Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Days of the year/Archive 1

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Note about use of 'this day in history'-type data sources:

Please be careful when using 'this day in history'-type website lists as reference sources to update our selected anniversary, day, year and subject articles. Many of the events listed on our day pages come from data derived from other similar lists on the Internet. In my experience, most of those lists contain many inaccurate and flat-out wrong data. In 2003 I was able to expand and fix about half of all the day pages and found that 1/5 to 1/3 of the events listed on my major online reference source for that were at least subtly wrong or had spurious items that could not be confirmed (for a time I tried to use other similar online lists but encountered the same problem). I therefore spent a few hours on every day page I worked on checking facts, moving unconfirmed entries to day talk pages, and then updating the corresponding year and subject articles.

  • My guess is that most, if not the great majority, of these 'day in history'-type website lists swap data back and forth via rewrites that are not checked for accuracy. In time errors must creep in - just like a huge game of telephone.
  • Some entries on these websites seem to totally confuse Julian and Gregorian dates (even converting Julian to Gregorian for events that happened before the Gregorian Calendar was adopted!).
  • Other websites seem to have added events to specific days when the exact day the event actually happened on is not known at all (I've found that many of these guesses are placed on the 1st and the 15th of months on these websites).

In short, please check any fact obtained from these type of websites and also check any fact on our own day pages before updating its corresponding year or subject article (of course, when checking you should largely ignore other 'this day in history'-like website lists - especially the ones that are just copies of our day pages). --mav