This is one thing I remember from Wikipedia that I actually want to bring over here. Basically, we celebrate birthdays of those who sign up. The way it would work is that you just enter your birth month (and your birth day, if you want the message to reach your talk page on the appropriate day) when you sign up, and every time your birthday comes around, you get a message saying “Happy birthday!” I want to minimize the exposure of personal information of those signing up for this project to just the birth month and the birth day. Signing up would be 100% optional for those concerned about user privacy.
My birthday is coming up soon (I will be 18), and I think this would be a little side gig that everyone could enjoy.
@Awesome-Aasim
I think this is a great idea I would love to help make and be part of this project. Just a suggestion maybe a small section in the Herald about that month’s birthdays?
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This could be a neat idea, but I wonder if wikiBirthdays might gain more traction than IRL birthdays? I think some people might be more hesitant to provide even their birth month as opposed to their wikiBirthday. Just a thought.
@Eric
You make a fair point and a think thats a even better idea. @Awesome-Aasim
any thoughts?
I think we can have both. Those who are willing to provide their birth month and birth day will also get notice of their actual birthday, so double the celebration
Another fair point if @Eric
thinks it’s okay I think we have finalised this idea. Maybe can start working on it
My personal opinion: I’d lean towards doing a wikiBirthday type of thing instead of a real birthday thing. Like Eric mentioned, I’m sure a lot of people are hesitant to share their real birthdays here. Not to mention we do have minors editing with us, and I could see younger ones being a bit overeager to share their birthdays without realizing that it’s not the safest thing to do.
Another question - how would this actually work? It could be really sketchy to list people’s actual birthdates on a wiki page or an open Google Doc (there’s web crawlers and the like, plus there are really persistent trolls who sometimes gather as much info on you as they can). Plus, if we’ve got a bunch of people registered on this that later go inactive but don’t delete their accounts, it can be hard to know who to keep on that list and who to remove.
I have started a draft. See here: wikihow.com/wikiHow:Birthday-Committee
I have tried to make a system kind of like a calendar - but I am not going to waste my time create 365 pages for each day of the year * 2. So I just made it so that you can add your birthday entry by simply clicking on the “edit entry” button on the appropriate day of the year. Not super ideal, I was going to have subpages transcluded in the main page, but transcluding headers for some reason stopped working after the upgrade.
I think the system is okay but if it gets popular we may have to figure out how to get transcluding headers working.
@Awesome-Aasim
I added a black outline to the page just because i felt that it made the page a little nicer to look at.
I agree with @Galactic-Radiance
; sure, I’ve shared my birthday like it was nothing, but think about it… if people find out your age, and the month and day you’ve been born, then that could end badly, as they could figure out the exact date. Even I’m not dumb enough to share the year I’ve been born in, but I was dumb enough to share the age one time (not going to tell you where so you don’t know). Nope, not gonna share it. I’ve decided that even when I turn 13 I’m not going to share it, as what point would that be? You don’t know who’s out there…
Very True we could focus on just doing wikiBirthdays because it would be much safer than if you shared you real birthday
It would probably be better with wikiBirthdays like other people have mentioned, but I think this is a nice idea overall, @Awesome-Aasim
I agree most people know waaaaay more about wikiLfe than personal life
I was testing and for some reason this is stuck on this page.
Saw you fixed something and I tested it again it’s all up and running correctly. @Awesome-Aasim
We may just want to delete the actual birthday based on what Helpie and Galactic Radiance said.
@JayneG
would you like to be the first person to put your WikiBirthday or real birthday to test what I worked on the past couple of days? You know I added a “Prefer not to say” for both wikiBirthdays and regular birthdays.
(You may have to Ctrl-F the month and then click on the appropriate day underneath the month header.)
And @Editor-Jr
feel free to add yourself to the member list.
