Template:Make YYYY–YY/doc

This is a documentation subpage for Template:Make YYYY–YY.
It may contain usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original template page.

This template creates a year YYYY–YY range (e.g. 1934–35 or 1984–1989), based on parameters which supply a base year, an optional offset, and an optional span.

Purpose

This is intended as a helper template for use in constructing other templates. In situations where there is a need to generate a date range with a two-digit ending year, the markup is complicated by the fact that if the ending year ends in 00 (e.g. 1300, 1900, or 2000), then it needs to be written a 4-digits.

For example, a range of one-year span starting in 1999 is written as 1999–2000, because 1999–00 would be ambiguous.

This template allows year ranges to be generated without a clump of impenetrable code.

Policy

Per the Wikipedia Manual of Style (MoS) at , two-digit ending years are generally deprecated, but are permitted in some limited circumstances. Please check the MoS before using ranges with two-digit ending years.

Usage

{{Make YYYY–YY|base year|offset|span}}

All parameters are optional

Parameters

All parameters are unnamed

The base year is the year from which the start year is calculated. If it is omitted, the current year is used.
The offset is a number which is added to the base year, to calculate the start year. This useful when the start year is a parameter supplied to the calling template.
The span is the length of the range; e.g. 2004–05 has a span of 1, while 2004–09 has a span of 5. The default is 1,

Examples

No parameters

{{Make YYYY–YY}} → 2024–2025

With base year

{{Make YYYY–YY|1601}} → 1601–1602
{{Make YYYY–YY|1799}} → 1799–00
{{Make YYYY–YY|1863}} → 1863–1864

With base year and offset

{{Make YYYY–YY|1304|5}} → 1309–1310
{{Make YYYY–YY|1692|1}} → 1693–1694
{{Make YYYY–YY|2000|-1}} → 1999–00

With base year and offset and span

{{Make YYYY–YY|2004|5|5}} → 2009–2014

With base year and span

{{Make YYYY–YY|1979||5}} → 1979–1984

With span

{{Make YYYY–YY| | |3}} → 2024–2027

With offset

{{Make YYYY–YY| |-6}} → 2018–2019

Sample use case

The by-year sub-categories of Category:Australian soccer by year are each parented in two year-range categories.

For example:

Category:1995 in Australian soccer is a sub-category of Category:1994–95 in OFC football and Category:1995–96 in OFC football
Category:1999 in Australian soccer is a sub-category of Category:1998–99 in OFC football and Category:1999–2000 in OFC football

The cathead template {{YYYY in Australian soccer category header}} would need some ugly markup to generate those category names, but with this template, the code is simple:

[[Category:{{Make YYYY–YY|{{Title year}}|-1}} in OFC football|Australia]]
[[Category:{{Make YYYY–YY|{{Title year}}}} in OFC football|Australia]]