7 ms·
Notable people born before 1700 tended to be born in years that are multiples of 10. I wonder if a lot of dates are less accurate than they're thought to be.
by Yardlink 12y ago
Notable people born before 1700 tended to be born in years that are multiples of 10. I wonder if a lot of dates are less accurate than they're thought to be.
- ejr 12y agoThat's part of it: "When exact birth year was not tagged, the individual was prorated over the appropriate time period." Which makes sense as you still get a relatively accurate portrait of the scheme. I wonder how large a roll the loss of records have played in erasing a large chunk of our history.
- kevinwang 12y ago"Judging from the spikes every decade prior to about 1800, it seems that Wikipedia generously applies birth year categories when birth decades would be more appropriate. Nonetheless, the birth categories turns out to be far better curated than the machine-readable PersonData field." Looks like it's a Wikipedia problem.
- Yardlink 12y agoAh right there in the article :)
- Yardlink 12y agoI'd expect the prorating to spread the dates evenly across the decade precisely to avoid this kind of periodicity. It seems to suggest dates have been inaccurately recorded with year precision as, say 1690 when some author along the line didn't know if it was 1686 or 1694.