Selected musicians with April birthdays: dates and names

A calendar entry is only as useful as its date and name fields. Below are selected musicians with April birthdays, grouped by day, followed by notes on checking dates and preserving names.

What to take away

Selected musicians born in April, by date

Two rows show the same failure. Billie Holiday, Loretta Lynn and Ella Fitzgerald all carried a birth year in publicity that their birth records did not support. The record won. That is the pattern to expect, not the exception.

Why the day can move by one

A birth recorded near midnight can land on the next day in a record kept in a different time zone. The local clock at the hospital and the clock at the registry are not always the same clock.

The fix is to store the date as recorded, plus the place, plus the time zone in force there. A page that keeps only the day has thrown away the field that explains the disagreement.

When two sources disagree

Holiday's example shows why a calendar entry should make room for a discrepancy instead of presenting one claim as settled. When sources disagree, explain the conflict rather than hiding it.

State both, cite both, and let the reader see the disagreement. A month index should explain what its grouping does and does not assert.

Sorting, collation and the name that came back wrong

Every stored character is a number, and numbers only become letters if you know which character encoding was used. Choose wrong and the text still renders, just as the wrong letters.

Accented characters and non-Latin scripts turn into runs of unexpected symbols, which is mojibake: readable output that is not the text anyone wrote.

A name index is dangerous because the damage is stable. Save the mangled form and it becomes the record. A later reader cannot tell corruption from an unusual genuine spelling, and a search for the correct name will not find it.

Romanization is a separate problem. It turns a name from one script into another, and there is normally more than one accepted way to do it. Two romanizations of one name are not two people, and a matcher that compares only the Latin forms will treat them as such.

A separate by-day page offers another example of why a sort key belongs in its own field rather than in the display name.

Why checking a date before publication matters

Take a single entry with a birth year that publicity got wrong. The arithmetic is simple and the reader can substitute their own figures.

Let N be the number of pages that copy the entry, T the minutes to correct one page, and V the minutes to verify the date against the record. The cost of fixing it after publication is N x T + V. The cost of verifying it before is V.

When N is large, V is the cheapest line in the budget. That is the whole argument for checking the record first.

Common questions about calendar data

Can a corrupted name be repaired automatically?

Often, if you can work out which pair of encodings was involved and the damage happened only once. Repeated conversions lose information permanently, and a repair attempt on a name that was never corrupted will damage it.

Is stripping accents a reasonable simplification?

Only as an extra search field. As the stored name it is a decision that the person's own spelling is optional, and it merges genuinely different names that differ only by a mark.

Which spelling should a page show?

The one the person uses, where that is known and published, with the others held as variants so that a reader arriving by any of them finds the entry. A separate musicians' page discusses why the identifier is the durable field.

Does this affect anything other than names?

Yes, but names are where it hurts most, because a name is the key people search by and there is no way to check a name against arithmetic or a dictionary. A corrupted title looks wrong. A corrupted name looks foreign. A separate month index describes how to report a wrong entry.