers couldn't cope with a "standard" way or referring to dates/times, one can't help but feel that a consistent, unambiguous way of refering to dates/times could only be good thing. Of course to be strictly compliant with 8601 (clause 4.1.2.4) we'd have to get our readers to agree first! As I said, this isn't a serious suggestion, but one can dream ... Mitch Ames (talk) 00:59, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
You could have your own religious vision, in which you dream that the Creator, Almighty or Supreme Being has decreed that the only divinely-accepted calendar, imperative on all pious true believers who trust in Salvation, is ISO 8601, and that any other method of recording the passage of time is the work of the Devil's agents or of proud, foolish mortals who know not the limits of their own puny powers. Then, of course, the followers of all other religious beliefs or unbeliefs would suddenly undergo a Damascene conversion and abandon their foolish calendar wars to adopt The One True Calendar.—— Shakescene (talk) 01:28, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
I wish proposing ISO 8601 notation was like poker, where there is an ante. The ante ought to be reading the standard before making the proposal. Jc3s5h (talk) 01:29, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
ante meridiem, perhaps?—— Shakescene (talk) 01:34, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
Actually I have a copy of, and have read, ISO 8601:2004(E). OK, I haven't read the whole thing from beginning to end, but I have browsed through it, and read some parts of it in detail, as I needed to. Jc3s5h, is there some particular part of it that you think is applicable in this context and that I haven't, but should read? Some part that makes the standard completely inappropriate here? Apart, of course, from the requirement for our readers to agree to us using it – (clauses 3.2.1 "... dates preceding the introduction of the Gregorian calendar ... should only be by agreement of the partners in information interchange", 3.5 "By mutual agreement ... expand the ... year, which is otherwise limited to four digits. This enables reference to dates ... before the start of the year ...", 4.1.2.1 "Values in the range through shall only be used by mutual agreement ...", 4.1.2.4 "If, by agreement, expanded representations are used ..., +-YYYYY" – which I did mention in my "proposal". As I said, my proposal wasn't serious, but I am interested in standardisation, and I would like to know if there is any other (than "mutual agreement") reason why ISO 8601 would not be appropriate. Mitch Ames (talk) 02:55, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
The signed integer convention is very unfamiliar to the general public; I think very few people would realize that −45 is not 45 BC but 46 BC (due to the lack of a year 0 in the BC/AD system). A. di M. (talk) 12:35, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
I wouldn't have guessed that −45 is a year at all. Is that standard for computer data or something? It surely wouldn't work for communicating information to the general public. Art LaPella (talk) 15:45, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
As mentioned earlier, ISO 8601 is an international standard covering the exchange of date and time-related data. It includes negative years, instead of BC or BCE. However, you wouldn't be expected to "guess" this, because 8601 explicitly requires mutual agreement between sender and receiver before using negative years. Hence my note that we couldn't really use 8601 because to do so would require all our readers' prior agreement to use negative years - which is clearly not practical. Mitch Ames (talk) 01:05, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

I've just moved this sub-discussion about ISO 8601 and negative years into a separate sub-section, so as to separate it from any serious proposal. As I said in the first line of my original post: This isn't a serious suggestion. (Nonetheless, it is interesting - well I think so, anyway.)

In addition to the agreement requirement there are also
  1. the requirement to always use the Gregorian calendar, even when stating dates related to events that occurred in countries where the Julian calender was in force, such as the Gunpowder plot in England, 5 November 1605 Julian
  2. the fact that 2009-10 means October 2009, not 2009 through 2010. Jc3s5h (talk) 01:20, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
The requirement to use the Gregorian calendar for events that occurred where that calendar was not used - even after it had been introduced elsewhere - is an interesting complication; I hadn't thought of that. ISO 8601 says that use of the standard for years up to 1582 - ie before the Gregorian calendar was introduced - require prior agreement, however it doesn't appear to require explicit separate agreement about denoting dates after the "introduction" of the Gregorian calendar but before its "acceptance" in any particular place.
2009-10 means October 2009, not 2009 through 2010 isn't a particular problem in itself - other than that it may differ from existing conventions. The reverse is also true. If someone had written 2009/10, would it mean 2009 through 2010 (interpreted according to ISO 8601), or October 2009. What about "07/09"? Years 2007 to 2009, or years 1907 to 1909? July 9th or 7th of September? Years 7 to 9, or (per ISO 8601) the 8th to 10th century? Actually its the expiry date of an old credit card - July 2009. Context is everything.
Two things that do become obvious:
  1. Introducing a new standard or convention for expressing dates - even if that standard is explicitly intended to remove confusion - can actually increase confusion unless we state explicitly that we are using that standard or we use it exclusively (which is clearly not feasible in Misplaced Pages).
  2. Calendar reform makes life difficult! Mitch Ames (talk) 09:45, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
Thinking further about the "... the requirement to always use the Gregorian calendar, even when stating dates related to events that occurred in countries where the Julian calender was in force ...". I presume you list this as a reason not to use ISO 8601, because it seems reasonable that the article is written using the calendar in force at the time. By this logic we would never use BC at all, because with very few exceptions no-one knew in advance when He would be born! Mitch Ames (talk) 11:10, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
Actually there are many instances where my logic is compatible with BC, since the Julian calendar was never in effect in many parts of Asia, Australia, and Africa. Even in the Roman Empire, it didn't go into effect until the fourth consulship of Iulius Caesar (which we would designate 45 BC). Jc3s5h (talk) 14:53, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
I think you may have missed my point. What event happened in a place where "BC" was being used as part of the calendar at the time that the event took place? Mitch Ames (talk) 10:22, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
  • I’m glad Shakescene’s wasn’t a serious suggestion. Let me know when ISO-format date and time is regularly used in real life so expressions of it in writing don’t draw attention to themselves. Greg L (talk) 17:45, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

AD/CE as disambiguator

An editor added:

(CE or AD may be needed to avoid ambiguity when the date is during the first few centuries of the Common Era. For example, "Sosigenes the Peripatetic was a philosopher living at the end of the 2nd century AD.")

Why is that necessary, or even helpful? — Arthur Rubin (talk) 16:15, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

As I found the text, it gave an example of where no disambiguation was necessary (Norman Conquest of 1066), but no example of where any well-edited reference work (including Misplaced Pages) should provide CE/AD to avoid ambiguity. In principle, since ambiguity is possible, I thought it would be good to give an example of where it exists. Since the Peripatetic school was going strong in the 2nd c. BCE and in the 2nd c. CE, it is quite ambiguous to say that Sosigenes is a Peripatetic writer of the 2nd century, so those who write about antiquity would not omit it. If this isn't persuasive, I need a fully spelled out argument about the non-necessity and non-helpfulness of such commonly provided disambiguators, because I can't figure it out. It is certainly not the case that "2nd century" in English refers by default to the 2nd century CE. It is ambiguous, and the disambiguator is normally left off only where context leaves no room for doubt. For readers looking up new subjects, we have to assume a little doubt. (I intended to provide a good example but not add any guideline. If I were to attempt a guideline, I'd say that disambiguation is common in good scholarly reference writing for the first through fifth centuries.) Wareh (talk) 16:20, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
I am of the opinion that AD/CE should be required as a disambiguator only for individual years up to 999, not centuries. Ex. — 999 AD/CE, 1000, 1st century, 2nd century. — CIS | stalk) 16:38, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
Let me just interject that I didn't want to speak of any requirements. All I believe is that when subject editors who work in antiquity have added CE/AD to a low-numbered century to prevent ambiguity, no one should have the impression that this guideline advises against such disambiguation. There are many contexts, I'm sure, where years 1-999 require no disambiguation (especially in the upper part of that range); I'm here to insist that there are many contexts in which centuries should have disambiguation upon the judgment of informed and neutral editors. Wareh (talk) 16:55, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
Well, actually, it is the case that the "2nd century" in English refers by default to the 2nd century AD, or sometimes the 2nd century of life. It never refers to the 2nd century BC. I could see the 1st century or 2nd century being ambiguous with the 1st or 2nd century of some other entity, but not to the 2nd century BC. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 17:09, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
"It never refers to the 2nd century BC." This is falsifable, and in fact false. In discussing classical antiquity "2nd century" etc. are ambiguous and very frequently refer to the 2nd century BC. E.g. these books have titles in English, yet with no "BC." Once we accept that "2nd century" etc. do often enough refer to BC, surely we'll see the point of disambiguation. I am a Classics scholar myself and sometimes experience the annoying situation that my own ignorance requires me to do further research to clarify an ambiguous reference the author considered unambiguous; our readers should not generally be put into that position. Finally, if the "never refers" were true (though I've already falsified it), we could simply delete "unless the date would be ambiguous without it," because ambiguity would be impossible! We might wish for that level of tidiness, but we can't impose it unilaterally on the English language. Wareh (talk) 17:35, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
I agree with Wareh completely. An article on Augustan Rome, for instance, will straddle BC/BCE and AD/CE. Sometimes 1st century will be the former, and sometimes the latter, and you can't assume the outside reader not initiated into WP ways knows the secret handshake: you have to specify the era for both. The purpose of stylistic consistency is clarity and accuracy; when the application of a "rule" creates ambiguity, it's an obvious case for an exception. To make an analogy, I've worked in newsrooms for daily and weekly papers that followed the stylebook of the Associated Press as holy scripture; however, all newsrooms have an internal stylebook of exceptions in order to accommodate a localized frame of knowledge. In our case, it's usually self-evident which era is meant, except when you're in an article, or disambiguating situation, that falls within the three or four centuries before and the three or four centuries after, and both eras are in play within the topic; then it becomes usefully informative to specify. The opposite is also true: if you're writing an article with a lot of dates in one paragraph, say a biography, and it's established that this person is living in the 1st century BC/BCE, it's perfectly clear if you don't use the era for every single numerical year: "Flaccus was a quaestor in 97 BC. He was a praetor in 87 BC, and after that a governor in Asia Minor throughout the 80s. His last known assignment was in 78, and he died in in 72." In this case, nothing is added by continuing to use the era, since no one would assume he died in 72 AD/CE, and the only thing diminished by omitting it is cluttered, naive prose. Cynwolfe (talk) 18:12, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
I see your point, although scholarly English can have completely different disambiguation requirements than ordinary English. Just consider the term field: in ordinary English, it's almost always field (agriculture) or field of study; while in mathematics, it's always field (mathematics). — Arthur Rubin (talk) 18:44, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
For some values of ordinary, the playing field meaning is far more common than the agriculture one, and for some values of mathematics, it's not "always" as it can also refer to tensor fields or special cases thereof. But one of the weirdest things is that, although field has umpteen completely different meanings, pretty much all occurrences of it (except in proper names) can be satisfactory translated in Italian as campo. —A. di M. (talk) 19:06, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
But if someone reading the Flaccus article were to search Misplaced Pages for 80s, 78 or 72, they would be redirected to the AD/CE year(s) in every instance. We cannot allow for such an ambiguity. I stand by my position that AD/CE should only be used with the first 999 years of the era, and that "1st century AD/CE" should only be used when there is a direct contrast with a BC century. — CIS | stalk) 18:52, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
Thank you for stating so clearly the position that Misplaced Pages must conform to (a personal interpretation of) the Manual of Style, even when it means actively misinforming the reader. That is the sort of nonsense WP:IAR was written to prohibit; we are here to write an encyclopedia, not to impose an arbitrary set of rules.
If date links from the Flaccus article were necessary - and it is the present position of MOS that they usually aren't - it is the responsibility of the editors to link correctly at both ends, neither distorting the text linked from nor conveying the reader to the wrong article. Fortunately, ] is not hard to type. We should above all be accurate, verifiable, sourced, and clear. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:20, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
For a reader to whom it does not occur to hover on the link (or who can't do that, e.g. because they are using a mobile phone or reading a hard copy), "72" is no clearer than "72", though. A. di M. (talk) 19:33, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
Quite so; as Cynwolfe said, good writing will only use 72 if it is already clear from context (here the earlier offices in 97 and 92 BC) which one is plausible; similarly, one should only use 73 by itself in discussing Masada if it is clear in context that it is AD. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:49, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
In any case, Septentrionalis makes a good point, which is that e.g. this edit (which brought this issue to my attention), at once confuses the reader about whether the reference is to BC or AD, and takes away one possible means of resolving the confusion (the wikilink). I agree with delinking dates, but I don't think we can expect readers to type "2nd century" in the search box, just to determine that Misplaced Pages as opposed to published books on the same subjects has a special system whereby the reader is supposed to know that "2nd century" always means "2nd century AD." (It's not just scholarly writing by the way: it's in any writing that has occasion to refer to these centuries--it just happens that scholars talk more about the 2nd century CE and BCE than most others!) In short, a reader of Sosigenes the Peripatetic after this change would have to (1) know the date of Alexander of Aphrodisias, or (2) consult the categories carefully, in order to know when Sosigenes is thought to have lived. I don't think Misplaced Pages can impose "all dates are CE unless otherwise noted" on our readers who come to us from Google etc., since (A) that is not the normal English practice elsewhere, and (B) it would, reasonably, require a banner on every article about the early centuries CE to remind them (such a banner would be no less called-for than notices that you may be missing IPA font characters, etc.). Wareh (talk) 19:36, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

On the substance of the matter: What MOS now says is that AD and CE should not be used "unless the date would be ambiguous without it". But fourth-century Greek writer is ambiguous; the first page of Google Book hits for the phrase includes Xenophon and Ephorus (of the 300s BC, although the text quoted doesn't say so) and Athenaeus and Cyril of Jerusalem (of the 300s AD). Why should our readers have to guess which is meant for Aeneas Tacticus or Longus or Horapollon or Theron? The solution may be to include one of these as a bad example (probably Theron, because there is a genuine controversy whether he is third century AD or BC, which adds a layer of richness). Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:42, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Wareh, Cynwolfe and Septentrionalis. Paul August ☎ 19:49, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

The important thing here is that, in Greek literary history, "third century" is not by default AD; until quite recently, it was by default BC, because the Greeks under the Roman Empire were held to be degenerate and uninteresting. I don't know the literature on China well enough, but it may do the same thing; Confucius is more studied that the literature of the Sui. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:17, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Very well, I withdraw my objection to the change in the MOS, except I'm not sure that example is appropriate. I'm still not convinced that it's for the best, but it makes sense. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 05:45, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Is the inappropriateness that Sosigenes is obscure? I agree, but am not sure who would be clearer. Most of the examples I can think of to replace him will still be obscure to the average reader: Lucian? Claudius Ptolemy? Athenaeus? Procopius? Plotinus? Please suggest one. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:04, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Positive rewrite suggestions

Currently: Do not use CE or AD unless the date would be ambiguous without it (e.g. "The Norman Conquest took place in 1066" not 1066 CE or AD 1066).

Suggested: CE or AD should only be used to prevent ambiguity, which generally arises only with the first several centuries CE/AD: e.g. . CE/AD is not used with more recent dates: e.g. "The Norman Conquest took place in 1066," not 1066 CE or AD 1066.

I'm optimistic, following Arthur Rubin's agreement, that we are pretty much ready for this discussion, though I don't want to be the person to add back the text I wrote before. The bottom line is that the guidelines should give an example of an appropriate CE/AD, so that editors can understand the real possibility of ambiguity, and remove superfluous CE/AD's while leaving disambiguating ones in place. Wareh (talk) 15:15, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

symbols for metric units

There's a continuing drip feed into Misplaced Pages of SI prefix and symbol errors e.g. 'Kw' instead of 'kW', 'Kms' instead of 'km', 'centigrade' instead of 'Celsius', 'mHz' instead of 'MHz', 'cm' to indicate cubic metre, etc. Several gnoming editors keep correcting these. From time to time, somebody will disagree with the corrections and say (correctly) that we have no documented consensus for a particular SI symbol or format. We saw this with the claim that 'km/h' wasn't acceptable. This could have been resolved quickly and without the swearing by global guidance in mosnum.

Can we reprint SI guidance within mosnum? Lightmouse (talk) 23:49, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Clearly non-SI metric units are important, or even pervasive in some or all English-speaking countries, for some applications. Examples include the energy unit kW·h and the pressure unit mmHg.
Furthermore, some, notably Greg L, insist that nonstandard abbreviations for SI units are used in the literature of some fields, and should be used in articles about those fields. While I could go along with this in principle, I find that the examples that have been advanced to date (such as c.c. for engine displacements of selected automobiles) are really too narrow to constitute a proper field deserving of recognition in an encyclopedia of the putative field's idiosyncratic abbreviations. Jc3s5h (talk) 00:08, 16 November 2010 (UTC)


OK. Thank you, Jc3s5h, for alerting me that you mentioned my views here. But you didn’t characterize my views as accurately as I would prefer. I am saying that the existing MOSNUM wording is proper and is generally sufficient. But Lightmouse’s above frustrations show that there are editors (volunteers with no technical writing common sense whatsoever) doing things that are horribly incorrect so we might well have to expand a bit on the current guidelines. Currently they suffice just fine but aren’t fool-proof against industrial-strength fools. They read as follows:
  • In scientific articles, use the units employed in the current scientific literature on that topic. This will usually be SI, but not always; for example, natural units are often used in relativistic and quantum physics, and Hubble's constant should be quoted in its most common unit of (km/s)/Mpc rather than its SI unit of s.
  • Some disciplines use units not approved by the BIPM, or write them differently from BIPM-prescribed format. When a clear majority of the sources relevant to those disciplines use such units, articles should follow this (e.g., using cc in automotive articles and not cm). Such non-standard units are always linked on first use.
  • Use familiar units rather than obscure units—do not write over the heads of the readership (e.g., a general-interest topic such as black holes would be best served by having mass expressed in solar masses, but it might be appropriate to use Planck units in an article on the mathematics of black hole evaporation).
There has been too much “Rah-rah SI and ISO and IEC” going on here on Misplaced Pages in the past. The current guidelines essentially amount to this message point:
“SI is more than fine; it is preferred. But don’t try to lead by example and show the world a new and better way if a given discipline routinely has a different way of doing things.”
For astronomy, different units will often be used besides meters and their prefixed multiples. For Honda motorcycles it is not a “1200 mL” engine but a “1200 cc engine”. For infrared astronomy and likely many other disciplines it is “microns” rather than “micrometers.” I didn’t make this stuff up; that’s just the way the world works in certain disciplines. We had our try with space cadets (bless their dear hearts) pushing “mebibytes” instead of “megabytes” for three years on Misplaced Pages. And the BIPM and their SI endorses that bit. But just because it’s logical doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to stand apart from the way the entire rest of the planet works when communicating to a general-interest readership. It’s real simple: If you find that a given discipline—as evidenced by the most reliable, current literature on that subject—is at odds with the SI, then don’t worry about and stop trying to change the world. Now…
Lightmouse: I am not in the least bit defending the asinine practices that are frustrating you (cited above): 'Kw' instead of 'kW', 'Kms' instead of 'km', 'centigrade' instead of 'Celsius', 'mHz' instead of 'MHz', 'cm' to indicate cubic metre, etc. You shouldn’t have to put up with that crap. There is absolutely zero (zip, nada) excuse for bastardizing unit symbols that are part of the SI. The rule of SI in that regard must be followed to the letter. The solution to that can be a rather focused bullet points that would read roughly like this:
  • Unit symbols for units of measure that are part of the SI shall rigorously follow the rule of the SI. It is kW for kilowatt and is never Kw.
  • Do not refer to temperatures as “centigrade” or “degrees centigrade. It is “Celsius” or “degrees Celsius.”
  • One never adds a plural “s” to a unit symbol that is part of the SI. It is 25 km away and never 25 kms away.
Printing the entire rule of SI is not only unnecessary, it is unwise because parts of it are contradictory to existing guidelines. For instance, it would have us writing “mebibyte”, “kibibyte”, and 75 % rather than the 75% like the rest of the world uses.
I suggest we hurry and get these added ASAP. I’ll leave the honor of implementing them to whomever is more active than I on editing MOSNUM. Greg L (talk) 00:53, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
The degree Celsius is not an SI unit. The SI unit for temperature is the Kelvin. Centigrade is an acceptable alternative (for non-scientific uses) as it is still commonly used, especially in Britain. McLerristarr | Mclay1 01:03, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Your statement lacks that necessary element of *truthiness*. That’s a fancy way of saying you could not possibly be more incorrect. Note SI brochure, section 2.1.1.5. And note too CIPM, 1948 and 9th CGPM, 1948: Adoption of "degree Celsius". The word “centigrade” was obsoleted 62-some years ago and no reliable source would ever use it. We won’t be having brain-damaged things like “centigrade” being slapped all over Misplaced Pages just because some editor crawls out of the woodwork and digs in his heels because he can point to retarded practices from a break-away province of the former Yugoslavia. Centigrade is not appropriate for anything on Misplaced Pages except to write about it in historical contexts. If we caved to stuff like you just spewed here, we might as well not have any manual of style on Misplaced Pages because all someone has to do is invoke the ENGVAR mantra to make a case to regurgitate whatever they want, wherever they want on Misplaced Pages’s pages. Greg L (talk) 01:14, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

P.S. As our ‘Stone (mass)’ article states: “the stone remains widely used within the United Kingdom”. Having stood on a bathroom scale in England, looked down, and had my eyes bug out, I can attest to the truthfulness of that statement. I couldn’t care less what moronic practice goes on over there on those islands; it doesn’t have to blight Misplaced Pages (you sure as heck won’t find stones used in our ‘Obesity’ article) just because England invented the dog-gone language used on en.Misplaced Pages. The rest of the English-speaking world moves on. Greg L (talk) 01:26, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

But those who use "stone" have reason to disagree. You don't have to use it, and you are free to argue against it; but you don't get to outlaw it.
Perhaps not “outlaw” it. But a Manual of Style governs its use. Stones for weight have precious little place for being used on Misplaced Pages. Greg L (talk) 01:40, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
It might be desirable to use only Celsius, instead of what Celsius himself called his system, but it is not yet true that only brain-dead translators from the Serbo-Croat use "centigrade". Calm down; English does not have an Academy; the CIPM isn't one; they may be more reputable than the UN, but they can no more make centigrade obsolete than the General Assembly can make The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (alphabetized under T) English usage; general acceptation would do it - and one mark of that is that we cease to argue about it here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:35, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
WP:CIVILITY. I'm not going to say anymore. McLerristarr | Mclay1 01:29, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
I’m not attacking you as a person; I’m pointing out how fallacious your statement was and, ergo, how your resultant conclusion has zero foundation. Greg L (talk) 01:40, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, I noticed you were careful that way. But even so, phrases like "what moronic practice goes on" sounds almost like calling Britons morons, for no good reason; people who remain unaware of our obscure regulations have more reason to call us morons than vice versa. Can't you just call them "wrong", and save the insults for those who deserve it, like say terrorists? Art LaPella (talk) 01:50, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Indeed, there's nothing intrinsically moronic with the stone. It's just that other people are not familiar with it. (And there'd be nothing wrong in using stones for the weight of a Briton in a pre-1985 context on Misplaced Pages, provided there's a conversion both to kilos and to pounds.) A. di M. (talk) 15:42, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm afraid this suggested guideline won't have the intended effect:

  • Unit symbols for units of measure that are part of the SI shall rigorously follow the rule of the SI. It is kW for kilowatt and is never Kw.

The cubic centimeter is part of SI so the rule of the SI must be rigorously followed: the symbol is cm. I can't think of any way to reword this proposal that will allow the nonstandard abbreviations some of us like (cc) and disallow the nonstandard abbreviations all of us frown upon (Kms). Jc3s5h (talk) 01:29, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

  • Easy: Add an explicit exception. New green-div coming… 01:40, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Should follow the rule of SI, where that is normally followed by reliable sources? That should also cover completely non-SI units, like hp. I doubt reliable sources will use Kms. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:35, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
No RS would ever use “kms”. And I like your suggested catch-all wording, PMA. Love it, really. Let’s see who slings mud at it before we try to run with it. Greg L (talk) 01:40, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Just do whatever the hell reliable sources do, for heaven's sake. Saying that the equator is 40 megametres long would fully comply with the SI, but if no-one does that (and indeed not only does "megametre" get a red underline by Firefox's spell checker, but there are no occurrences of either it or its plural in the BNC, and the only three occurrences of "megameter"/"megameters" in the COCA are from science fiction works), we shouldn't do that either. A. di M. (talk) 01:50, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
The less common units will normally appear in scientific publications, and those publications usually use symbols rather than spelled-out units. The Corpus of Contemporary American English does not seem to provide the ability to perform case sensitive searches, so apparently one cannot do a search that finds "Mm" but excludes "MM" and "mm". So COCA seems of limited use for the topic at hand. Jc3s5h (talk) 01:58, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Search the COCA for "Mm", click on "1000" near "SAMPLE" on the top of the results (it will show you 1000 results chosen at random), set your browser's "Find" feature to case-sensitive, and search for "0 Mm", "1 Mm", "2 Mm", ..., and "9 Mm". I can't remember anyone ever actually using megametres, even in contexts where it would make perfect sense. People just use metres or kilometres or (for larger lengths) astronomical units, with exponential notation for the number if necessary. A. di M. (talk) 02:15, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, A. di M., I like your attitude but I think your proposal relies too greatly upon common sense. Given the collaborative writing environment here and the spectacular range of skills in contributing editors, it would be good to have what you just wrote and some added specificity. Let’s try this one on for size and see where it goes. As Jc3s5h alluded to above, the second and third bullet points could still be seen as being in conflict if one wikilawyers a bit. But I think a common-sense interpretation based on the provided examples avoids any real conflict or problem in grokking the mix. The green-div would be as follows:

  • In scientific articles, use the units employed in the current scientific literature on that topic. This will usually be SI, but not always; for example, natural units are often used in relativistic and quantum physics, and Hubble's constant should be quoted in its most common unit of (km/s)/Mpc rather than its SI unit of s.
  • Some disciplines use units not approved by the BIPM, or write them differently from BIPM-prescribed format. When a clear majority of most-reliable sources relevant to those disciplines use such units, articles should follow this (e.g., using cc in automotive articles and not cm and Cashmere wool must have a fiber diameter not greater than 19 microns). Such non-standard units are always linked on first use.
  • Unit symbols for units of measure that are part of the SI must rigorously follow the rule of the SI. It is kW for kilowatt and is never Kw and it is MHz when one means megahertz and never mHz, which means a millihertz, or one oscillation ever thousand seconds.
  • Use familiar units rather than obscure units—do not write over the heads of the readership (e.g., a general-interest topic such as black holes would be best served by having mass expressed in solar masses, but it might be appropriate to use Planck units in an article on the mathematics of black hole evaporation).
  • One never adds a plural “s” to a unit symbol that is part of the SI. It is 25 km away and never 25 kms away.
  • Do not refer to temperatures as “centigrade” or “degrees centigrade. It is “Celsius” or “degrees Celsius.”

This ought to resolve what poor ol’ Lightmouse is being frustrated over right now. Poor guy. Greg L (talk) 02:04, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

I think the second point is too strong and would prefer Some disciplines often use non-SI units or write SI units differently from BIPM-prescribed format. When the reliable sources in a field normally use SI units, articles should do so; when they do not, articles should follow reliable sources with the same examples. The chief effect here is to avoid some cm fan counting a pile of automotive trade journals and seeing whether the pile with cm or c.c. is higher; I doubt any field is really in a mixed condition - and if one is, everybody will understand both systems. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:26, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
I consider the above green-div to be a live document for anyone who is truly trying to be constructive here, i.e. is mostly on my side ;-) So have at it PMA; please revise as you see fit or copy and past your own, below. But I was hoping to address the issue you raised by writing When a clear majority of most-reliable sources… I wouldn’t want to second-guess anyone on any subject if a clear majority of most-reliable sources use this or that unit of measure. If slaughter houses use the length of goat entrails for length and the clear majority of most-reliable sources on that subject follow the practice, far be it me to second-guess a fan-boy. Greg L (talk) 03:14, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
This is all bloat. First the pluralization of symbols is already mentioned in the MOSNUM. The sentence about symbols implies things that are not meant to be implied, for example the symbols for the kilobyte is very often written KB and not kB, even though the "proper symbol" is kB, there is also the issue of cc vs cm, and plenty of other cases. We do not need to encode every little detail about the MOSNUM in the MOSNUM. There's also no reason to single out "Celcius" and "Centigrade", plenty of units have multiple name. Have Lightmouse's bot run through the bot approval process, explain the changes it will make there, the reasons for them, and then when people bitch about it, which should be once in a blue moon, then point them to the bot approval page. Of if this does not concern a bot, then have the page in your userspace. No need to clutter the MOSNUM because someone complains every six month about something as silly as writting kw·h properly, instead of "kwh". Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 06:07, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Maybe we can just add a bullet point to "Unit symbols" or to "Units and symbols often written incorrectly", reading "Note that symbols for prefixes and units are case sensitive: for example, use MHz for the megahertz, not mHz (which would be the symbol of the millihertz)." (And maybe also "Use capital K when it means 1024 and lowercase k when it means 1000.") Then, if we really need to, we can add "Do not use the old-fashioned name degree centigrade for the degree Celsius except in quotations and historical contexts" at the end of the bullet about °C, °F and K, but I think the latest discussion concluded that people do not write that in the first place often enough for it to be worth a mention in the MOS. All the rest seems to be already covered in MOSNUM. A. di M. (talk) 12:40, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

I think we're making progress. Mosnum has grown like coral and has a lot of fuzziness and too much trivia. It's time for a rewrite. There are three principles that seem to have agreement:
1. Misplaced Pages uses official SI guidance.
2. Misplaced Pages has a list of acceptable deviations from SI guidance.
3. Misplaced Pages has a method of changing the list of acceptable deviations.
Unfortunately the current mosnum text suggests that SI guidance is merely an option. I think this opt-in system is why we have such long rambling mosnum text and lengthy discussion outside mosnum. Anyone can demand proof of consensus that normal metric formats apply for any edit. We need to state that SI guidance applies by default, and the list of acceptable deviations are available as opt-outs. We can then purge a lot of the metric trivia. It'll be shorter, clearer, and more usable in article talk pages. Lightmouse (talk) 15:02, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

It's a reasonable approach, provided that no bot remove a questionable unit without an active consensus that it is not used in the field. (I agree that the consensus may consist of "anyone heard of this unit being used", and hearing no reply in a reasonable amount of time, no less than a week.) Bots of that sort can cause too much damage before they are stopped, even when run by operators who generally abide by Misplaced Pages principles. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 15:08, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
There is one principle that has universal agreement:
  1. Do what the sources do.
We may reasonably note that we want reliable sources on the particular subject of the article; we may reasonably note that in many fields the consensus of the sources is to use SI units - although there are exceptions - and to abbreviate them as SI does. But this still involves editing by reading the sources - which is how Misplaced Pages is supposed to develop. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:23, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
I disagree with PMAnderson's comment "we want reliable sources on the particular subject of the article". We want the reader to understand. An encyclopedia reader tends to be more of a generalist than the audience of sources focused on a narrow topic. We must make a judgment whether many of our readers will be comfortable with the units peculiar to a particular field. Our audience is not the same as the audience of the sources supporting a particular article.
The whole world allows, and most of the world requires, SI in most situations because the world has judged that people should be able to move from field to field without having to learn a new set of units. We should respect the world's judgment. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:32, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
I should prefer to respect the world's judgment by doing what the world does. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:49, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Holy smokes, Jc3s5h; give it up. Your mission to push adoption of the SI will go nowhere. The tide of realization has turned for some number of years now and your mantra is now tedious. Misplaced Pages does not exist to promote adoption of the SI by using it in a “Oh… didn’t-cha know??”-fashion in articles covering disciplines that routinely use non-SI units of measure. The unit of gravity, the µgal is a non-SI unit formally sanctioned by the BIPM as being acceptable for use with the SI. Encyclopedias exist to educate its readership on topics and properly prepare them for their continuing studies on the subject. Everyone else here understands that we would do our readers a disservice by routinely talking about gravity gradients of 3.1×10 s when books on the subject speak of “3.1 µGal per centimeter.” The latter form is what one would be taught in school and use in the field if they got a job in the discipline. The same goes for those units in other fields that aren’t approved for use with the SI, like parsecs in astronomy. Most-reliable literature on certain astronomy topics routinely use that unit of measure. Misplaced Pages follows that practice where applicable. Your argument that the world has judged that people should be able to move from field to field without having to learn a new set of units could not possibly be more fallacious. Flouting the most-reliable current literature in favor of SI promotion—as with ISO-time promotion and IEC-prefix promotion—has no place on Misplaced Pages. All we end up with is poor gullible readers who don’t know any better walking into a computer store and telling the sales clerk that they “Want a computer with 512 mebibytes of RAM.” They are either met with suppressed smirks or outright dismissive laughter to their faces because no computer packaging on the planet (or advertisement in a magazine or sales brochure or sales-page Web site) has a bullet point on the outside that says • Features 512 MiB of RAM. Greg L (talk) 17:52, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
If one can actually enroll in a university or other major education program today and receive instruction that predominantly uses an abbreviation for an SI unit of measure that departs from the official BIPM brochure, by all means go ahead and use the non-standard abbreviation in Misplaced Pages. An example is the mcg, used in medicine (at least in the USA) because the correct symbol, μg, is too easy to confuse with mg, especially when written by doctors with their infamous handwriting, or an EMT in the back of a moving ambulance.
On the other hand, abbreviations used only by obscure groups of enthusiasts, such as collectors of antique automobiles, have no place in Misplaced Pages. Jc3s5h (talk) 18:19, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
The matter of deciding which unit to use is addressed by the second bullet point in the green-div below: When a clear majority of most-reliable sources relevant to those disciplines use such units… I’m not going to be drawn into wikidrama based on arguments of “obscure groups of enthusiasts” because that’s not what we’re discussing and it is an absurd stretch. If you mean “Just because ‘micron’ is used in infrared astronomy doesn’t mean it has to be used instead of ‘micrometer’ elsewhere on Misplaced Pages,” then you won’t get any disagreement from anyone around here. Greg L (talk) 18:34, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
  • PMA is absolutely correct. Once again, I find we are shirking our responsibilities and caving to a few with well-worn heels and {{I DON’T LIKE IT}} tags rather than help Lightmouse out here. In starting this thread, he wrote as follows: There's a continuing drip feed into Misplaced Pages of SI prefix and symbol errors e.g. 'Kw' instead of 'kW', 'Kms' instead of 'km', 'centigrade' instead of 'Celsius', 'mHz' instead of 'MHz', 'cm' to indicate cubic metre, etc. Headbomb pointed out that MOSNUM already addresses the pluralization of unit symbols. So Lightmouse could have referred such editwarring editors to MOSNUM with regard to “Kms”.

    (New stand-alone paragraph here): But other issues that are flat incorrect still exist and if MOSNUM remains silent on those other issues, Lightmouse will no-doubt experience continuing problems on them.

    It simply doesn’t matter, Headbomb, if “plenty of units have multiple names”; just because “micron” jumps off a bridge all the time is no reason for “centigrade” to do so. The proper term has been “Celsius” since 1948 and the vast majority of most-reliable sources use “Celsius”. That simple fact drives a silver spike through the heart of “centigrade” and settles the issue. Finito for that one. There are no-doubt other sources in the U.S. that still use “centigrade” (the Alfa Romeo collectors’ car repair shop down the road?) but that doesn’t make the practice right nor a “be politically correct to ignorant sources”-issue. Manuals of style exist for a reason and having MOSNUM here in a collaborative writing environment requires less timidity—not more—in the face of stupid writing practices that passed into history along with the DC‑3. Any example of Hexane’s boiling point is a range spanning 20 degrees centigrade needs to be corrected the instant it is encountered. Arguments that the editor who greatly expand the ‘Hexane’ article hails from Zamia and en.Misplaced Pages is so-very *international* so the “other name” ought to stick due to ENGVAR would be absurd. Greg L (talk) 17:06, 16 November 2010 (UTC)


Given that MOSNUM supposedly already addresses plural unit symbols (I haven’t seen it personally but I’ll take Headbomb’s word for it), I’ve trimmed that point out and arrive with the following:

  • In scientific articles, use the units employed in the current scientific literature on that topic. This will usually be SI, but not always; for example, natural units are often used in relativistic and quantum physics, and Hubble's constant should be quoted in its most common unit of (km/s)/Mpc rather than its SI unit of s.
  • Write units symbols properly. The symbol for kilowatt is kW, not Kw for example.
  • Some disciplines often use non-SI units or write SI units differently from BIPM-prescribed format. When the reliable sources in a field normally use SI units, articles should do so; when they do not, articles should follow reliable sources. For instance, it is cc in an article on Honda motorcycles engines and not cm; the term "micron" (rather than micrometre) is also still in widespread use in certain disciplines. Such non-standard units or unit names are always linked on first use.
  • Use familiar units rather than obscure units—do not write over the heads of the readership (e.g., a general-interest topic such as black holes would be best served by having mass expressed in solar masses, but it might be appropriate to use Planck units in an article on the mathematics of black hole evaporation); likewise, most articles should use Celsius or Fahrenheit, not the SI kelvin, for ambient temperatures on Earth.

I’m just not seeing “bloat” here since three of the above bullet points are copied over from what’s currently on MOSNUM. It’s two additional bullet points to help Lightmouse out with legitimate concerns on which he is absolutely correct. Greg L (talk) 17:14, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

If we are going to claim that the examples in the proposed change are used by a clear majority of most-reliable sources relevant to those disciplines, I think we should provide a citation to show this is indeed the case. Who says "cc" is the predominant abbreviation for the automotive dicipline? Who says "micron" is the predominant unit of measure for the fiber diameter of cashmere wool?
Determining if a clear majority exists is a difficult burden, one best undertaken by the lexicographers, not Misplaced Pages editors. Perhaps a more feasible standard should be used, such as "listed as the preferred term by one or more reliable sources that provide general coverage of the dicipline (especially specialized dictionaries or style guides of relevant scholarly societies)". Jc3s5h (talk) 18:55, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I think a better place for the bullet about symbols would be the "Unit symbols" section, immediately after the current fourth (not counting sub-bullets) bullet. I'd also be more explicit that it is capitalization we're talking about, e.g. "Note that symbols for prefixes and units are case sensitive: for example, use MHz for the megahertz, not mHz (which would be the symbol of the millihertz)." (And maybe also "Use capital K when it means 1024 and lowercase k when it means 1000.") As for Celsius vs centigrade, that could be added at the end of the third bullet in "Units and symbols often written incorrectly", rather than as a new bullet. A. di M. (talk) 19:01, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Very well. As you wish A. di M. since you understand the structure of MOSNUM much better than I.

    Responding to you, Jc3s5h: “We” (the volunteer editors cybersquatting at WT:MOSNUM this week) don’t resolve issues of what units are used in any particular discipline; that is left up to the editors specializing in their respective articles if a disagreement over fact arrises. We set only global principals and stay out of day-to-day editwarring. The bedrock principle (When a clear majority of most-reliable sources…) is perfectly clear and there is no need to change it. Your suggestion—listed as the preferred term by one or more reliable sources that provide general coverage of the dicipline (especially specialized dictionaries or style guides of relevant scholarly societies)—is just a prescription for editwarring because all an editor has to do is point to a single source and whine “But my source uses this unit so I want my waaaaaay.” We need none of that. Greg L (talk) 19:12, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

  • One of the best example that I know of for explaining the need to use the correct case for metric symbols is to explain that 1 mW is sufficient to power a hearing aid, whereas 1 MW is needed for the air conditioning of a medium-sized office block. Martinvl (talk) 19:31, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
This box is better, but it now has the problem of endorsing microns as a "sane" unit of measure. It's not. And it also have the problem of that horrible "* Unit symbols for units of measure that are part of the SI must rigorously follow the rule of the SI." rule which means use cm, not cc, and so on. So I rewrote the thing, removed the problem parts, and I would support this version of it. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:43, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps we should explain that the official BIPM brochure may mention certain units and symbols that BIPM has no control over, such as "%" or "kibibyte" and that these mentions have no more weight in Misplaced Pages than other technical publications. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:25, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
What you have is mostly fine with me, Headbomb. But case-by-case basis can be interpreted as “come whine to Mommy here at MOSNUM” for each exception. It would be nice if you could find wording that makes one point clear regarding “micron”. The message point would be this: “You and your Turkish butt-stabbing opponents can go look at most-reliable literature and resolve matters of fact yourself, so don’t expect someone here to hold your thingy every time you take a whiz.” Greg L (talk) 01:23, 17 November 2010 (UTC)<
Reworded, how's this? (Also I removed the "most" in the "clear majority of most-reliable sources" because that's grammatically unsound and doesn't add anything to the sentence).Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 01:32, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
That’s fine. I realized that the principle of looking towards most-reliable literature with regard to whether or not "micron" is appropriate made it best to consolidate it into the bullet point covering ‘which unit or unit symbol to use’. So I took the liberty of doing so, above. It’s now getting rather tidy and logically tied together. Also, “centigrade” was never capitalized; so the “don’t” example was overkill with bad case layered upon wrong word. Greg L (talk) 02:23, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
  • I see your edit, Headbomb, where your edit summary was then this one can disappear, since it is contained in the previous bullet. But I’m not seeing an explicit mentioning of not using centigrade in any other bullet point. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lightmouse hasn’t been experiencing WTFs from other editors besides User:McLerristarr | Mclay1. I’m sure you can find an appropriate place for *the centigrade / Celcius*-thing if you don’t think it is best grouped with these. But I urge that MOSNUM be explicit about that one since other editors will invariably raise ENGVAR once RS-based reasoning forbids its use. I also corrected the spelling; it is “Celsius”, not “Celcius” (not sure who did that, but it’s correct now). Greg L (talk) 04:04, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
    • It doesn't need to be explicit. Is "degrees centigrade" used by "a clear majority of reliable sources relevant to the field"? No they aren't, therefore out the door they go. Therefore it's covered by the "sometimes people do things differently, if the SI says X, but field Y does Z more often, then it's acceptable for our articles on field Y to use Z." bullet of the greenbox. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 04:12, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
      • Are you telling me that will stop editwarring when editors think this: “Centigrade is an acceptable alternative (for non-scientific uses) as it is still commonly used, especially in Britain.”(??) Greg L (talk) 04:18, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

        P.S. …or the entire quote, which is this: “The degree Celsius is not an SI unit. The SI unit for temperature is the Kelvin. Centigrade is an acceptable alternative (for non-scientific uses) as it is still commonly used, especially in Britain.”

          • And if that claim is true - and there appears to be some evidence in support of it - we are not helping the encyclopedia by edit-warring to fet rid of a familiar unit. I have included the strongest recommendation I think to be actual consensus. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:31, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
            • As for the Celsius, the obvious solution in about 99.99% of the cases is to just use the symbol and a conversion to Fahrenheit, without spelling the names out. Pretty much everyone able to read English knows that 24 °C (75 °F) is too warm for a room but too cold for a bath, don't they. A. di M. (talk) 17:06, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

As for "clear majority of reliable sources" (this thread has become so huge I won't bother to locate the right way to place this post), IMO the point should be that if an unit is called "A" by more than about 80% of the sources and "B" by less than about 20%, we should call it "A"; if it's called "A" by less than about 20% and "B" by more than about 80% we should call it "B", and if the numbers are less different than that we should just pick one for each article and then stick with it unless a really compelling reason for changing it exists; and if A and B are different units rather than different names for the same unit, in the third of the cases above whichever one we choose there should be a conversion to the other, e.g. 25 parsecs (82 ly). (By "about 20%" rather than a specific fraction I mean "common enough that most people familiar with the field will likely have encountered it before. As a rule of thumb, if two English-language mainstream reliable sources independent of each other and published in the last decade use the unit B, it shouldn't considered to be marginal unless there's some evidence of the contrary.) Whether A, B or both are approved or not by the BIPM should not by itself have any relevance. A. di M. (talk) 16:56, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Example of non-standard abbreviation for SI unit

Is "cc" a good example of a nonstandard abbreviation for an SI unit, when explaining in Misplaced Pages's Manual of Style (dates and numbers) that in some fields nonstandard abbreviations should be preferred over the standard symbol? Jc3s5h (talk) 12:20, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Challenge if statement is factual

I challenge the statement "it is cc in automotive articles and not cm". In the absence of qualification, "automotive articles" includes everything from antique cars to 2011 models, and all aspects from economic impact of the auto industry to mechanical engineering aspects of autos.

It would be better to use an example that will not require extensive qualification and for which strong evidence can presented. I would suggest the abbreviation "mcg" for microgram in medicine, but I do not have access to a wide range of reliable medical sources to determine whether a clear majority of them use "mcg" and frown upon "μg".Jc3s5h (talk) 12:12, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

I googled both "mcg" and "µg" with a filter of ".nhs.uk". The number of hits for mcg outnumbered µg by about 10 to 1. Since the letter µ does not appear on the UK keyboard, there fewer hits are expected. However, when I applied the filter ".thelancet.com", the numbers were reversed. Thus far from mediacl circles dispaproving of the use of "µg" being, it appears to me that medical academic cirles prefer "µg" to "mcg". Martinvl (talk) 12:44, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
What about mAh (rather than the standard SI mA h or mA·h) for the milliampere-hour on rechargeable batteries? A significant fraction of people able to use a computer will be familiar with that. A. di M. (talk) 17:00, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
I don't think a clear majority of the best sources related to rechargeable batteries would use mAh instead of mA h or mA·h so I don't think there is any article topic for which we would recommend mAh. This does bring up a different point though: h·mA is just as allowable if we blindly follow the official BIPM brochure, but it is not used in the literature. Jc3s5h (talk) 18:09, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
Are you sure? A. di M. (talk) 18:20, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Jc3s5h push to make Misplaced Pages follow the rule of the SI rather than follow the way the world really works in certain disciplines is not the consensus view. His making waves with formal RfCs over a minor point is unfortunate. I changed the example to List of Honda motorcycles so this point is now moot. Time for the next wikidrama. Greg L (talk) 17:59, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

    P.S. Since the point of contention over “automotive” applications (Honda motorcycle engines is an irrefutable example), I removed the RfC tag. I don’t know if only admins can do that, so if this was an error, please revert. Greg L (talk) 18:02, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Revert removal of RFC tag because the discussion is over when there is consensus it is over or, by default, after 25 days. While Honda motorcycle engines might be easier to defend than automotive articles in general as a topic where "cc" is appropriate, no concise defense that could easily be added to the manual as a footnote has been offered. Perhaps such a defense can be found, or a different example that can be defended more easily can be found. Jc3s5h (talk) 18:18, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
P.S. a Misplaced Pages list is not even one reliable source, much less a clear majority of the best sources (and the one reference provided for that list is a dead link). Furthermore, whether Honda motorcycle engines, as described to consumers, form a discipline is debatable. Jc3s5h (talk) 18:23, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Well, you clearly don’t understand much about Honda motorcycle engines and the standard practices in that field. Your “rah-rah SI” crusade now has you denying reality to the point where you are implying that Misplaced Pages’s going with the flow on Honda motorcycles is some sort of contrived fabrication by some CGS fans. Good luck with that tact. And just because you started a (now-moot) RfC is no reason the community can’t just start ignoring you from hereon; you are bordering on being tendentious by restoring an RfC tag predicated upon a point over “automotive articles” when I addressed your concern and made it Hondas in the green-div. So I’ve deleted the RfC tag again. If you must slap {I DON'T LIKE IT} tags all over the place instead of discussing things here without your hair on fire, then start a NEW RfC below that makes a half-way rational case speaking to the CURRENT green-div and how the new wording too is somehow not true. Greg L (talk) 18:39, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Time to gauge consensus

We’ve flogged this more than enough now; it shouldn’t have to drag on any further. And, as evidenced by the above RfC, it is unrealistic to try to get any more issues addressed in the green-div. I propose a straw poll. How say the community on the following green-div:

  • In scientific articles, use the units employed in the current scientific literature on that topic. This will usually be SI, but not always; for example, natural units are often used in relativistic and quantum physics, and Hubble's constant should be quoted in its most common unit of (km/s)/Mpc rather than its SI unit of s.
  • Write units symbols properly. The symbol for kilowatt is kW, not Kw for example.
  • Some disciplines often use non-SI units or write SI units differently from BIPM-prescribed format. When the reliable sources in a field normally use SI units, articles should do so; when they do not, articles should follow reliable sources. For instance, it is cc in an article on Honda motorcycles engines and not cm; the term "micron" (rather than micrometre) is also still in widespread use in certain disciplines. Such non-standard units or unit names are always linked on first use.
  • Use familiar units rather than obscure units—do not write over the heads of the readership (e.g., a general-interest topic such as black holes would be best served by having mass expressed in solar masses, but it might be appropriate to use Planck units in an article on the mathematics of black hole evaporation); likewise, most articles should use Celsius or Fahrenheit, not the SI kelvin, for ambient temperatures on Earth.


  • Support The general principals adhere to and reflect real-world practices and best enhance Misplaced Pages’s efforts to educate its readership on topics and properly prepare them for their continuing studies on the subject. Greg L (talk) 18:53, 17 November 2010 (UTC)