User talk:SJFreed

Patricia Belcher edit

I have reverted your addition of an unsourced date of birth to Patricia Belcher. In addition to Wikipedia's basic principle of citing sources (Wikipedia:Citing sources), a special need for citations applies with regard to elements of a biography of a living person (WP:BLPPRIVACY). Feel free to add a date of birth when it is accompanied by a citation to a reliable, published, non-primary source. Eddie Blick (talk) 02:47, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

Hi, thank you! The source I found was IMDB, which is mentioned in the External Links of the page but not cited. The individual date of April 7th is also mentioned here, on her personal website, but without the year. I looked at some other actors' pages to see if there was a citation standard for birthdates or if there were any others that combined two sources, but the few I looked at must have been lacking or cited in a way I didn't realize. I would appreciate any advice on how to effectively show & cite the combination of the three sources with respect to the biography guidelines! SJFreed (talk) 04:22, 28 January 2023 (UTC)

I appreciate your wanting to add a date of birth to the article. Unfortunately, IMDb is not a reliable source for use in a citation on Wikipedia. (It can be listed in the "External links" section, as you noted. You might want to read WP:IMDB to see some comments about it. I also suggest reading WP:USERGENERATED to see some other online sites that are similarly unreliable for use in citations.

Publication of personal information in a biography of a living person is more restricted than that for people who have died. The key statement is "Wikipedia includes full names and dates of birth that have been widely published by reliable sources, or by sources linked to the subject such that it may reasonably be inferred that the subject does not object to the details being made public." (from WP:BLPPRIVACY). The only way we can show such publication is with a citation to an appropriate source.

Another restriction comes from WP:BLPPRIMARY, which says that public records cannot be used as sources for content about living people. That eliminates state birth records, which sometimes turn up in searching online for information about a person.

Unfortunately, you will still see some biographies of living people with uncited dates of birth or dates cited to sources that should not be used. A few of us editors try to catch as many as we can, but many more have eluded us thus far.

I suspect that the official website omits the year out of privacy considerations. I don't know how the date without a year might be used in a Wikipedia article. Articles sometimes have a birth year with a citation, but no date, but I don't recall seeing any with a date but no year. You will also sometimes see something like "born 1970/1971". That technique can be used when a reliable source gives the person's age. A template called "Birth date based on age as of date" determines those years based on the age given in the source and the date of the article's publication.

I apologize for going into so much detail, but I hope this information helps. Eddie Blick (talk) 01:36, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

No need to apologize, I'm here to learn!

So, in summary, since none of the sites provided are both non-user-generated and contain the full YYYY/MM/DD date of birth, there's no source that meets the Wikipedia standards for citation, correct? SJFreed (talk) 22:29, 30 January 2023 (UTC)

That's the way it seems to me. You might post that question on the article's Talk page. Other editors might have different views. Eddie Blick (talk) 02:06, 31 January 2023 (UTC)