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Latest comment: 3 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
David Eppstein, please re-read WP:SDDATES. You quoted part of a sentence and ignored the rest that says "or enhance it as a descriptive annotation". Adding dates clearly enhances the annotation and your other edit summary "we don't and shouldn't put dates in shortdescs" is utterly false. A consensus on this was reached at SD project which led to the guidance at Wikipedia:Short description. Sorry if you don't agree with it but that is the consensus. MB23:33, 12 November 2021 (UTC)Reply
The original discussion of the language in SDDATES was at Wikipedia talk:Short description/Archive 8#Dates in short description. It is clear from that discussion that many participants were against adding dates to short descriptions as a general rule, but found them acceptable as a way of disambiguating articles when disambiguation is needed. Therefore, the specific language that was added to SDDATES specified that they should be used in cases where disambiguation is needed and where a date is a helpful way of disambiguating, and that for biographies in particular dates can be a helpful way of disambiguating. You, on the other hand, appear to be adding the date to a short description as a general rule, disregarding the question of whether they are needed as disambiguation. There is obviously no need for disambiguation in searches for which this article is a result, because the article title already has a better disambiguator (his profession) and because there are no other computer scientists with this name to disambiguate. I conclude that you are misreading SDDATES and misapplying the results of the consensus there. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:48, 13 November 2021 (UTC)Reply
