How does Wikipedia update ages?

Factual Questions
1

There are thousands of biographical articles in Wikipedia for living people. And one standard datum for each of them is their current age. But every day, there are dozens of people who have Wikipedia articles having a birthday and becoming a year older. (Today, for example, we had a group of people ranging from Prince George turning one year old to Licia Albanese turning a hundred and one. Happy Birthday to them along with Bob Dole, Orson Bean, Tom Robbins, Alex Trebek, George Clinton, Bobby Sherman, Danny Glover, Don Henley, David Spade, Rufus Wainwright, and Selena Gomez)

Do some people go around and manually update all those ages every day? Or is there some automated process that does it?

2

The birth date is coded. For example, on the page for Barack Obama, you see:

In the source data for that page is:


|birth_date = {{birth date and age|mf=yes|1961|8|4}}
3

You can read more about the Birth date and age template here:

4

So it just automatically adds a year to everyone’s age when the appropriate date is reached? Does it happen at midnight and where is it based on? Are these automatic edits reflected in the edit history of the text?

5

No, it is not an automatic edit. It is an ad hoc calculation.

Consider it to be a sort of programming. If you’ve ever edited a Wikipedia article, you know that if the article contains something like


[[Straight Dope]]

those brackets do NOT appear to people who are reading the article. Instead, Wikipedia translates it into being a link to the article titled “Straight Dope”. Similarly, it does a quick calculation and shows you the person’s age in plain text.

6

Out of curiosity what do the parameters “mf” and the “8” and the “4” for?

Brian

7

The mind boggles that anyone would think, that in this age of computers, someone would have the very tedious job of manually adding one to everyone’s age on their birthdays.

8

1961|8|4 = 1961-08-04 = 04 August 1961

No idea what mf is, though.

9

The 8 and the 4 are the month and date of the birthday of the person in question, in this case August 4. The parameter “mf” or “df” indicates whether you want the date to be displayed month first or date first.

10

Thanks. I was wondering about the “mf”, thinking it meant “male/female” but seeing nothing like that in the output.

I am very curious why they chose the cumbersome and cryptic “mf=yes” and “df=yes” instead of the simpler “mdy” and “dmy”.

11

Whoever created the template just decided to use those letters. If you don’t like it, you can create your own template and see if it catches on. (Not being snarky here. It’s just sort of how the templates propagate. Some guy makes one and uses it and spreads it, and eventually others catch on and retain the original code for compatibility.)

12

Given that I’m a professional programmer, I really did consider that. But then when I actually went to that link and read about it, and saw all the warnings about the hidden codes and 'bots and such, I realized that it’s not as straightforward as I thought. Still, maybe someday…

13

On some pages, like mine, the age reads “64 or 65” as Wiki only knows the year of my birth and not whether I’ve had my birthday yet this year.

14

It turns out that computers can do math.

15

I didn’t think that was a likely possibility but I was curious how the actual process worked.

16

Well don’t leave us all in suspense! Are you just old, or pensionably old? :stuck_out_tongue:

17

Well since my full benefit retirement age for Social Security is 66, I guess I’m the former, though I am already 65.

18

Duh! I was thinking “4” meant a 4 digit year but then couldn’t think of what the “8” would be.

Brian