Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/March 6, 2006

I put the years of birth and death in because I missed them when I read the blurb. An article about a person is incomprehensible if you don't know when the person lived. Not including the year of birth for a living person is probably OK, especially if there's a fairly recent image present. If we don't want years in brackets, we should somehow include the appropriate information in the blurb text.Zocky | picture popups 04:30, 6 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Stuff that goes in parenthesis after the name - the birth dates, foriegn spellings, transliterations, 'etc - does *not* belong in the featured article blurb. They interrupt the flow of writing, and make an already-long write-up longer. Nor do they add much, as the proximate span of any person so featured can be trivially gauged from the text. In today's case, it says she got her PhD in 1927, and won the nobel prize in 1983, therefore it's not a stretch to infer she was born in the early 20th century and lived until around the end thereof. Raul654 04:41, 6 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The first sentence is the definition of the article subject. It should be enough to read the first sentence to know what or whom the article is about. I agree that the stuff in parenthesis that articles normally include shouldn't be in the blurb. Most of it shouldn't even be in the first paragraph of articles at all. But, when a person lived is a part of the definition. If we don't want to go with the standard notation with years in ()'s, then the first sentences should include a time reference in prose. Zocky | picture popups 06:14, 6 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]