# How does Wikipedia update ages?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-wikipedia-update-ages/1034785>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 10, 2026, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-wikipedia-update-ages/1034785 "2026-11-10T18:40:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\
**Post date:** [November 10, 2026, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-wikipedia-update-ages/1034785/1 "2026-11-10T18:40:26Z")

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There are over a million pages in Wikipedia which are biographical articles of living people. (Which is an astonishing number.) A standard feature in such an article is to show the subject’s current age.

A little math shows that this means around three thousand edits a day would be necessary to update ages as people have a birthday. Obviously this is not being done by direct edits.

So I assume there must be some automated system that notes today’s date and is able to search all biographical articles for people with that birthday and add one to their age. Is this correct?

Is this all done at one time? Or is it a rolling process depending on time zones?

Are there other similar automated editing systems that I haven’t noticed?

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**Author:** ![TemporalFix](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c6cbf5/32.png) [@TemporalFix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TemporalFix)\
**Post date:** [November 10, 2026, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-wikipedia-update-ages/1034785/2 "2026-11-10T18:48:59Z")

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It’s probably done by a little JavaScript program that’s part of the page and makes your browser compute the age. The computation is done by your local computer or phone, not by Wikipedia’s servers.

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**Author:** ![Lord\_Feldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lord_feldon/32/341_2.png) [@Lord\_Feldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lord_Feldon)\
**Post date:** [November 10, 2026, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-wikipedia-update-ages/1034785/3 "2026-11-10T18:55:43Z")

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The article itself doesn’t have to be edited at all. There’s a [template](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Birth_date_and_age) that automatically generates the age every time the page is loaded.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\
**Post date:** [November 10, 2026, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-does-wikipedia-update-ages/1034785/4 "2026-11-10T21:24:38Z")

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Interesting. I always assumed the text was there waiting, not generated when somebody opens the article.

So moving on to my other question, are there other examples of text that is generated like this when an article is opened?