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Template:Categories will allow us to enter a person's Surname, birth year, and death year much quicker. If the birth year is not entered, it will result in Category:Year of birth missing. If a death year is not entered, it will result in Category:Year of death missing. If a surname is not entered, it will result in Category:Unknown Surname. In addition, for the birth and death year only, it will sort them by Last, First. I will add to the template so we can enter the People of, People from, etc. categories. Any thoughts? -AMK152(TalkContributions 02:00, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Everyone is of course entitled to use whatever template they wish and the fact is that most won't use anything. If we get people in the habit of using the person template, then, assuming your goal is to get massive coverage of birth and death dates, that is the best solution. Reason why is a bot can easily auto create year cats and for the most part, surnames (ok, except wonky Noble names- who cares about them anyway).~ Phlox 03:51, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
As I've just said on its Talk page, this looks like a very good step in the direction of automation and ultimate timesaving.
Regarding the Phlox comment about folk not using anything - I hope we can build this into all of our recommended people-page "templates" at Help:Starting pages, so that later editors can easily fill in the gaps by drag-or-paste if the initial creator hasn't filled all that he or she could have.
Am I right in assuming that the "Surname, First Etc Names" line will allow automatic application of that ordering in the categories where we want it (ie everything except the Surnames cat)? Wikipedia has (recently?) instituted a template that does that sort of thing (but also, of course, still needs human input at the start); if this works I may not need to look further into the WP one.
Robin Patterson 05:39, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
It will automatically sort by Surname, First except for the Surname categories. -AMK152(TalkContributions 20:01, 23 September 2007 (UTC)