Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26975268-20130201045831/@comment-188432-20130219222054

Nah, I'm not buying it. There's no reason to duplicate the information. All of it is on the birthday and deaths pages. All of it is easily accessible. It wouldn't be getting rid of anything. Rather, it would be focussing attention on it and presenting the information in a much less haphazard way.

Again, it does not matter to the production of Doctor Who what some actor's birthday is. It doesn't matter one bit when JNT died, because he wasn't in production of DW at the time. Putting all this information on a dedicated page gives people a focus for their enquiries.

It means that the real world day of the year pages have a natural limitation point. We would be saying, this is where we put production- and broadcast-relevant information only. It would be "this day in DW history", not "this day in DW birth and death days".

Imamadmad is quite incorrect when she asserts that this move would leave us with a lot less information. Far from it — we'd be freeing the page up for the tons and tons of interesting, date-related info about the production of Doctor Who that we've only barely started to cover. I could fill up these pages with information solely from the Hartnell years.

What's interesting about links to actors is not what their birthday is, but:
 * on what day were they hired?
 * on what day were they first/last in front of the cameras?
 * on what day did they formally submit their resignation?
 * on what day did they audition?
 * on what day did they first meet their co-star or producer?

There's just a ton of information that these articles are missing because we quite mistakenly believe that their birth/death day matters one single iota to Doctor Who history.