Template:Birth date and age/doc

Usage

These templates ({{Birth date}} and {{Birth date and age}}) return a person’s date of birth and optionally his/her age. The latter also has the shortcut: {{Bda}}.

Using this template rather than simply inserting the date into articles allows for the inclusion of hidden metadata about the date. This metadata can be used by web browsers and other software tools to extract the details, and display them using some other website or mapping tool, index or search them.

Syntax:

{{Birth date|year of birth|month of birth|day of birth}}

or

{{Birth date and age|year of birth|month of birth|day of birth}}

{{Bda|year of birth|month of birth|day of birth}}

Examples:

{{Birth date|1993|2|4}} returns "(1993-02-04)February 4, 1993"

{{Birth date|1993|2|04}} returns "(1993-02-04)February 4, 1993"

{{Birth date|1993|2|24}} returns "(1993-02-24)February 24, 1993"

{{Birth date and age|1993|2|4}} returns (1993-02-04) February 4, 1993

{{Birth date and age|1993|2|04}} returns (1993-02-04) February 4, 1993

{{Birth date and age|1993|2|24}} returns (1993-02-24) February 24, 1993

Month First (mf) and Day First (df) options

The default output of this template is to display the month before the day. The majority of readers will see the date displayed this way because they aren’t logged in and therefore don't have accounts with a date preference set. This default may not be appropriate articles about people from parts of the world where the day precedes the month in a date. In such articles the optional parameter, "df", can be set (to "y" or "yes" for example) to display the day before the month. Conversely the parameter "mf" can be set for month first, currently the default behaviour.

Examples:

{{Birth date | 1993 | 2 | 24 | df=yes }} displays "24 February 1993" to readers without a date preference.

{{Birth date and age | 1993 | 2 | 24 | df=yes }} displays "24 February 1993 (age 31)" to readers without a date preference.

hCard microformat

The templates also return the date, hidden by CSS, in the ISO 8601 format needed by hCard microformats. for example:

(<span class="bday">1993-02-24</span>)

As such, the {{Birth date}} template may also be used for the "foundation", "built" and similar set-up dates of companies, buildings, etc, provided day, month and year are all specified (it will not work for year-only or month-year dates)

See the microformats project for details.

Notes

When only the year of a person's birth and/or death are known, or if it is desired not to state a person's full dates of birth and death for privacy reasons, use the templates {{Birth year and age}} and {{Death year and age}} instead.

Note: The template will appear broken when the parameters are left blank (as seen above).

Note: Do not use this template inside of the Persondata template as it can interfere with data extraction.

See also

• Wikipedia:Age calculation templates
• {{BirthDeathAge}} – carries out the functions of this template and all the following ones
• {{Birth date and age}} – same as {{Birth date}}, except that "(age ##)" appears after the birth date
• {{Birth year and age}} – year of birth and approximate age
• {{Death date}}
• {{Death date and age}} – same as {{Death date}}, except that "(aged ##)" appears after the death date
• {{Death year and age}} – year of death and approximate age at death