Board Thread:Projects/@comment-30128802-20171213021820

A while ago, I suggest to Sugarhoney a mini-project (which he approved) of revising the "birthdate" fields of characters whose birthdates are derived from age. The issue was that many characters are given birthdates derived from their age listed in an official charater profile. For example, someone who is age 20 on June 1, 2030, could have been born anywhere between June 2, 2009, and June 1, 2010. However, as it is right now, a typical character infobox would simply list "2010" in this case, which is not necessarily canon.

Although this project been on the back burner, I haven't forgotten about it.

I've surveyed all the characters that are implicated. Below is a compilation of which characters have specifically known birthdates and which characters do not.

Category 1: Characters whose birthdates are known to the specific year

Hugh Darrow - 1973 (Official timeline) David Sarif - 1970 (by being age 57 in DXHR and age 58 in DXMD) Yelena Federova - 2001 (specifically stated in official bio) Viktor Marchenko - 1991 (stated in pocket secretary) Megan Reed - 1995 (Sarif datafile) Francis Pritchard - 1991 (Sarif datafile) Athene Margoulis - 1970 (Sarif datafile) Adam Jensen - well known Masaaki Oshiro - Info panel in Blade Plaza Ashani Talwar - Info panel in Blade Plaza

Category 2: Characters whose birthdates can only be approximated (to a range of 2 years) by the character's age

Age listed in DXHR official character bios - Faridah Malik - Jaron Namir - Lawrence Barrett - William Taggart - Isaias Sandoval - Tong Si Hung - Zhao Yun Ru - Zeke Sanders - Wayne Haas - Bob Page

Age listed in DXMD bios - Alex Vega - Delara Auzenne - Elias Chikane - ShadowChild - Hector Guerrero - Frederick Flossy - Talos Rucker - Vaclav Koller - Jim Miller

Age listed in DXU: Children's Crusade Bios - Duncan MacReady - Daniel Fletcher - Peter Chang - Elias Chikane

Age listed in in-game profiles - Arun Singh - John Trent

The Birthdate Information Project

As discussed in the post on Sugarhoney's wall, the birthdate for the second category above will be converted into a year range, together with a note on the character's age, e.g., "1992-93 (age 36 in A Criminal past)".

(As an aisde, I think listing a character's age is more directly useful to most readers, as it avoids having to do mental math to find out how old a character is. This is probably why most characters are only given an age, rather than a birthdate.)

The Timeline poses an issue because you can't list an entry for a date range. Thus, for the timeline, I think the best approach is to list the birthdate on the simple-subtraction birthdate year, and then add a note saying that the character may have been born on this or the previous year. For the format of this note, I think a mouse-over tooltip over the word "born" would be the least intrusive method. The alternative is something like a "[note 1]" superscript, but this might not looks as clean.

Any suggestions are welcome. If there are no comments (or objections), then I will go ahead and implement this by the upcoming weekend (around December 16-17, 2017). 