Category talk:People grouped by birth year

I wonder if we shouldn't have a category for unknown birth years or for birth decades: I find the clustering of renaissance composers in round-figure years mildly scandalous ;-) Richard Mix (talk) 23:32, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Categories for birth decades sounds like a good idea! Would it be something in the line 1420s births? —Carlos 04:22, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

Yes, either with or without apostrophe. It still doesn't help with Johann Stadlmayr but would probably be mostly good enough. Machault would be 1300s births (not to be confused with 13c births) and Francesco Landini, hmm, shall we assume he enters the record before his 20's and therefore a 1330s birth? Richard Mix (talk) 10:40, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

Btw, is there a way to not display empty subcategories? I was once similarly frustrated trying to browse 10-part music. Richard Mix (talk) 10:56, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

For the century categories, as in the case of Stadlmayr, I'd suggest the longer form: "16th-century births" (as used in Wikipedia). But we must make it very clear in its description that such categories are only for people with year of birth unknown.

As for the empty categories... as far as I know, the only way is by deleting them. —Carlos 16:12, 22 August 2015 (UTC)

Hi again: not wanting to reinvent the wheel I've looked around and discovered Template:BirthDecade and Template:BirthsInCentury, as well as the curious syntax of Template:Birthyr in which dates are written 142|0 (removing the last significant digit however doesn't give a decade category). Could the documentation be made a little bit clearer? What categories are associated with BirthDecade and BirthsInCentury? Richard Mix (talk) 01:54, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Hi Richard, Birthyr and Deathyr are very old templates, only used on the "XXXX births" and "XXXX deaths" categories. They were created before we had access to more powerful programming tools, and they have some space for improvement (including their documentation). The other two you cite, BirthDecade and BirthsInCentury, are not used on categories, but on automated lists in the 'ChoralWiki' namespace. You can check the pages that use them by clicking on the "What links here" link on the left menu. These pages also require some updating... —Carlos 11:35, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip! Maybe a convenient way (if any) to click from a composer page to ChoralWiki:1420s births is more useful than a new Category:1420s births then: these pages are certainly more reader-friendly, though certainly labyrinthine to a would-be editor. Is there a DPL tool to put pages with an added "unknown birth year" category in italics or with the word circa, or would a whole new set of c. 1300 births and so forth need to be created? Btw, Choralwiki:15th century births is without hyphen (which is fine by me); it takes a moment or two to notice the navigation arrows to 14th century births. Richard Mix (talk) 05:58, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

I've had another idea: would it be simpler to just add Category:unknown births to Cat:yyyy births? Ideally this would add a question mark, so Category:1475 births would look like:

• Michelangelo Buonarroti
• Elzear Genet?
• Michael Pesenti?
• Andreas de Silva?
• Robert Wylkynson?

Richard Mix (talk) 01:05, 11 November 2017 (UTC)