Talk:List of minor secular observances

against

there are commerative days weeks and months that are not holidays. yes it needs to be better arranged, but not subsumed Koibeatu (talk) 19:19, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Agree but lots of help is needed to fill out the page. Girl Scout Week is the first full week of March (See 2011 Patch for the 2011 patch; the official announcement for 2011 hasn't yet been posted). National Public Safety Telecommunicator Week is celebrated over the second full week of every April. The editor of an on-line magazine collected lots of background information including the US Congressional proclamations here. doctreeDoctree (talk) 18:16, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I added both of these, since they're at least mentioned in Wikipedia articles. -- Beland (talk) 15:33, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Sources

http://www.jours-feries.com/index.php3?id_langue=2

http://yahooligans.yahoo.com/Around_the_World/Holidays/By_Month/

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Mark Richards (talk • contribs)

Another possible source could be http://www.charityvillage.com/cv/charityvillage/event3.asp. It is Canada specific and includes whether the commemorative event is recognized nationally or which province. --67.225.19.166 (talk) 14:59, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Sources?

This doesn't seem to have any sources. The only reference I can find to Lasagna Awareness Month, for instance, is that emu farmers were commemorating it -- but it sounds like they stumbled upon it the way everyone else did, i.e. the internerds. Is there an association or body who developed or officially endorses this day?

Requested move

The following is a closed discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

List of commemorative days → List of commemorative days and months celebrated in North America — New title describes the nature of the article much better. DeLarge 11:18, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Survey

Add  # '''Support'''  or  # '''Oppose'''  on a new line in the appropriate section followed by a brief explanation, then sign your opinion using ~~~~. Please remember that this survey is not a vote, and please provide an explanation for your recommendation.

Survey - in support of the move

1. Support; but under a different name Sorry about that DeLarge; I didn't notice those. The page does need to be changed to reflect the presence of the months, which are all US-related.

Survey - in opposition to the move

1. Oppose, strongly. The presence in the article of Australia Day, ANZAC Day, Armistice Day, Chinese New Year, European Day of Languages, German Unity Day, Hangul Day, Queen's Birthday, etc etc show that it is not exclusively devoted to North American holidays. --DeLarge 11:23, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Discussion

Add any additional comments:

Should this not be merged and winnowed with Holiday? I.e., Holiday talks about holidays/commemorations in general, and this article is the list linking to the individual articles. --SigPig |^{SEND - OVER} 05:05, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

It was requested that this article be renamed but there was no consensus for it to be moved.--Stemonitis 08:25, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Date order?

Would it not make more sense to have the list of commemorative days in date order also?? Or maybe in a chart so that you can put them in whichever order you would like them? I was looking through for days around the middle of april and it took a while!! Comments? Timclare ^(talk) _{(sign here)} 12:57, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Split

I've split the months off to List of commemorative months, since the title refers to days, not months, and also since the months are almost entirely unreferenced. All references welcome over at that article. YrPolishUncle (talk) 20:02, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

To be merged with Lists of holidays

This is a random selection of various types of holidays. Maybe the author who created it did not know about the much more complete Lists of holidays article or that just did not exist then. --Hunadam (talk) 09:19, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Redundancy and conflicting information

This list doesn't seem to have an additional purpose beyond International observance. Furthermore, many entries are largely unsourced or conflicting between these lists. For example, in this list, we have "International Cat-Day / World Cat-Day - August 8/August 8", in the other list "March 1 - International Cat Day". Neither is sourced, neither had a comment from the person who entered it. In my oppinion, it would be the best if such entries just get deleted, as there doesn't seem to be any institutional basis and the entries on wikipedia suggest legitimacy to the outside rather than having legitimate reasons why they should be on wikipedia in the first place. Makrom (talk) 13:54, 28 August 2011 (UTC)

I'll tag items without any citation and without any link to an "X day" article with "citation needed" and then remove them in about two weeks time. Sjö (talk) 18:49, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Article title is not accurate

The list is of days "to raise awareness of an issue, commemorate a group or event, or celebrate something" - two out of three of those reasons are not commemorative in the modern sense of the word. If we are generally happy with the scope of the article, the name of the article ought to change to something that more accurately reflects the contents. Perhaps "List of observance days". Mitch Ames (talk) 09:45, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

If anything, the scope of the article should be narrowed. In Category:Lists of observances there's List of awareness days (and other lists of awareness days), and I think that there's no reason to duplicate that information here. Sjö (talk) 13:56, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

And Lists of holidays covers the topic "celebrate something" pretty well. So there are three different articles about awareness, commemoration and celebration. Except the scope of the list of commemorative days also duplicates the other two articles. I suggest that we prune this article to include only commemorative days. There will still be some overlap, and that's OK since the date of an awareness day can be chosen to honour the memory of someone, and a commemorative day can also be a holiday. Sjö (talk) 14:54, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

And before anyone starts adding them, I think that the saint's days are out of the scope of this article, even if they are in some sense commemorative. The sheer number and the differing calendars in different denomination also makes it impossible to add them all. Sjö (talk) 05:14, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

NO MENTION IN JULY OF GLOBAL ENERGY INDEPENDENCE DAY!

July has no mention of GLOBAL ENERGY INDEPEPNDENCE DAY JULY 10th . To promote alternative Green energy! Its also the birthdat of the great energy and eleletrical pioneer NIKOLA TESLA(1856-1943) see www.teslasociety.com, It was organizaedJuly 2005 and givien Los Angeles County recognation that year! Thanks! Dr. Edson Andre' Johnson D.D.ULC64.203.36.139 (talk) 18:25, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

This would be because A) there is no Wikipedia article about it. And B) per Tesla Day it is not an agreed upon world holiday. If you think it should be included, write an article, prove that it exists beyond L.A. County, and then see about having it added to the list. I would also recommend that if you want your suggestions to be taken seriously you present them in correct English. —    Bill W.    (Talk)  (Contrib)  — 14:13, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

Mt. Everest Day

Should that count? An IP added it without mentioning it here, so I'll remove it. If you want it back up, just mention it here (and maybe on my talk page). Jwoodward48wiki (talk) 18:26, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

It doesn't have a Wikipedia article, so removal seems like the right thing. -- Beland (talk) 14:51, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Proposal that the scope of this article should be what its title says

As of now, the inclusion criteria is days ment "to raise awareness of an issue, commemorate a group or event, or celebrate something". Two of those aren't really commemorative. I propose that this article is restricted to those days that are ment to honour the memory of someone or something or to serve as a memorial to someone or something. Like I said above there will be some overlap, e.g. an awareness day may have been chosen to honour the memory of someone. Still I think that the lede should be rewritten to match the definition of commemorative, and that the lede should mention that there are separate articles for holidays, awareness days, saints days and national days. Then the list should be pruned from days without a commemorative purpose. What do you think? Sjö (talk) 14:11, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Today, I started tagging days that have no commemorative element to them. Sjö (talk) 06:42, 28 December 2016 (UTC)

This all depends very much on your definition of Commemorative, and the alteration that you therefore made to the introduction. commemorate verb 1] recall and show respect for (someone or something). "a wreath-laying ceremony to commemorate the war dead" 2] mark or celebrate (an event or person) by doing or producing something. "the victory was commemorated in songs" Commemorative events can therefore also be celebration events. An event also does not need to mark a specific date or place in time. event noun a thing that happens or takes place, especially one of importance. "the momentous political events of the late 1980s" a planned public or social occasion. "staff have been holding a number of events to raise money for charity"

I would therefore suggest that 'events' such as New Years Day, or Plough Monday, which have been marked as dubious, are very clearly dates which are celebrated and commemorated. I have returned the introduction back to its original "This article lists articles about notable observed commemorative days used by various governments, groups and organizations to raise awareness of an issue, commemorate a group or event, or celebrate something." But I would certainly recommend that there are many dates of dubious authority, and new dates should be properly sourced.Ianatheling (talk) 20:46, 1 January 2017 (UTC)

...and I must add that some of those that you have marked as dubious do actually commemorate an actual event, ie Public Domain Day marks the anniversary of the copyright mark...Ianatheling (talk) 19:13, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Using that view of "commemorative" makes this an indiscriminate list where almost any day could be included (provided it's notable). Or have I misunderstood, are there any days that you would say are outside the scope of this article? Sjö (talk) 06:29, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

It would be interesting to know what the intention of the original creator of this page was? For me it would be a day which is remembered and commemorated in some form and has notable recognition. An existing Wikipedia page would be a good guide. I do think that every entry should be properly referenced showing clear sources for why it should be commemorated.Ianatheling (talk) 21:18, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

The page begins with the comment "This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness." so I would suggest that it was always intended to be more than a list of notable anniversaries Ianatheling (talk) 21:24, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Well, that would make this article a List of notable days without any inclusion criteria except that it's a day and that it's notable. That would mean that this article would duplicate the days in mentioned in . I don't think that's a good structure for an encylopedia. Sjö (talk) 06:45, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

I cannot find the page which you refer to, although there are certainly a variety of similar pages, which have slightly different themes, but which list many of these dates.Ianatheling (talk) 22:49, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Sorry about that, it should be Category:Lists of observances. Forgot to add the colon sign. Sjö (talk) 05:17, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Yes I would agree, this page would cover the same dates. The key difference however is that this one is listed by 'type of event' which is quite useless if you want to search what events take place on a certain day. I know that you can also type in a date and each day has all of the commemorative days listed. But I would suggest that there is still a place for a daily based list as well as a thematic list. Such a list, if done properly, could of course became very long! so there could be a covering index page which takes the reader to a separate page for each month? Ianatheling (talk) 20:38, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

I'm not a fan of list articles, and especially the unwieldy ones. This is a poor article, with little going for it IMO, but I've tried to keep it in some order according to my understanding of the scope of the article. You can change the interpretation and scope if you like, but I hope that you will stay and maintain the article since I will then take it off my watchlist. There's a limit to how much work I can do on an article that I really dislike. Sjö (talk) 21:19, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, I have added and removed stuff over the last year, and have been intending a more thorough review of it... but like you its finding the time to do it. I use the page for a daily quiz group that I run, so I am on it most days, so the concept works for me, but I will try to improve it gradually. Ianatheling (talk) 19:49, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

I find the article content really valuable and came to it today wanting to see if there were any days coming up of awareness of ecological issues. An as comprehensive as possible listing of such days is really appreciated. GregKaye 07:11, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

Scope of Article, redux

It seems clear that Religious holidays should not be included in this article. It also seems reasonable that days listed on List of awareness days should not be listed. Is there anything else that must be excluded? "Commemorative days" isn't a term with a clear definition, in my opinion. power~enwiki (π, ν) 05:25, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

We have a proliferation of these lists which substantially overlap, and which make it difficult for readers to find all the things of a given type that they are looking for. To keep things manageable, I think public holidays (which we have listed by country - see List of holidays by country) should be kept separate, since those are valuable lists on their own because people actually get time off on those days. There are also too many religious observances, since every religion has its own calendar for the whole year. There's no top-level list for that, but we do have Category:Religious holidays from which readers can navigate to the denomination of interest. Given those exclusions, a good name for this article might be something like List of minor secular observances or List of unofficial secular observances? I'm not sure "unofficial" is quite right because there's usually some authority designating them, and sometimes that's the United Nations. -- Beland (talk) 01:53, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

As the person who started List of unofficial observances by date, I'm certainly not opposed to the merge. I also think the scope should be clarified, and a certain level of notability should be enforced. What I have been doing at the other list is to require that every list entry should either be a blue link (so that the target article is required to show notability), or that the entry should be accompanied by a reference to a reliable source that demonstrates notability: not necessarily to the same degree as would be required for a stand-alone article, but at least to show that it's "a thing", and not just some company's attempt to market something or something that a fringe group is "trying to make a thing". If the merge goes through, that could be good, because we'll have more eyes on a single article to keep it clean and useful. --Slashme (talk) 17:53, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

I also agree with User:Beland that the national holidays should be kept separate, but I haven't yet decided to be so bold. I have given the article a quick once-through removing unreferenced and redlinked days, though. --Slashme (talk) 18:05, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

All done merging for today; I think we need to take a breather to sort and de-duplicate. -- Beland (talk) 18:23, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

What drew me here in the first place was my hope that I would find a reasonably complete list, so that I could look up specific days
and tell my friends things like "Tomorrow is xyz day" or "Did you know your birthday falls on xyz day" ... that kind of conversational thing.
For that purpose it wouldn't matter to me in the least whether the day was a legal holiday, or religiously observed, or not. All that would matter to me would be avoiding having to search the Internet for many different kinds of lists.
I don't think I'm alone to want this list to be that kind of reasonably complete reference. KingMidasTheSecond (talk) 08:46, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

I did not mean to violate any rules about adding a new awareness day for Irritable Bowel Syndrome. If I have not added it correctly, please correct. Thx. WorldIBSDay (talk) 21:18, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Mother's Day date

It says that Mother's Day is celebrated on May 13. Different countries celebrate this day differently yet there is no country that celebrates Mother's Day on May 13, 2020. I suggest for it to be displayed as the second Sunday of may as it is the most common day of celebrating that event.--JETH888 message me 13:32, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Password Day

The article mentions May 7th as Password Day citing a blog post from 2020-05-07 mentioning 'today' as Password Day. However, Password Day is not generally on May 7th every year but on the first Thursday in May. In 2020 that happened to be the 7th, in 2021 the 6th. Source: https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/password-day — Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.233.145.26 (talk)

Remove cleanup templates?

It seems that since the cleanup templates were added, the article has been improved greatly. There are articles/links for most entries, and references for entries without an article. The entires all seem to be in chronological order as well. If no one has anything to say I will remove these templates in a few days. ― Levi_OP^Talk 13:46, 22 September 2021 (UTC)