2008/10/14 Skyring skyring@gmail.com:
But is a birthday really significant? Or a deathday? Thomas Jefferson and his mate dying on the same day is of some interest, I guess, but it's really trivia rather than encyclopaedic.
I should have been clearer, I think - when I said "useful", I meant in the sense that someone following the link might possibly get something they expected in the page at the other end...
As you note, with year articles, you always get some contextual benefit (even if trivially small) to linking the year something took place, even if it's just the ability to quickly check whether the Renaissance had started yet or not.
You don't get any such contextual benefit from linking the "day of the year" something took place, unless you want to know something that happened on exactly the same date. It's very unlikely you want to know what happened on the same day a century before or after - the only circumstance that I can think of that happening with any frequency is people's birthdays, hence why it seemed worth mentioning as an exception.
I'm not arguing we need to link birthdays, but I do think there's usually slightly more merit for linking [[6 January]] in the context of a birthdate than there is for doing it anywhere else in the article. (This may, indeed, be taken as a demonstration of how useless the rest of them are...)