User:Gurch/Reports/Page ID lookup

While it is not guaranteed, generally page IDs are assigned sequentially to pages in the order in which they are created; thus, older pages tend to have smaller IDs.

This is not always true, as a number of things mess with the pattern; for example, deleting/restoring revisions, merging page histories, oversight and suppression. Additionally, pages created before March 2002 were migrated from an older version of the wiki software, and those pages' IDs do not correlate with creation date.

However, for the most part page ID can be used to give an estimate of page creation date, with the caveat that occasionally the estimate will be wrong, possibly even by several years.

Why do this at all? Determining the creation date for a page is relatively slow, and can only be done for one page at a time. However, page IDs can be fetched from the API 50 pages at a time (500 if you are an administrator), so if you are dealing with a large number of pages and only need an estimate, a script can obtain one much more quickly with the aid of a table such as the one below.