Sources and licences

Where our facts come from

Every Birthday Gazette front page is assembled from public data. We cache it as static files when we build the site, so we do not put load on these services when you make a page.

Events, observances and famous birthdays

From English Wikipedia’s “On this day” lists, via the Wikimedia REST API feed. Wikipedia text is by Wikipedia contributors and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. We shorten and filter it. The adapted text on our pages and front pages is shared under the same licence. Each date credits its source article, for example March 14.

To choose well-known people, we rank birthdays by how many Wikipedia language editions cover them, using Wikidata (CC0 public domain).

Because this is a gift, we automatically leave out wars, battles, disasters, crime, terrorism and similar events, and we favour culture, science and sport.

Typical US prices

From the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Price Index and average-price series, which are US government works in the public domain. Where BLS average prices exist (mostly from 1976 to 1980 onwards) we show them directly. For earlier years we estimate the price by tracing the item’s own CPI index back in time (the bakery index for bread; milk is shown only from 1996, when BLS average prices begin). Estimates are marked ≈. Prices are national averages, so local prices varied.

Postage rates are from the US Postal Service’s rate history. Minimum wage figures are from the US Department of Labor. The president in office is from public records.

Music charts

We do not include “number one song” data. We could not find a clearly licensed public chart dataset, and we will not copy commercial charts.

Fonts and software

Playfair Display, Old Standard TT and IM Fell English are used under the SIL Open Font License. Print files are generated in your browser with html2canvas and jsPDF (MIT licence).

Not a newspaper

The Birthday Gazette is an original keepsake with its own masthead. It is not a reprint of, and is not affiliated with, any newspaper.