Template talk:Birth-date and age

See also

TBD (notes to self) See Template talk:Death-date and age -J JMesserly (talk) 20:37, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Formatting

This template does formatting (df/mf) options, as a legacy feature to maintain its ability to fully replace {{birth date and age}}. As far as I'm concerned, the formatting is a separate feature entirely and I don't care if it is in or out. All I care about is the microformat emission. -J JMesserly (talk) 19:11, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Birth date and age

This template should maybe based upon the {{Birth date and age}} date so the logic only resides one place? I.e. Call Birth date and age with it's parameters from this template. Then we also make sure that the new template conform to the other template in every way. Nsaa (talk) 08:29, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Are you proposing the new templates be dumbed down to be compatible with the old template? The old templates:

• Don't support non gregorian dates,
• no microfomats emitted for death dates?
• No time zone support
• No BCE support

I can go along with a merge that simply redirects to either code base, but the idea of a deep merge is untenable. You'd have to add numeric versions of these parameters, eg parameter 10 for gregorian year, parameter 11 for gregorian month, etc. If I have this wrong, then what new parameters do you propose that would be recognized by the old templates.

Note that this is a comprehensive inquiry. What we decide should be applicable across the entire family of microformat date templates including {{start date}}, and {{end date}}. With this merge also imply that plain text date templates such as {{marriage}} have compatible numeric syntax introduced? -J JMesserly (talk) 17:41, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Difference between this template and Template:Birth date and age

I don't completely understand how or why this template is different from Template:Birth date and age, other than the hyphen that separates "birth" and "date." The templates documentation doesn't offer much explanation. Can somebody explain the difference and perhaps add it to the documentation? Or, is it perhaps a duplicate? • Supāsaru 20:53, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

• @Supasaru: The hyphen-less template takes in the data in a different way (yyyy|mm|dd) from this template (date as text). They are serving the same purpose, but some work would be needed to convert the entered data to align these two templates. SFB 21:47, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

BCE and Julian calendar support

On 16 March 2025 @Gonnym: added BCE and Julian calendar support, at least according to the documentation. I would like to view the test cases that were used to verify this. Jc3s5h (talk) 23:16, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

I prepared some test cases at User:Jc3s5h/sandbox3. The test cases are based on Calendrical Calculations: The Ultimate Edition by Edward Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz (Cambridge University Press, 2018, Appendix C). The bce parameter does not appear to work.

If the bce parameter is supposed to apply to both the Julian date and the ISO 8601 date, there are a few days where there is a conflict. For example, December 31, 1 BC, Gregorian is the same day as January 2, AD 1, Julian. The same parameter can't serve for both. Jc3s5h (talk) 01:09, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I added two more dates to the test cases. Now that the template explicitly supports BCE dates, one would also expect it to support the years CE 11 through CE 99. But the year 70 is interpreted as 1970. Jc3s5h (talk) 02:03, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Is this template family worth saving?

I have edited the talk page of an early editor of this template, J JMesserly, inquiring whether this template, and related templates, are worth saving. Reasons to question their worth are

• The coding style is very hard to understand, and seems only meaningful to the original editor.
• the method for implementing time zones is undocumented.
• The template does not appear to look up the offset from Greenwich on the date passed to the template.
• It's claimed that Julian dates are supported, but there is no documentation or example of how to use it.
• It's claimed that BCE dates are supported, but there is no documentation or example of how to use it.

Jc3s5h (talk) 12:57, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I don't have answers but I have wondered why a birth date and age would be needed with an ancient date. Another template is {{birth date and age}} which does not have time zones or Julian dates. It gives an error with ages above 150. It does that to guard against user error since the date is supposed to be the birth date of a still alive person. Johnuniq (talk) 23:19, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

The point about people older than 150 years makes sense, but there are other members of this family of templates that could be used on people born more than 150 years ago, if only we knew how they were supposed to work, and if they did what they were supposed to. Jc3s5h (talk) 23:23, 17 March 2025 (UTC)