This template does not require a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Economics This template is within the scope of WikiProject Economics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Economics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.EconomicsWikipedia:WikiProject EconomicsTemplate:WikiProject EconomicsEconomics Finance & Investment This template is within the scope of WikiProject Finance & Investment, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of articles related to Finance and Investment on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Finance & InvestmentWikipedia:WikiProject Finance & InvestmentTemplate:WikiProject Finance & InvestmentFinance & Investment

Archives

Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3

This page has archives. Sections older than 180 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 4 sections are present.

Too often I find {{inflation}} abused in a way that reports numbers with false precision, like here: "... signed him to a contract worth $15,000 (USD, $22,041.4 today)." Even ignoring the fact that here $15,000 is probably rounded already, the implied precision (down to cents!) of the adjusted number is clearly absurd. Since this is a frequent occurrence, I suggest we change the default precision of this template accordingly. --bender235 (talk) 20:16, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Making the default r=-3 doesn't help much, except for baseball salaries. Recent discussion in {{convert}} shows that there is a better way to do this. {{Convert}} does it based on significant digits, or relative precision. Setting r=-3 would be wrong for values of a few dollars, or a few billion dollars. In addition (since there are many r= out there), there should be a sigfig= option, default without r=, for relative digits. In the case of {{convert}}, it figures out the digits based on the input value. That might or might not be right here. Gah4 (talk) 21:08, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe computing significant figures on the input value isn't so easy, but one could still specify the number of significant figures for the output, and 2 might be about right for the majority of cases. Note that r= doesn't work well, as it changes with the order of magnitude of the value. Gah4 (talk) 22:04, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Using this template for $25 and $50 respectively (and all other values being the same) yields:

$25 equivalent to $900 in 2023

$50 equivalent to $1,800 in 2023

Since 2 x $25 = $50, one would naturally assume that doubling the amount in the $25 template to $50 would produce a template output of $1,600 yet what we are seeing is instead $1,500, off by $100 or approximately 7%. --That man from Nantucket (talk) 08:59, 1 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@That man from Nantucket: You have used the parameter |r=-2 asking it to round to the nearest $100. If you change the rounding parameter you will see a different precision, such as:

$25 equivalent to $916 in 2023

$50 equivalent to $1,831 in 2023

--David Biddulph (talk) 09:12, 1 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Do note that might be more precision than the data indicate. See above. Gah4 (talk) 21:02, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hello
I found this template by accident while trying to fix a sourced current value for a 19th century cash amount. It is certainly a useful template; can I suggest you add a link to it, so that readers might know where the estimate comes from, and that editors won't otherwise spend time tracking the information down/trying to fix it per RS/VERIFY? In the meantime I’ve done this to provide some verification. Swanny18 (talk) 22:39, 12 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Swanny18: there's {{inflation-fn}} to create a footnote for the appropriate inflation index being used. Imzadi 1979 → 03:23, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Imzadi1979:: Thanks for that (and for fixing the Six Napoleon’s article)

It would seem to be best practice to use all three templates, but I notice that while the inflation template is used on about 12,000 articles, the count for the footnote one is only 4,700-ish (and for the year template the it’s 16,000-odd; I’ve no idea why that should be). Is there any way of prompting the use of all three templates? Maybe a bot message when the inflation one is used, like the prompt for links to a disambiguation page, or something) Or am I reading too much into this? Swanny18 (talk) 15:48, 17 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Would it be possible to allow units to be entered in the value, which would be copied to the output? Most of the numbers I deal with are of the form "1.2 billion", which has to be manually recreated using two templates. It would be much easier if I could |US|12. billion|1978, and I think that would help the readability of the source as well.. Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:29, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Most of the time, you can just put the units on the outside. There are sometimes that might fail (as in look ugly), but most often it should work. Can you give more of an example of what doesn't work? Gah4 (talk) 21:59, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I have the same problem. I am constantly using expressions like:

$125 million (equivalent to ${{Format price|{{Inflation|US-GDP|125000000|1979}}}} in {{Inflation/year|US-GDP}})

This is the wrong approach. It is cumbersome, error prone (because the valued has to be entered twice, the second time with a lot of zeroes), and clutters the article. It would be much simpler if Maury's suggestion were allowed. {{Inflation|US|125 million|1979|fmt=eq}}

@Maury Markowitz: In the Sandbox I created a new format "eqm", to perform the task:

{{Inflation/sandbox|US|125|1979|fmt=eqm}} => 525

See (Template:Inflation/testcases). Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:01, 30 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Why not just: $125 million (equivalent to $423 million in 2023)?

That is, $125 million (equivalent to ${{Inflation|US-GDP|125|1979|r=0}} million in {{Inflation/year|US-GDP}})

(Note that the {{Format price}} confuses things by adding on cents.) Gah4 (talk) 20:27, 30 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Why not just: $650 million (equivalent to $2202 million in 2023)?

You think we did not think of that? The comma goes missing. Whereas the sandbox produces: 2,202 Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:33, 30 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

$650 million (equivalent to $2,202 million in 2023)? Gah4 (talk) 02:40, 31 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I used this template for British pounds and it surprised me that I have to put the currency symbol if I'm not using US dollars. Doesn't the GBP index know which currency (and therefore symbol) it's expecting as input, and therefore producing as output? I thought it might do automatic currency conversion so that I could specify cursign=$ and have the resulting GBP converted to USD but it's just to change what's displayed.

Anyway, it would be nice if I could just do \{\{Inflation|GBP|1.5|2000|2019|fmt=eq}} and have it work as expected. Akeosnhaoe (talk) 20:36, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hiya to add to the sources discussion above, I have been happily using this template, it's super useful (for example at List of heists in the United Kingdom) so thanks to all the creators for their hard work!! Recently, someone added a reference for the figures here which doesn't give the same info as the template (1,120,000 vs 1,526,611.85) and today there's this citation needed tag added. So I came here to ask if the template should be referenced. I suppose best practice says yes,and if that is the case should it then be added automatically? I'll be adding {{inflation-fn}} from now on, including those pages I've mentioned, cheers! Mujinga (talk) 11:02, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

1684 is a long time ago, and a lot has changed since then. According to the accuracy link on that page, the goods that households buy have changed over the years. OK, for one, 1,526,611.85 has way too much precision, and even 1,120,000 probably still does. The difference is a factor of about 1.4, which is probably about as good as you can get without knowing the exact set of goods. As I understand, the price of a BigMac is used by some as an index, (I suspect not for this one), but obviously that doesn't work for 1684. You just have to believe that a factor of 1.4 is close enough. Gah4 (talk) 22:16, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes the accuracy is difficult for such a long time period. My main question was does this template need to be referenced. It seems best practice would say yes, so then maybe it's an idea to build in the referencing. Mujinga (talk) 15:43, 8 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I happened to look at the error category and see the article Maung Weik.

The full message is Error when using {{Inflation}}: NaN/calculation error please notify Template talk:Inflation..

I see that the issue was introduced to that article with what is currently the most recent edit, Special:Diff/960240485, which reveals that that this template is actually being called from {{US$}}, so the above discussion #This should be a module to reduce expansion depth might be relevant. A purge of that article changed nothing. That's all I have investigated. --SoledadKabocha (talk) 02:34, 16 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I made the error go away by adding a value for |round=. I didn't read the documentation to find out why it worked, but it seems to have worked. The error message was not particularly helpful. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:35, 16 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The inflation data for France has been already added. The other templates need to be updated. Trigenibinion (talk) 17:15, 10 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]