I apparently have failed to be clear why I wrote this function. The
idea was to allow editors to use any date format they like at the time
they write the article, but only need to mark it as a date. Thus,
"<date>January 1, 2003,</date> was the Western New Years Day, but
<date>1st of Feb.</date> was the [[Chinese New Year]]" would be a valid
fragment.
Then the rendering engine would look at my preferences and render that
sentence as "[[January 1|1 January]] [[2003]] was the Western New Years
Day, but [[February 1|1 February]] was the [[Chinese New Year]]."
Someone else's preferences may result in "[[2003]]-[[January 1|01-01]]
was the Western New Years Day, but [[February 1|02-01]] was the
[[Chinese New Year]]."
The idea was to provide increased flexibility -- to eliminate formatting
requirements -- not to to impose them.
--
Sean Barrett
sean(a)epoptic.com
-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin(a)wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikien-l-admin@wikipedia.org] On
Behalf Of Zoe
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 17:59
To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Date Formatter Written
I also think it would cause edit wars between people who would insist
that their
favorite date format is the only way it should be.
Zoe
Erik Moeller <erik_moeller(a)gmx.de> wrote:
> A suggestion was made to allow date strings to be wrapped in -
> tags which the Wikipediware will parse and render properly. 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.
Questions:
How would I go about adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
Should I even bother adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
I don't want it. With some units (metres vs. feet etc.) I can
understand
the desire to provide automatic conversion, because
many Europeans
don't
know the American system and vice versa. With dates,
the common
notations
are reaonably unambiguous -- any reader, once familiar
with our
notation,
can get used to it. As a German, I am already used to
reading
different
date styles in Eng! lish texts (mostly "February
27, 2003",
"2/27/2003" and
"27th of February, 2003" -- I haven't
seen "27 February 2003" much,
but
maybe I wasn't paying attention). Having a
German-style date in an
English
text (27. February 2003), on the other hand, would
look alien to me.
Adding tags also further complicates our syntax at little benefit.
And I don't even want to think about converting all the existing
dates.
What I do want is a consistent policy on the date style for each
language.
We should hold a vote on each Wikipedia to determine
the preferred
style.
Regards,
Erik
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