Template talk:Birth date and age

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y m d => December 25, 1984 (age 21)

d= m= y= => March 12, 1990 (age 16)

Contents 1 Request 2 Problem 3 Fall thorugh 4 Use in infoboxes 5 British or U.S. order 6 Error?

[edit] Request

This is a very nice & useful template, but it displays as "Month day, year". Perhaps those in the know could program a "day month year" alternative version for those articles that use that format? Bolivian Unicyclist 12:11, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

It displays the date however you have it set in your preferences. If you prefer the day-month-year order, just set your preferences to that. —Angr 11:51, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Kind of a mess because birth dates are usually in parentheses, so this template pretty much guarantees nested parentheses. Also, I'm not too comfortable with the notion that some people's articles should be tagged with their age; how does one decide which? - Jmabel | Talk 18:49, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

If you don't want the extra formatting, just use Template:Age. I created the original "age calculation" template so that those people who should be tagged with their age, can be. Which people those are, I haven't got a clue. Good luck deciding! --Uncle Ed 21:58, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Problem

Adding the template to Owen Wilson, I put in { { birth date and age|1968|18|11 } }, for the 18th November, but it came up June 11th. I don't think this is a problem with my preferences, because I've not chosen one. CelebHeights 16:51, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, it goes year|month|day in order from larger unit to smaller unit. Try { { birth date and age|1968|11|18 } } to get November 18, 1968 (age 38).

Template "arguments" don't follow your preferences. --Uncle Ed 17:54, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, not to sound brash, but is that not a serious problem? Not everybody uses the American way of writing dates.CelebHeights 13:16, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

You could do it like: {{Birth date and age|date=12|month=3|year=1990}} now, that Okay? Matthew Fenton (talk · contribs · count · email) 13:44, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, YYYY-MM-DD is an ISO standard way of displaying dates, not the "American way" (which is MM-DD-YYYY). And Matthew, I hope you updated all the pages using the template after you changed it, otherwise it's going to be broken on a whole lot of pages. —Angr 14:17, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Why would it be broke? Both ways work. thanks/Fenton, Matthew Lexic Dark 52278 Alpha 771 14:23, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fall thorugh

To make it international acceptable I've added fall through parameters (month=, day=, year=) - these can be called in any order during transclusion. Matthew Fenton (talk · contribs · count · email) 13:46, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Use in infoboxes

This template has been approved for use in {{Infobox actor}}. See Template talk:Infobox actor for discussion. Dismas|^(talk) 22:55, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] British or U.S. order

I have no preference between British d/m or U.S. m/d order. In fact, the default order of paramaters follows the East Asian (or "computer" order) or y/m/d. The idea is that the largest unit comes first. This matches the hour/minute/second order used elsewhere.

We could easily create a variant like {brit bda} or {british birth date and age} that uses year/day/month, but how many people actually would use it?

It's only when the year comes last (4/5/1980) or is omitted (4/5) that there's any ambiguity. But this template requires the year. And if the year goes first, I don't know of anyone who'd want to put the day next. Anyway, Matthew's fall through parameters should suffice. --Uncle Ed 12:38, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

In England we actually do <day>/<month>/<year>.. I thought it was U.S. that did <month>/<date>/<year>? thanks/Fenton, Matthew Lexic Dark 52278 Alpha 771 13:13, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, Ed had it backwards. For some reason people in this country (the U.S.) put it in month/date/year order. I've never understood it and I've lived here all my life. Dismas|^(talk) 13:16, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I was typing in a hurry and didn't proofread what I typed. Sorry for adding to the confusion. --Uncle Ed 14:18, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps the origin of the order (on my side of the pond) is usage like "August 10th". Then you might add the year as "August 10th, 1845". Note that the U.S. military chose to use d mmm yyyy order: 10 Aug 1845. I guess they felt the extra second or two it takes to write out the month abbrev. was worthwhile, to prevent confusion over whether 10/8 means 10th day of August or October 8th.

By the way, I learned a lot about dates and how they get entered into computers, stored and interpreted during in the two years leading up to the great "Y2K problem". --Uncle Ed 14:23, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Error?

the template page is reading:

[[ {{{3}}}]] [[{{{1}}}]] (age Expression error: Unrecognised punctuation character "{")

...is this correct? --emerson7 | Talk 18:06, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

That's just the rogue output from the template, in reality when called it won't spit out that error message to you :-) thanks/Fenton, Matthew Lexic Dark 52278 Alpha 771 18:18, 10 December 2006 (UTC)