 | This is a documentation subpage for Template:Start and end dates. It may contain usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original template page. |
 | This template is used on approximately 2,900 pages and changes may be widely noticed. Test changes in the template's /sandbox or /testcases subpages, or in your own user subpage. Consider discussing changes on the talk page before implementing them.
Preview message: Transclusion count updated automatically (see documentation). |
 | This template should not be used in citation templates such as Citation Style 1 and Citation Style 2, because it includes markup that will pollute the COinS metadata they produce; see Wikipedia:COinS. |
This purpose of the {{start and end dates}} template is to return the date range during which an event transpired or an entity existed. It also includes duplicate, machine-readable date (or date-time) in the ISO date format (which is hidden by CSS), for use inside other templates (or table rows) which emit microformats. It should be used only once in each such template and never used outside such templates. The hidden date degrades gracefully when CSS is not available.