Automatic currency converter and inflation calculator
Problem: There are many articles where where currency is updated to current costs; e.g., on film pages, you might see "Such and Such earned $134 million ($445 million in 2022 dollars)" to indicate how much that is equal to in today's dollars. This is a lot to update on a slew of articles. Likewise, there are often references to money in one country with a parenthetical saying how much in US dollars, euros, etc. With database tables to pull from for inflation and currency conversion, could a template or tool be devised to auto-update these?
Proposed solution: Develop a template or tool to reference the amount and automatically display the inflation amount, and a similar template to convert to other currencies (perhaps such a template could convert from the cited currency to ANY currency available in the tool)
Who would benefit: A tool or template to automatically update examples for inflation, or to convert foreign currencies, would greatly reduce manual updating of many pages and result in up-to-date accuracy on any such pages. For movies, it's enough to auto-convert the inflated amount for the most recent year in the table. For currency conversion, it could pull the daily conversion rate from a table.
More comments: Updating a database of inflation rates and one for conversion rates on a regular basis should be enough to pull from the database in a quick calculation with such a tag or tool to return the amount.
This would need external scientific data which could be controversial and unprecise, especially for old currencies like Sestercius. In addition to historical bias, there is also a geographical bias which make scientifics sometimes to use non-monetary currencies like Big Mac Index. --Pols12 (talk) 21:29, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. This is one of those things that looks simple until you really start understanding how many caveats apply. It gets into original research territory in my opinion, which we should not have in Wikipedia. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:40, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
And different countries have different inflation rate, as well as different currency exchange rate. Even among countries that use same currency. C933103 (talk) 01:01, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
On the English Wikipedia at least this is done automatically using things like en:template:inflation and en:template:To USD, there's already no need to manually update pages. Given that there is an element of editorial decision involved in choosing which inflation measures and conversion methods to use I think this is best left to individual wikis to set up, rather than being hardcoded into mediawiki. 86.23.109.10111:11, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
When translating templates, we have to include some internationalization and some phrase would different in other languages. The inflation is like using the outsider's data, which is sometimes third-party. Maybe getting the inflation data from Wikidata? Thingofme (talk) 10:31, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support I would also appreciate the option to convert currencies and adjust for inflation at the same time, ie. what is £1 million in today's UK£ and US$? JDspeeder1 (talk) 01:39, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]