Wikipedia talk:Selected anniversaries

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Template for how many years ago something was

It would be nice to have the selected anniversaries in the On This Day section of the home page show how many years ago something was. For instance something that happened in 1925 would say:

• 1925 (100 years ago) – Whatever happened.

I suspect this could easily be done with some sort of template that automatically calculated the date, similar to ages on a person's infobox. Relinus (talk) 01:08, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

March events

I've gone through moving 2024 events in March to their 2025 dates. I haven't touched Night of Power as I cannot see how it works from the article, and Easter 2025 needs sorting out. Secretlondon (talk) 19:48, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

OTD entries based on non-calendar-based recurring events

The question is, if something happened on Easter (or Thanksgiving, or Passover, or Ramadan, or Diwali, or any anniversary that is not purely Western calendar-based) many years ago, can that be a valid OTD entry for the same anniversary this year?

This was briefly discussed last Saturday at WP:ERRORS in relation to a specific Easter-related article, where there was a lot of support for allowing this kind of anniversary. That article ended up not being posted due to lack of time, but a similar Easter Monday-related article was published today, based on that discussion. That discussion is here. But of course, ERRORS doesn't get archived, and someone has asked about today's article here. If we decide to keep doing this, I'd prefer there be a discussion in the OTD talk page archives to point to, instead of that ad hoc discussion at ERRORS. In addition, there's a question of whether we need to "clarify" somehow that this is the anniversary of the moving-date event, not the calendar anniversary. So I'm bringing it here for further discussion. I'll ping everyone involved in that in a moment. Floquenbeam (talk) 20:54, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

Notifications of people in previous discussion: @Gerda Arendt, Ravenpuff, John, Launchballer, Fortuna imperatrix mundi, AirshipJungleman29, Narutolovehinata5, and PrimeHunter: Floquenbeam (talk) 20:55, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

First of all, thank you for taking the trouble to raise this issue here. Forgive my intellectual economy (or laziness); I'm short of time, so I'll just repost what I said at the previous discussion. "I think this would be a very valid use of IAR, and Wikipedia does not run on precedent but on serving our readers well. Easter is on a different date each year but it is still Easter." I think the idea of a clarification, if it is unintrusive, is a good one, a foot note or similar, just pragmatically to so we don't need to explain every time somebody queries it. John (talk) 21:01, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

I think it is worth remembering that it s “on this day, not “on this date.” Only the most trivial definition- i.e. “today” -of these phrases completely overlap.

You’d have [to] format the moveable feasts, second-Tuesday in May, &cet differently, or else you’ll reinforce the Main Pages reputation as Citogenesis Central. Qwirkle (talk) 21:12, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

I might not have been clear. Or maybe not understanding you. We do already move the anniversaries themselves each year (when someone remembers). Up on the top line. This is about, for example, having one of the bulleted entries saying something interesting happened on Thanksgiving in 1920, and including that for this year's OTD for Nov 27th, not Nov 25th (the date of 1920's Thanksgiving). Floquenbeam (talk) 21:21, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

Nahh, you were clear enough; my apologies if I was not. I am saying that you’d need a robust, uncontrollably different format for anything that didn’t line up by date, lest it lead to confusion in readers and Artificial Intelligence Augmented Stupidity scrapings. Qwirkle (talk) 21:35, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

I understand where the argument is coming from, but I think it would be best to not allow such exceptions as they would go against the spirit of what was intended by "On this day". When OTD was created, the intent was to give information about what previously happened on that particular date (as in, the intended meaning of "day" was "date" rather than any particular moving holiday). Claiming, for example, that something that happened on November 27 but actually happened when Thanksgiving fell on a different date in a different year, could at the very least lead to confusion. This, of course, does not mean ruling out featuring events that happened on Easter, Ramadan, etc. just that they should run on the actual date and not the movable feast. So for example, if something happened on an Easter that fell on April 1, it can run on OTD, but under April 1 and not under when Easter fell on a particular year. Narutolovehinata5 (talk · contributions) 22:16, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

Support having movable feasts as days in the sense of "On this day" for anniversaries, especially when mentioned in the OTD first line. On 20 April 2025, that line was "Easter (Christianity, 2025)". The Easter Oratorio, dedicated by its creator to Easter, not to 1 April, was clearly connected, even for readers unaware of the 2025 date. With strict rules insisting on "date" instead of "day", I would not have nominated the piece, for respect of the composer who would have observed quiet time then. Thanksgiving and Ramadan similarly: if an article has content related to Thanksgiving or beginning of Ramadan, it would want to see it on Thanksgiving or beginning of Ramadan, not some calendar day that may have nothing to do with the topic in a different year. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:16, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Interest in the Easter Oratorio was higher on Easter Sunday than on April Fools. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:43, 22 April 2025 (UTC)