[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Date Formatter Written

Thu Feb 27 22:38:25 UTC 2003

On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Sean Barrett wrote:
> Some discussion has occured in [[Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates
> and numbers)]] about the formats of dates; i.e., whether or not
> [[January 2]], [[2003]] is American-Imperialist.  (My feeling: yes, but
> that's not the only reason I like it.)
>
> A suggestion was made to allow date strings to be wrapped in <date> -
> </date> tags which the Wikipediware will parse and render properly.

Why a date tag? Common date formats should be quite easy to find
programmatically; the rare false positives can be <nowiki>'d away. Adding
more new tags (particularly for things like dates, of which we have
many thousands!) would just be a royal pain in the buttocks.

>  I have written a Perl routine to not only do this, but also return
> either the American or the European format, based on a flag set in
> each user's preferences.

Can I get them in 2003-01-02 format instead? :)

> How would I go about adding this routine to the Wikipediware?

It would be a help to post it or a link to it to the wikitech-l list.

> Should I even bother adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
>
> Does anyone care?

(shrug) It's really part of the same issue as US vs UK (and most everyone
else) spellings and word usage. What's normal to one group appears galling
to the other, and we allow both equally and have no official preference.
(Though there may be a de facto greater presence of one or ther other due
to the relative proportions of contributors... additionally, there are the
titles of the day pages, which really should be consistent, whereever they
happen to be at, and however many redirect forms will get you there.)

A separate issue is presentation of dates in, for instance, recentchanges
etc. I for one would prefer to see YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS everywhere. But
then, I leave my timezone setting at UTC so you know I'm a weirdo. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)