Born On Your Day

How this works

This is a fun page, not a claim about you. Every fact links to a public source you can open and check yourself. The pages are built automatically from public records, and figures are accepted or rejected by automatic rules rather than checked one by one by a person. This page says what those rules are.

Who gets listed

Everyone here starts from Wikidata, the open knowledge base behind Wikipedia, and must have a birth date known to the day. People are found by automated queries, not picked by hand: wealthy and entrepreneurial people first, including everyone in English Wikipedia's “billionaires by nationality” categories, then Nobel laureates, chief executives of well-covered companies, scientists, athletes, artists and historical figures with enough coverage to be interesting.

How the text is made

Records are enriched automatically: Wikipedia pageviews measure how widely a person is read, a short description is taken from the opening of their English Wikipedia article and credited to it, and a photo is attached only when Wikimedia Commons shows a free licence. Every other sentence on a date or person page comes from a template that is used only when the data behind it exists, with its numbers computed from the records. No AI model writes descriptions or creates any person, wealth figure, company link or milestone.

What “billionaire” means

A person is shown as a billionaire only when Forbes, Bloomberg, the Sunday Times Rich List or Hurun reported an estimate of at least $1 billion, the estimate reached us by one of the two routes below, and the date of that estimate is shown next to it. Wealth changes. Nothing here is a live figure.

Where wealth figures come from

Each estimate shows a value or a range, a currency, an “as of” date and its publisher. A figure reaches the site by one of two automatic routes, and no person reviews each figure:

  • a Wikidata net-worth statement that cites a Forbes or Bloomberg page, in US dollars, with a date. These are labelled as recorded on Wikidata and not yet re-verified on the publisher page;
  • a sentence in the person's English Wikipedia article, accepted only if it passes every rule below.

The rules for a Wikipedia sentence, all required:

  • it says “net worth”, and the amount belongs to those words, not to a sale, a donation or a company;
  • the amount is in US dollars; other currencies are left out, not converted;
  • it carries a citation, and the figure is attributed to Forbes, Bloomberg, the Sunday Times Rich List or Hurun;
  • it says when (“as of May 2025”, “in 2024”), and does not name two different years;
  • it does not hedge or change subject: peaks, losses, ranges, family or combined fortunes, relatives and companies are all rejected;
  • the amount is plausible for one person: between $100 million and $600 billion.

Each accepted figure keeps the Wikipedia revision and the exact sentence it came from. When the two routes describe roughly the same moment (within eighteen months) and one figure is more than one and a half times the other, a machine cannot tell which is right, so the Wikipedia figure is left out. Anything rejected is simply absent, the same as a person with no known fortune, never a guess. The newest accepted estimate is the current one, and estimates older than eighteen months are marked as older estimates. “Combined wealth” for a date is the sum of the low end of every current estimate, so ranges never inflate it, and the newest estimate date is shown beside the total.

How often it changes

The dataset is refreshed automatically about every four weeks: the queries are re-run, new people are enriched, Wikipedia articles are re-read for net worth, and every score, rank and page is recomputed. A refresh is not reviewed by a person before it goes live, so a figure can lag the news by up to a month on top of the publisher's own date.

Milestones and ages

Milestones are dated statements on Wikidata: companies founded, awards received, positions held, chief executive roles, notable works and sports teams joined. Obscure items are left out, and each kind is capped per person so prolific people do not swamp a page. The age at each milestone is computed exactly from the birth date; when Wikidata only gives a year, the age is marked with a tilde and is never shown as earlier than it could have been. The “at your age” section reads the birth year you typed, which stays in your browser and never becomes part of a page address.

Rankings

Every ranking on /rankings compares all 366 dates on one number computed from the dataset: billionaire count, combined wealth, founders, notable people, laureates, fields and countries. Ties share a rank. A ranking is published only when enough dates have a value behind it. Month comparisons are per date, with February averaged over 28.25 days. Because our coverage is deliberately uneven, a date low on a list may simply be one we have covered less; the honest reading is “among the people we list”, not “in the world”.

The birthday battle

The battle compares two dates on ten counts, one point each, no weights. It is entertainment built on the same numbers as the date pages. It says nothing about anyone born on either date.

Person quality score

Each person gets a score from 0 to 100 that only counts what the record holds: a birth date known to the day, a Wikidata or publisher identifier, how many sources there are and how reliable they are, career details, a sourced figure for wealth records, a photo, a description, categories, and whether the person is read more than the median person on Wikipedia. It is added up the same way for everyone and never adds a fact; it decides the order of cards and who gets a page.

Person pages

A person gets a page of their own only when there is substantially more than a card: an attributed description, a licensed photo or a sourced estimate, and at least 2 dated milestones (one for a top-tier person), with a quality score of 70 or more. Pages are capped at 8,000 per build; there are currently 6,560. Everyone else appears on their date page with their sources.

Tiers

People are grouped into three tiers computed from the data, never assigned by hand: sourced billionaires, Nobel laureates and top-decile coverage with a high quality score form the top tier; the middle tier needs a solid quality score and above-median coverage; everyone else is the third tier. Tiers order cards and decide who gets a page; they are not a judgement of importance.

Characteristics

No characteristics are shown today. One could be shown for a person only when a quote from a biography, interview or profile supports it, the quote was found in that source, and a person approved it; counts such as “persistence appears in 8 of 12 documented profiles” would describe the people listed, not anyone sharing the date.

“In history” events

The short list of events on each date page comes from Wikipedia’s “On this day” feed under CC BY-SA, with a link back. Five events are chosen spread across history. It is context, not the point of the page.

Duplicates and dates

Two records merge only when they share an identifier, or an identical name and birth date plus a matching company or occupation. Doubtful matches are held back. February 29 is a full date with its own page; people born on it are counted as celebrating on March 1 in non-leap years for age calculations.

Photos and text

Photos come from Wikimedia Commons under public-domain or Creative Commons licences and carry their credit. Short descriptions adapted from Wikipedia are attributed under CC BY-SA. Wikidata's data is public domain (CC0).

Page quality and what gets indexed

Every date page is scored from 0 to 100 on nine measurable things: how many well-documented people it lists, billionaire and founder coverage, dated achievements, source coverage, wealth-data completeness and freshness, how much date-specific analysis the data supports (ranks, fields, countries, age bands), historical context and page completeness. The score is recomputed at every build and is our own quality control, not anything a search engine uses. It sets the order in which we enrich dates. A page is submitted to search engines only when it lists enough people to stand on its own and clears a minimum score; thinner dates stay live with a note and are left out of the sitemap until they improve.

Limits

Automatic rules can still let an error through: a figure is only as right as its publisher and the Wikipedia sentence that quotes it. Coverage is uneven across dates, wealth estimates lag reality, industry is known only where a founded or led company records one, and documented characteristics do not exist yet. Dates without enough people yet say so, and are not submitted to search engines. Last updated 2026-09-28.