Template:Start_date
Template:Start date
 | This template is used on approximately 451,000 pages, or roughly 1% of all pages. To avoid major disruption and server load, any changes should be tested in the template's /sandbox or /testcases subpages, or in your own user subpage. The tested changes can be added to this page in a single edit. Consider discussing changes on the talk page before implementing them. |
 | This template should not be used in citation templates such as Citation Style 1 and Citation Style 2, because it includes markup that will pollute the COinS metadata they produce; see Wikipedia:COinS. |
This purpose of the {{start date}} template is to return the date (or date-time) that an event or entity started or was created, and to do so in a standard format. It also includes duplicate, machine-readable date (or date-time) in the ISO date format (which is hidden by CSS), for use inside other templates (or table rows) which emit microformats. It should be used only once in each such template and never used outside such templates. The hidden date degrades gracefully when CSS is not available.