Talk:Dan Willard

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Date of birth

What would be considered a reliable source for date of birth? The page is already tagged with the category "1940s births" - ought this be removed for lack of citation?

This source corroborates the 1940s category tag already applied, and is consistent with the known life history of Willard: https://prabook.com/web/dan_edward.willard/540864 Jpt401 (talk) 08:14, 4 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The library of congress [1] is probably good enough. Their entry says they got the date from his thesis copyright page. But prabook is never a good source. I think it is just a web scraper. You cannot tell the provenance of their information, and whether it was from somewhere else more reliable (in which case cite that instead) or just some random web page. See Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 359#RfC: Prabook.com. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:22, 4 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Noted, thank you; fortuitously, the LoC link also lists date of birth as September 19, 1948 [0], so I will use that reference instead.

[0] Predicate-oriented database search algorithms, 1979:t.p. (Dan E. Willard) CIP data sheet (b. 9/19/48) [emphasis added] Jpt401 (talk) 08:42, 4 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]