Many airlines codify the dates in terms of DDMMMYY but with explicit reference to the month name instead of the month number. For example, your example could be represented as 01JAN23-31DEC86. Depending on the space and the context you could give yourself a some rope and expand the items a little bit. Given the particular nature that in this case both dates belong to another century, you could be a little more specific: 01JAN1923-31DEC1986. If you can spare some more space, maybe some spaces would be fine to make a clearer reading: 01 JAN 1923 - 31 DEC 1986. Another detail could be turning all those caps in month names to normal capitalization, as in 01 Jan 1923 - 31 Dec 1986.
You could even drop the leading 0s 1 Jan 1923 - 31 Dec 1986.
On the other hand, I've found this guide on date ranges. The following is just an extract, as there are more considerations when dealing with ranges with different lengths.
Dates of birth and death
At the start of articles on people, their dates of birth and death are
provided. For example: "Charles Robert Darwin FRS (12 February 1809 –
19 April 1882) was an English naturalist ..." The two dates are
separated by an en dash (HTML code: –). When either date
contains a space, the en dash is preceded by a space (preferably a
non-breaking space, code: ) and followed by a space. When full
dates are provided in the text or in an infobox, year-pairs can be
sufficient for the lede in some cases; in such cases no spaces are
used, e.g., "(1943–1971)".
- For an individual still living: "Serena Williams (born September 26,
1981) ...", not "... (September 26, 1981 –) ..."
- When only the years are known: "Socrates (470–399 BC) was..."
- When the year of birth is completely unknown, it should be
extrapolated from earliest known period of activity: "Offa of Mercia
(before 734 – 26 July 796) ..."
- When the year of birth is known only approximately: "John Sayer (c.
1750 – 2 October 1818) ..."
- When the years of both birth and death are known only approximately:
"Dionysius Exiguus (c. 470 – c. 540) ..."
- When the date of death is completely unknown, it should be
extrapolated from last known period of activity: "Robert Menli Lyon
(1789 – after 1863) ..."
- When the reign of a sovereign is uncertain: "Rameses III (reigned c.
1180 BCE – c. 1150 BCE) ..."
- When the individual is known to have been alive (flourishing) at
certain dates, [[floruit|fl.]] or {{fl.}} is used in articles, not
disambiguation pages, to link to floruit, in case the meaning is not
familiar: "Osmund (fl. 760–772) ..."
- When the individual is known to have been alive as early as about
660, and to have died in 685: "Aethelwalh (fl. c. 660 – 685) ..."
In biographical infobox templates, provide age calculation and
microformat compatibility with date mathematics templates. See the
documentation for those templates in order to use them properly, and
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Biographies for more guidelines on articles
about people.
Other date ranges
Dates that are given as ranges should follow the same patterns as
given above for birth and death dates.
Hope it helps.
This question takes us into the area of discretionary punctuation. Different style guides have different preferences on these points, and it seems to me that there is no compelling reason to prefer one guide's approach over another's.
Having said that, let me outline the recommendations that one particular style guide—The Chicago Manual of Style, sixteenth edition (2010)—makes. First, regarding the use of en dashes in regular text, Chicago says this:
6.78 En dash as "to." The principal use of the en dash is to connect numbers and, less often, words. With continuing numbers—such as dates, times, and page numbers—it signifies up to and including (or through). For the sake of parallel construction, the word to, never the en dash, should be used if the word from precedes the first element in such a pair; similarly, and, never the en dash, should be used if between precedes the first element.
[Relevant examples:] I have blocked out December 2009–March 2010 to complete my manuscript.
The London–Paris train leaves at two o'clock.
This guideline asserts, in the first place, that if your construction reads as "from July–September 2015," you should rewrite it as "from July to [or through] September 2015"; and that if it reads "between July–September 2015," you should rewrite it as "between July and September 2015." On the other hand, it seems to endorse the construction "the period July–September 2015," if you want to use an en dash (rather than to or through) there.
Another point that we may infer from the first example is that Chicago sees no reason to insert a comma between a month and a year in terms such as "December 2009" and "March 2010." I am not aware of any logical basis for rendering "December 2009" and "March 2010" without commas but requiring insertion of a comma after the month range in "May–July 2016."
Elsewhere, Chicago has this to say about commas with dates:
6.45 Commas with dates. In the month-day-year style of dates, commas must be used to set off the year. In the day-month-year system—useful in material that requires many full dates (and standard in British English)— no commas are needed. Where month and year only are given, or a specific day (such as a holiday) with a year, neither system uses a comma. ...
[Relevant example:] In March 2008 she turned seventy-five.
It seems clear from this guideline and the one cited earlier that Chicago strongly favors the form "December 2009–March 2010" (with no comma) in any instance where you are using en dash properly in a months-and-year(s) range. But again, Chicago would not approve of prefacing such a range with "from" or "between."
Best Answer
For a person for whom both dates are known, use the form “1923–2003” (preferably, per CMS, with an en dash, not hyphen, double hyphen, or em dash); for one still living, just write “b. 1923.”