Category talk:1954 Births

A category for fan deaths can be useful in terms of archiving permissions, for information on fan memorials and tributes, and dating fanworks.

But I'd like to understand why we need fan births notated. MPH 15:29, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

I figured it could be trivia and Pinky put in Birth cats on the articles she edited before me. If I wanted I could look up my birth year and see others my age, could be interesting. But its definitely not a fannish event, and there are privacy concerns since most fans don't outright say the year they're born in at any point. If birth cats would be more of a hassle to implement consistently on Fanlore, feel free to nip it in the bud now and not later. --Cavewomania (talk) 19:23, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

My vote is to not have birth year categories. MPH 23:20, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

I also vote no on birth year categories. I think many fans would dislike having this kind of personal information so public and having the categories encourages editors to add it. I also don't think sorting fans by birth year serves much purpose. --sparc 18:05, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

I strongly support retaining these categories. As I said on Category talk:Deceased, birth year, death year, and nationality categories are pretty standard on wikis with a fair amount of biographical articles (Wikipedia has Category:Births by year). I fully understand drawing a line at more ambiguous or sensitive attributes like ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, political affiliation, etc. But most people wouldn't view someone's year of birth as controversial or intrusive information when it's been publicaly stated.

Visibility probably deserves to be a consideration here. But I'd say there's a major difference between reporting the biographical details of high-profile fans like Cassandra Clare and combing through the Tumblr archive of i-love-klance-forever12 to find the time they reblogged a '90s nostalgia post with the tag "I was born a year after 9/11." BNFs often cultivate a kind of wide visibility that smaller fish in the pond don't. They have followings. They appear at cons. They are profiled by mainstream media. I don't think the Cassandra Clares of fandom have as much of a moral claim to privacy as the i-love-klance-forever12s. We have articles on LaptopGate and the plagiarism debacle. Why would stating that Clare was born in 1973 be a bridge too far? (You can tell my age from the fact she's the BNF I reached for as an example.) To be perfectly frank, it seems arbitrary. I feel that enforcing such a policy would be detrimental to our ability to write comprehensive articles about BNFs and creators.

Because why draw the line at categorizing by birth year? You can broadly infer someone's age from the anecdotes they share: watched the moon landing live, got a Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas, stayed up past bedtime to watch TNG's finale. You can infer age from favourite bands, authors, films, characters, etc. Someone who cites Lestat as their favorite vampire has probably lived longer than the average Edward Cullen fan. Should we disallow any quotes in which fans discuss their experiences, influences, and interests? I know I'm making a slippery-slope argument. But I feel it might help to reframe this issue. One's relationship with time can be a lot more revealing than the numerical data point of their age.

I'm in that tiny Xennial cohort that had a fully offline childhood, a partially online adolescence, and a fully online early adulthood. There's a weird resonance whenever I enjoy someone's work and then discover they're in the same microgeneration. We love Tumblr but we remember Usenet. And so I can understand both sides here. I see the merit in preserving something of the pre-Internet fandom ethos. But I can also see that this is fandom-centered wiki in the age of social media. Many who come across Fanlore will understand it as a wiki. I've long argued that Fanlore's categorization system needs development. I'm glad that other users have taken on the task. But I wouldn't be opposed to setting guideposts. Maybe we could limit inclusion in birth year cats to creators and fans with high visibility? I don't think our hypothetical i-love-klance-forever12 would belong in the "2002 births" category. I can understand how it might feel intrusive for a small-name fan to find themselves categorized in such a manner. But at the same time it would seem bizarre not to categorize Marion Zimmer Bradley or Vonda McIntyre by birth year when they are on Wikipedia. Night Rain (talk) 22:36, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm not in favour of Birth Year Categories. It makes sense for somewhere like Wikipedia, but most of the people we're documenting are fans, with a reasonable expectation of privacy - Our fan pages are mostly for people who aren't public figures, and they aren't famous or even well known. Fans might share personal data casually in fan spaces, with an expectation that it won't go any further. Many of our fan pages do contain some personal data (nationality/language skills/pronouns etc.) but it's very rare to come across age data, and a fan's "generation" is more often gleaned from their communities/fandoms. I don't think anyone who searches for their name on fanlore expects to see their birthday in an article. So I'm not in favour because I think categories would encourage editors to seek out and add personal data to articles. I'd much prefer to focus on a fan's "generation" - where were they active? what communities were they involved in? etc.

So far, this discussion has only focused on Fan pages. Do we want to treat Fan pages and People pages the same way? Our people pages are for actors, writers and other professionals. In many cases their birth years would be well documented on other sites, but the majority of our pages don't contain any information on age or birthday. I wouldn't be opposed to a Birth Year categories for people who are not Fans (if that makes sense?), but would that be useful in anyway?--Auntags (talk) 22:28, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

I understand the need to maintain different standards of relevance for articles on subjects who are clearly public figures vs. subjects who are clearly not public figures. But how do we handle special cases? The big fish in small ponds? The fans who go pro? Someone may have a very large presence in a public-facing fannish community like filk or historical re-enactment while being virtually unknown outside of it. These are questions that could be resolved through discussion and consensus. But I don't believe deleting birth-year categories would be a proportionate or logical response. Frankly, this feels like a solution in search of a problem. The issues raised could be solved with guidelines and monitoring. By establishing which articles may contain specific biographical data and hiding edits that contravene those guidelines. Again, we have articles about decades-old interpersonal conflicts in fandom, sourced with second-hand and often anonymous accounts. How would reporting a BNF's publicly-known birth year transgress the "reasonable expectation of privacy" when reporting quarrels they got into twenty years ago seemingly doesn't? I'm not seeing a consistent rationale here. There just doesn't seem to be a strong case against birth year categories, or against reporting confirmed birth years for figures of a certain stature in articles. I'm not pointing to Wikipedia's standards out of a sense we should blindly copy them. But there is a baseline that readers expect from wiki bios. What conclusion will readers draw if even our bios on household names like Harrison Ford don't mention birth when the first sentence of the corresponding Wikipedia articles do. I worry it will make the article look incomplete and hasty, and thus decrease the chance they read it. Night Rain (talk) 00:42, 11 December 2023 (UTC)