User talk:Nygeek

A belated welcome!

Here's wishing you a belated welcome to Wikipedia, Nygeek! I see that you've already been around a while and wanted to thank you for your contributions. Though you seem to have been successful in finding your way around, you may still benefit from following some of the links below, which help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:

Need some ideas of what kind of things need doing? Try the Task Center.

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Again, welcome! Graham87 15:19, 8 February 2023 (UTC) Graham87 15:19, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Birthdates

Hello, thanks for your edits to remove birthdates at Gary Giddins and Susan Landau (I found your edit to the former page while responding to this message). Per the policy about privacy of biographies of living people, it is indeed OK to remove birthdates in cases like this where the subject/someone close to them objects. However, I've put just the years back because:

They're well-sourced in both cases.
Wikipedia has a system for categorising people by year of birth and you just removed the dates/years in the text but not in the categories. Categories should be supported by the text in their articles.
The above-mentioned policy says that only the year of birth should be used in cases like this. The year also *could* be removed if absolutely necessary but this isn't normally done and creates further categorisation problems.

Hope this all makes sense. Graham87 15:19, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Graham87 Both of them asked me to remove the birthdates. I understand that the facts are out there. My guess is that they would prefer to include month and day and *omit* year. Age discrimination is real. Nygeek (talk) 19:55, 10 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah that's even more unconventional on Wikipedia; I've literally never encountered that. In the case of the Gary Giddins page, I actually wanted to know his year of birth (or at least approximately) so I could find out roughly how old he was when he would have interviewed Benny Goodman. Just the idea that they were alive at the same time for an in-depth interview was ... interesting to me. And given the number of jazz luminaries he managed to interview, I'm sure I'm not the only one who wanted to know that sort of information. As for Susan Landau, the years she gained her degrees are given (as is usually standard) and it's easy to infer her approximate year of birth from those. The actual dates of birth can be used for identity theft, etc., so that's why removing those can be considered more acceptable. If you have further questions about the guidelines around them, you can ask at the policy's talk page. Graham87 05:28, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]