Talk:2019 in Australia

Death section format change

Last night I made an edit to this death section of this page which among other things replaced the age of death with the year of birth, added additional photos to fill up (but not overflow) the images on the side and linked each individual day (i.e. 1 January). Essentially I did so not only to make the page more presentable, but also to make it in line not only with the death section of the main 2019 page, but also with that of 2019 in the United States. However, this edit has since been reverted by @Canley: - you can go back and have a look at the end result on the "View History" section. What does everyone think - should we go along with the changes I put forward? --Thescrubbythug (talk) 03:21, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

When I saw the page last night I felt that it looked overly complicated and wondered how I would match the formatting if I were adding a record of another person's death, as I sometimes do. Changing this page would mean that every year in Australia page would need to be edited to match, which I believe to be an unnecessary use of editors' time, particularly when there is so much still to be added to Wikipedia. Oronsay (talk) 07:04, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

My main concern was WP:DATELINK. Over ten years ago it was standard practice to link all dates (partly to allow month or date first formatting based on preference), but after much discussion and several RFCs, the consensus reached was it was a kind of overlinking and the Manual of Style added: "Month-and-day articles (e.g. February 24 and 10 July) and year articles (e.g. 1795, 1955, 2007) should not be linked unless the linked date or year has a significant connection to the subject of the linking article, beyond that of the date itself, so that the linking enhances the reader's understanding of the subject."

With the age/year of birth options: I can't really see an advantage in listing (and linking) the year of birth (although this seems to be somewhat standard for 19th century "Year in Australia" articles – was never sure why but I suspected because year of birth was often known but not the specific age or date of birth)—for contemporary articles I feel the age at death is more informative and meaningful, and does not trigger the cognitive load of performing a mental calculation. Looking at an age figure, one can quickly get a feeling of the distribution of death ages including old/young outliers. Listing birth year can too, but my brain is often inclined to attempt the subtraction to check my feeling of the age is correct—"Wow, that guy died at 112!" as opposed to "Hmm, (b. 1907), so he must have been, hang on, 2019 − 1907 = 112"—I accept that it could just be me that does this! Finally, which country does what: certainly USA, France and Germany link dates and years and show date of birth not age—I accept that that's a reasonable set of very major countries which do this, although I feel it flies in the face of WP:DATELINK. The UK articles are the same as Australia (no links, age at death), and New Zealand shows year of birth not age, but doesn't link dates. It's a bit all over the place, and I guess whatever the editors who maintain the articles are happy with seeing and maintaining—although I'm guessing you would be willing to do the work to reformat previous years, so I'm not worried about that. If others think that format is more useful and presentable, that's fine and I won't oppose it, I just thought it needed some discussion for what is a pretty major change which was made without so much as an edit summary. --Canley (talk) 07:46, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

Also, I have no issue with the photos by the way, they're great. I couldn't undo the reformatting edit so I reverted back to a previous version—but by all means add the photos back in. --Canley (talk) 07:51, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

Looks like the UK articles did list the birth year until 2013, but have been age at death since then. And of course Deaths in 2019 shows the age, and does not link dates. Another issue is, if listing the birth year, do you say "(born 1972)" or "(b. 1972)"—is there a chance readers may not know what the "b." abbreviation means? I guess there is a chance they don't know what the number after the name means as well... Finally, in WP:DATELINK is does say date linking is "not discouraged" in "intrinsically chronological articles" which I guess applies here, but I still don't see the point of linking to dates, even if others are doing it because they always have. --Canley (talk) 08:14, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

From what I can gather there does seem to be a lack of consistency regarding the formatting with the "Year In Australia" articles, both when it comes to early 20th Century and as you pointed out, 19th Century examples. That said I'd be more than willing to take a crack at updating each one myself (also with the earlier years, the birth and death lists are almost empty - which should also eventually be rectified), just as I've been updating the Incumbent section of each page (so far, every year from 1964 onwards is complete). --Thescrubbythug (talk) 15:41, 24 August 2019 (UTC)