{{Person categories}} or its shortcut {{L}} (from the original name "Lifetime") is for automatically generating all category tags related to birth and death years, including living people and missing or unknown values. The general DEFAULTSORT can be embedded as well. It should not be used to replace existing DEFAULTSORT and/or category tags.
{{subst:L|year of birth|year of death|sort key}}
will generate:
{{DEFAULTSORT:sort key}}
[[Category:BIRTH births]]
[[Category:DEATH deaths]]
Other cases are handled with options, see below. As with the original, the embedded magic word DEFAULTSORT also applies to all categories on the page, no matter whether the lifetime template is before or after them.
Since the {{DEFAULTSORT:}} should occur before the categories, the L template should generally be placed before the first Category tag, for example:
{{subst:L|year of birth|year of death|sort key}}
[[Category:ABC]]
:
[[Category:XYZ]]
Options
For each option, the default value is displayed in bold and automatically assumed if the field is left blank.
Please note that MISSING results in Categories that are not displayed on the page.
{{PAGENAME}} : should almost never be left blank (especially with Asian names, it is hard to see the difference between a missing sortkey and a sortkey identical to the article name due to a family-first name).
Asian name, Honorific prefix (qualifier suffix) : for assertion of sortkey assessment.