Wikidata:Property proposal/date of probate

date of probate edit

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Person

Done: date of probate (P9946) (Talk and documentation)

Description	date on which the person's will was proved
Represents	probate (Q6500369)
Data type	Point in time
Domain	human (Q5)
Allowed values	date
Example 1	John Playford (Q18756897) → 29 April 1685
Example 2	James Digges, of Digges Court (Q104038718) → 24 November 1540
Example 3	Sampson Lanier (Q96621661) → 5 May 1743
Example 4	Cornelius Van Ranst (Q96311184) → 24 May 1762
Planned use	for approximating death dates when only the date the will was proved is known
Robot and gadget jobs	possibly search descriptions for "probate date", "will proved on", "will proved", etc., and populate this property accordingly.
See also	date of baptism (P1636)
Distinct-values constraint	yes

Motivation edit

Recommended EN aliases: "will proved on", "probate date"

Often, we know only the date a person's will was proved, which gives us an "earlier than" approximation of a death date. I drives me nuts that we can't record this as structured data. It is often included in item descriptions since there is no dedicated property (see examples 2-4 above). This property should be allowed as a statement or as a qualifier for death dates. PKM (talk) 20:59, 1 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion edit

Support as proposer. - PKM (talk) 20:59, 1 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose What about <person>significant event (P793)probate (Q6500369)point in time (P585)<date>? --Tinker Bell ★ ♥ 19:41, 2 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I agree with Tinker Bell that we cannot have properties for every personal event, and that there are lots of cases when having a significant event is best. I think this property might be special because it supports Wikidata's very strong bias for identifying dates of death. @PKM:, can you say something more about where you got the data for the dates of probate in your examples? Also, can you make a guess at how many more probate dates someone knowledgeable might find if they looked? I am curious if this is a rare property likely to turn up 10s of cases versus something where we could plausibly find 1000+ values if someone went through a process or dataset. Blue Rasberry (talk) 22:37, 12 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- @Bluerasberry: For Playford, the date is from ODNB. For Digges, the date is at The National Archives. For Lanier, the date is in Genealogics. For Van Ranst, the date is also in Genealogics. A search of ODNB returns 19,200 records with probate or will proved dates. Some of these do have an actual date of death as well.
- @Tinker Bell:, I believe "date pf probate" is equally valuable to "date of baptism in early childhood" as clarifying the limits on our understanding of birth and death dates. - PKM (talk) 21:20, 13 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  - Support This is comparable to baptism and seems to be a field which multiple other databases already note as routine biographical information. Blue Rasberry (talk) 22:39, 13 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support even if it's probably more useful for some countries than for others --- Jura 22:45, 13 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support Nepalicoi (talk) 08:01, 4 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@PKM, Tinker Bell, Bluerasberry, Jura1, Nepalicoi:

Done date of probate (P9946) Pamputt (talk) 19:57, 6 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]