

March 27 and March 4 are the most common days for birth, death on Wikipedia - lermontov
http://www.vocativ.com/news/208300/wikipedias-greatest-mysteries/

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chavesn
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_27)

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NickNameNick
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](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction)
[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata)

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

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thoman23
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.

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DrScump
I thought it was "March comes _in_ like a lion and goes _out_ like a lamb."

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

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tonydiv
Why would someone be motivated to do this?

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bitJericho
I wonder if its the mystery editors birthdays.

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slyall
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

