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Comment by ucaetano | Hacker News Reader

Good to see a balancing decision like this coming from Europe in general, and Germany in particular.

given the prevalence of age discrimination, it's disappointing that wikimedia didn't take the birth year down voluntarily

yes, the data's available from other sources, but a prospective employer might not see that until after evaluating some other aspects of her work, and end up hiring her in a situation in which they wouldn't if they found her age immediately

for that matter, i find wikimedia's prominent display of age for people in general to be a bit too forceful. is that really such a defining characteristic of a living person that it belongs in the highlight box ?

A lot of newspapers in the U.S. will print the age of the subject of a story or interview as a standard part of their style.

https://www.google.com/#q=%22said+smith%2C+25%22 https://www.google.com/#q=%22said+smith%2C+26%22 https://www.google.com/#q=%22said+smith%2C+27%22 https://www.google.com/#q=%22said+smith%2C+28%22 https://www.google.com/#q=%22said+smith%2C+29%22 https://www.google.com/#q=%22said+smith%2C+30%22

Nice demo. You could optimize it down to a single link:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q="said+smith%2C+18..75"

Cool, thanks for the tip!

If you are a employer spending billable time looking up people on wikipedia and facebook, would you not also have the budget to purchase a e-book, pay access to a registry with public data or get credit/police records? The age of the person is very likely to be included somewhere, especially if include it in the book.

Age itself doesn't really matter but I think having birth and death dates listed is really important because it tells you: 1) If the person is still living and 2) what era they lived in. Listing the age is just a natural byproduct of having the other two pieces of information and if it wasn't included conveniently in a box, could be easily calculated. I do agree that society in general puts a strange emphasis on age, as if whether someone is 30 years old matters vs someone who is 60. The only case where it's really relevant is that if they're living especially long, but then that would be mentioned in the article anyway.

According to your 2 points, only date of death would be important.

Knowing when they were born helps know what age they grew up in. Knowing someone died is great, but how old were they when they died is just as important if not more so.

> given the prevalence of age discrimination, it's disappointing that wikimedia didn't take the birth year down voluntarily

Consider how well the adoption of the Occlusion Method would work -- or rather, be received -- if applied to any other common adjective to discrimination. (Gender, (lack of) religion, race, redheadedness, etc)

To be clear, I don't think trying to keep your age a secret is an effective way to either a) keep your age a secret, or b) decrease the prevalence of age discrimination.

> for that matter, i find wikimedia's prominent display of age for people in general to be a bit too forceful. is that really such a defining characteristic of a living person that it belongs in the highlight box ?

Who knows. It's two characters, though, that are easily skimmed over when reading, and presumably enough people find the information useful to warrant its presence.

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