I've added a site-wide configuration option for whether an
English-language wiki should display dates in American (Mar 3, 2003) or
International format (3 Mar 2003).
Set "$wgAmericanDates = true;" in LocalSettings to use the American
format. English Wikipedia has been set to use American dates for now to
maintain the status quo, as I have no interest in arguments about the
desirability of one or other other style. However the new option may be
of interest for third-party sites.
The date & time code needs some general overhauling... timezone data can
be gotten from the browser via JavaScript (but it's roundabout, as we
can't talk to it directly, and of course not always available), and we
need to support half-hour timezones (parts of Australia, India,
elsewhere).
Display of dates in YYYY-MM-DD format should also be an available
option, and we will certainly want user-selectability on these things,
as well as sensible ways of setting defaults and sniffing locale info
from browsers where possible and appropriate.
The generation of date/timestamps in ~~~~ sigs is also currently a mess;
it uses a locale-based function and doesn't integrate with our language
files.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)