March 27 and March 4 are the most common days for birth, death on Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

March 27 and March 4 are the most common days for birth, death on Wikipedia

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21 pointslermontov11 comments

It took me a while to realize that they are talking about the number of birthdays listed on the page about March 27[1], not actually combed from all Wikipedia person pages, as I expected from the title.

To anyone who knows even a little about how Wikipedia is edited, this shouldn't be a mystery at all; there are no automatic pages or statistics, even for fixed entities like dates, and there is no automatic cross-referencing.

So as you'd expect, a person entered every birthday on that page, and there is absolutely no reason to assume that comparable detail has been given to all other days of the year.

(I'd hardly call this an easter egg, and I wish more people understood Wikipedia enough to make this entirely uninteresting.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_27

Actually, there is some cross referencing.

wikidata[1][2] is used in some places, for example the population of london could be stored in wikidata, and referenced from all the translations of the london article.

Amusingly, Birthdays is the first example given in the wikipedia article about wikidata.

[1]https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata

June 21 is the summer solstice, and pregnancy lasts for 280 days. March 27 is exactly 280 days after June 21.

Given that March 27th is my birthday, and my daughter's birthday (my best ever birthday present), I was very interested in this. Too bad it's total crap.

I thought it was "March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb."

Alternate theory: March 27th is 38 weeks after July 4th.

Why would someone be motivated to do this?

I wonder if its the mystery editors birthdays.

Possibly. When I was a active wikipedia editor one of the pages I kept an eye on was my birthday. I'm also vaguely aware of famous people who share my birthday.

I found that the page is usually pretty quiet most of the year with a few days around the date it happens with events that year and also "20 years since" articles get published

Leaving a trace?

Assuming it's done manually:

It's easier to build a list of notable births from a search and update one page than to go through notable people, finding their birthdate and updating multiple pages.

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