Wikipedia:Defining generations is hard

In most Wikipedia articles, verification is simple. You find the fact you need in a reliable source, add a citation to it, and move on. This is not true of date ranges for recent generations (Generation Z, Generation Alpha, etc.) because different sources all give different dates. Reasons for this include:

• Generations have no scientific definitions.
• Generations have no authoritative or official definitions.
• Definitions of more recent generations are still in flux.
• There are two incompatible systems for setting generation date ranges.

In the face of this, editors are left to specify multiple possibilities or a range for start and end dates instead of a single year, which many don't find satisfying. But there really is no other way.

No scientific definition

Generations are not a scientific concept. They're used to some extent by social scientists, but their primarily use is in marketing. There is no experiment you can run to determine the start year of a generation.

No official definition

There is no organization with the authority to set the date range for a generation. Wikipedia editors are left to survey the ranges given at different websites.

Recent definitions still in flux

Date ranges for older generations, up to the Baby Boomers or Generation X, are static, but younger generations, particularly Gen Z and Gen Alpha (still being born) continue to see new date ranges from different sources.

Pew vs. McCrindle

There are two ways of thinking about named generations. The Pew Research Center, an American think tank which looks at social issues and whose definitions are used by many other organizations, exemplifies the first one. They look at historical events and survey data to determine shared experiences which justify calling people in a certain age range a generation. For example, from the 2019 press release announcing their official end year for Millenials, "But for analytical purposes, we believe 1996 is a meaningful cutoff between Millennials and Gen Z for a number of reasons, including key political, economic and social factors that define the Millennial generation’s formative years."

Another approach is taken by McCrindle Research, the Australian marketing and consulting firm that coined the name of Generation Alpha (and Beta). From a white paper on their website, "Generational definitions are most useful when they span a set age range and so allow meaningful comparisons across generations. That is why the generations today each span 15 years with Generation Y (Millennials) born from 1980 to 1994; Generation Z from 1995 to 2009 and Generation Alpha from 2010 to 2024." This does make sense, but it doesn't have widespread acceptance yet.

One more issue: Generation Beta

The above considerations are also true for the names of generations, and the (not yet born) generation after Alpha doesn't have a generally agreed-on name yet. It may well be called Generation Beta. It will probably be called Generation Beta, since there aren't any competing names as of mid-2024. But there isn't yet a quorum of reliable sources, and Wikipedia's mission is to determine content from these sources, not to specify usage which will then be adopted by people. Until these sources exist, attempts to recreate the Gen Beta article won't be approved.