At present, the places you can record information about real people in a
P5 document are scattered.

The Corpora module defines <partic> and <particDesc> for participants in
a transcribed text. These allow for any number of so-called
"demographic" subelements, such as <birth>, <occupation>, <residence> etc.

The Names and Dates module defines <persName> and various subcomponents
for names of people, but resolutely eschews any attempt to describe
reality: it's onomastic, rather than prosopographic, by design.

The new Manuscript Description module defines a <person> and
<listPerson> which contains some of the same elements as <partic> but
also adds some. For example, <birth> is in the corpora module, but
<death> is in the MS one. (Not really surprising, since the people
manuscript describers are interested in are usually dead, whereas the
people corpus encoders are concerned with usually aren't)

We could resolve this confusion in either of two ways, it seems to me.

(a) we could define an entirely new module concerned with prosopographic
information, defining <listPerson> and <person> and their children, and
remove <partic> and <particDesc> from the corpora module

(b) we could do essentially the same but add the new elements to the
core module

(c) we could do essentially the same, but add the new elements to the
names and dates module

Any preferences? counter-suggestions? I have a slight preference for (a)
  over (c), since CO is already so grossly inflated, but would welcome
opinions.