Template talk:Death date and age/Archive 3

Using Module:Age
I plan to use Module:Age to implement this template soon. Death date and age/sandbox uses the module and can be used for testing. The module checks dates are valid and has more features.

The current template documentation says the "year, month, and day of death are required" but that is not the case. For example, William Inge (judge) has The template requires the month of death but that seems to be a limitation due to wikitext complexity rather than a wanted requirement. The module requires the year of death and the year of birth. All other fields are optional.
 * → May 1322

The module also accepts two dates in a variety of formats:

The main reason to use the module is to improve the error messages that can occur (see above). Examples of error messages: Earlier I thought that using the module would reveal 30 or 40 problems in articles that would need to be fixed. After looking more closely, I don't think that is the case because the existing template mostly calls age which uses the module, so dates are already validated. Johnuniq (talk) 09:30, 7 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Once you've updated this template. Just wondering if it's also worth doing Template:Birth date and age2 as well? -- WOSlinker (talk) 11:41, 7 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Will the updates either issue a warning, or not produce metadata, if either date is before 15 October 1582? Jc3s5h (talk) 12:08, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Compatibility was my first thought, so no. Putting the two templates for William Inge above into Special:ExpandTemplates shows they generate exactly the same output, except the module does not have the extraneous comma after "May". That cutoff date is unclear because, as you would know, the switchover date varied enormously worldwide. However, it would be pretty easy to add a test to not output the metadata. I was also wondering about whether the metadata should show zeroes for missing month/day (it currently does), or whether an unknown component should mean the metadata is omitted. Johnuniq (talk) 22:33, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I switched the template to use the module. Problems will appear in Category:Age error which I check regularly. Johnuniq (talk) 22:55, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I understand the module is supposed to emit metadata that follows the V-card standard. That standard says it follows a subset of ISO 8601:2004. I have a copy of that that I grabbed before ISO removed all the publicly accessible versions. The relevant section indicate that if the date is unknown, it may be omitted. Similarly, if the month and date are both unknown, they can both be omitted. Substituting zeros for unknown values is not mentioned, and is therefore incorrect. The examples given in the standard are 1985-04 for April 1985, and just 1985 when neither the month nor date are known. Jc3s5h (talk) 03:32, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Would you mind posting a new section with a proposal for what should happen with the metadata. According to the doc, the metadata is not official anyway because (it says) there is no standard for death date metadata. Therefore I'm not sure if it matters what we do, but I have no concern about removing it if wanted. The year is always known (omitting the year gives an error). Apart from possibly omitting metadata when the month or day is unknown, there is the question of what to do when the death date is before the official Gregorian calendar. We need some discussion from people with an interest in metadata. Any sign of consensus would mean I'd be happy to do what is needed with the module. Johnuniq (talk) 05:00, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Do you know if all the date and biography related templates all use Module:Age? Would fixing Module:Age fix all of them? It seems a shame to fix it for just the death date and age template when all of them are an issue. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:51, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

There are lots of related templates and many do not use the module. I listed some at Module talk:Age. Some of those output metadata. I looked at birth-date and age and it outputs a lot of HTML that is quite different from birth date and age: April 12, 1941 April 12, 1941 &amp;#160;( 1941-04-12 ) (age&amp;nbsp; 77)

April 12, 1941 ( 1941-04-12 ) April 12, 1941 (age&amp;nbsp;77)

May 1993 May 1993 &amp;#160;( 1993-06 ) (aged&amp;nbsp;52)

May 1993 May 1993 (1993-05-00) (aged&amp;nbsp;51–52) There would be a fair bit of turmoil in getting all the templates cleaned up, and there are several that I did not list that probably should be deleted. Proceed slowly, I guess. I will ping MB to be sure they know the message problems mentioned above have been fixed. There were only a couple of glitches in articles and they have been fixed. Johnuniq (talk) 06:35, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I added outputs from death-date and age and death date and age as well. Johnuniq (talk) 08:42, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I put more details at Module talk:Age and asked about the metadata at WT:WikiProject Microformats. Johnuniq (talk) 09:32, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

confusing error message
This template seems to accept Feb 29 only for leap years. For example, February 29, 2016 works fine. With an invalid death date, there is an error but it points to a problem with the birth date: February 29, 2015 (That's how I interpreted the error message - "second date" meant the birth date)

But with the an invalid birth date, there is a different error: February 28, 2015

This was even more confusing because Template:death date doesn't seem to care at all, e.g. February 29, 2015, February 30, 2016, February 31, 2016

Is there any way to have the template say specifically which date (death or birth) is in error. I assumed there was a problem with the birth date because of the "second date" part of the error message. I was further misled when I "confirmed" the death date was correct by trying February 29, 1523 in template:death date, where it worked fine. So I went back to looking for a problem with the birth date and finally figured out the problem was really with the death date because there is no Feb 29 in 1523. MB 06:24, 4 January 2019 (UTC)
 * This situation arises because the template uses wikitext for most functionality but calls age to display the age in years. The latter is implemented by Module:Age and it requires valid dates and issues the unfortunate message. It says the second date is invalid because that is what it is given:
 * Input:   February 29, 2015
 * Output:  29 February 2015 ( 14 )
 * Notice that the dates are reversed in age and the invalid date is the second.
 * The fix would be to implement the logic of this template in Module:Age but I haven't got around to that. I converted a fair number of other templates to use the module to get proper date validation but it involved a ton of manual fixes to articles with invalid dates. Johnuniq (talk) 06:47, 4 January 2019 (UTC)


 * I will be glad to help with manual fixes to cleanup errors. Just let me know. MB 15:32, 6 January 2019 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks. I put a new version in Module:Age/sandbox but have run into an irritating glitch regarding what it does if the second date (the birth date) is omitted. I also investigated how the template is used in articles and there aren't many problems (maybe 30 or 40) because this template calls age and it requires valid dates, so many old problems have been fixed. I think I'll be another few days and will ping you when I update this template to use the module. Johnuniq (talk) 22:15, 6 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Perhaps I'm merely repeating what others have already pointed out, but the error message "Error: Death date (first date) must occur after birth date (second date)" is confusing - or even false (because in this template the death date must occur before the birth date). --77.173.90.33 (talk) 09:28, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * No, that's not correct—the death date (first date) should be after the birth date (the second date) meaning that the first date has to be later than the first. On 7 January 2019 I updated Module:Age to implement this template, and updated Template:Death date and age to use the module. That means the messages above are obsolete (they refer to what the old template did before 7 January 2019). It looks like I forgot to ping MB so here is a late notification. Johnuniq (talk) 10:36, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Editors enter two dates when using this template. One of these comes first, the one on the left. The death date may be chronologically last, but it's included first. Neither the error message nor what you write makes any sense, and both are completely confusing. --77.173.90.33 (talk) 10:40, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * And, by the way, I'm talking about this error message: June 10, 1913 "Error: Death date (first date) must occur after birth date (second date)" --77.173.90.33 (talk) 10:43, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I think the confusion is caused by "occur" being multi-interpretable. Occur (exist) in the template vs. occur (take place) chronologically. --77.173.90.33 (talk) 10:53, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Yes, that is unfortunate. What should it say? Johnuniq (talk) 10:57, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * I know we'll get into the nitty-gritty of "template-speak" vs "captain dummy talk", but we could change it to say Death date (first date values) must occur after birth date (second date values) or something similar, to make it clear that it's the parameter set we're referring to (simply saying "first parameter" might be confusing since technically the dates are three params. Primefac (talk) 12:11, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Phrase "must occur after" there can still cause confusion. I actually wanted to reply to you with "before :)" thinking you made a mistake. But then I realized you're simply using occur chronologically. So, your suggested phrasing doesn't solve the problem (fully). --77.173.90.33 (talk) 14:32, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Death date (first date value) must be later in time than the birth date (second date value)? Without semantically deconstructing every nuance of every word we use, I'm not sure if we're making things better or worse by being this specific. At some point we have to assume that the users will have some idea of what we're talking about. Primefac (talk) 21:35, 30 March 2019 (UTC) And I apologize if I sound snarky or sarcastic, I'm genuinely curious how we can be succinct and avoid being overly verbose.
 * What you suggest here - Death date (first date value) must be later in time than the birth date (second date value) - seems perfect to me. --77.173.90.33 (talk) 22:28, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

I updated Module:Age with a new message namely "". That's slightly different from Primefac's suggestion but should be adequate and is consistent with other messages. I did some i18n work for the Bengali Wikipedia in February and took this opportunity to put that in the enwiki module so it's a massive change. Johnuniq (talk) 01:11, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks Johnuniq. --77.173.90.33 (talk) 09:48, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

"Age" versus "aged": 2019
Read all of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Death_date_and_age/Archive_2#%22Age%22_versus_%22aged%22 - no consensus was reached.

Can we reach a consensus now?


 * Yes (if en-US is specified use "age", else use "aged") - I have lived in the US all my life, and I know one other person who (I'm fairly sure) has also lived in the US for all of their life and thinks that "aged" in this context is wrong. The word "aged" in this context is not American English, but it is British English. --User123o987name (talk) 07:36, 11 May 2019 (UTC)
 * This page won't get general views. I suggest asking at WT:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers. The link to the 2015 discussion is Template talk:Death date and age/Archive 2. Johnuniq (talk) 07:54, 11 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Agreed. There are 42 page watchers here with maybe a third checking it regularly. Getting a change made to a template used on 200k+ pages will require a little more input. If you do decide to start a discussion, though, please make sure there's a link here so that people like me who only watch this template (and not MOS pages) will know. Primefac (talk) 11:57, 11 May 2019 (UTC)