This issue has been sorted out. Dates are duplicated across LegalName and PerformanceNames. For now, this page is kept as is as history, though it may be migrated to the discussion of another relevant page later on. -- dmppanda 2008-03-10 02:30:21

Date of Birth (and Death) Style

One of the UnresolvedStyleIssues is whether the PerformanceName of an artist should duplicate the DateOfBirth and DateOfDeath of the "real person" represented by the LegalName.

Obviously the LegalName of an artist should include their DateOfBirth and death, but should this be included in each PerformanceName? If it is, that creates DataRedundancy (bad), if it isn't, the data won't be visible on the PerformanceName (also bad), and may well be added anyway by a well meaning user.

There have been several discussions of this issue, but as of yet, no resolution.

Links to Discussions in Other Forums

• A thread I started on April 14 2005.

• Start of a thread about Björk's Birthday. The thread continued into June 2005.

• mb-style " RFC: close the (very old) UnresolvedStyleIssue about DateOfBirthStyle", by Olivier, on Fri Feb 15 01:31:06 UTC 2008.

• Tracked as BugTracker #3584, and as "Date of Birth (AR duplication)" in kuno/CurrentStyleProposals

Discussion

I should note that I'm coming around to the idea that it's best to live with the DataRedundancy in this case, but I'm open to arguments. --JohnCarter

• I think it is technically feasible to make a bot that checks whether the redundant birth and death dates are inconsistent. That is, for every PerformanceNameRelationshipType AR P, which says that "artist A2 is a performance name for Artist A1", check whether A2's DateOfBirth is inconsistent with A1's DateOfBirth, and similarly for the DateOfDeath. The script could also check that the date attributes on P are consistent with the dates on A1. Given that this kind of check is feasible, I'm less concerned about the DataRedundancy. I like the benefit that newbies who know a well-known PerformanceName and don't know a LegalName will be able to find dates of birth where they expect them. —JimDeLaHunt 2008-02-17.

Another point that came up in the discussion (also in the chat) was whether the Begin Date of a PerformanceName should be the birthday of that artist at all or if it should be (if available) the date when the artist first used this PerformanceName (especially when she/he changes it over the time). I think this is a borderline case.. asume the example that person "Henry Peter Blah" performs under the name "Henry".. then shouldn't the Begin Date of Henry be his birthday because he was always called Henry? Or should his full name be an alias (it would not be visible then)? It was also proposed to make the full name a field in the artist data of the PerformanceName (like sortname and birthdate). I agree to that. --Shepard

A compromise suggestion: birthdays only get added to artists that have attached albums (or other musical relationships). That way the birthdays will be where newbies expect to find them, and duplication will at least be avoided in the large number of cases where the artist never uses their LegalName professionally. --MatthewExon

One cat-corner situation that is specifically PerformanceName related... I've run into an artist who was born a few decades after he died - or so P.D.Q. Bach's bio would have you believe... In any case, this is something the system just isn't built to handle, so it's in the annotation for the moment. -- BrianSchweitzer 2007-09-02 18:15:07

CategoryHistory CategoryStyle Author: JohnCarter