Brion Vibber wrote: I see. Seems we have to stick then with the current level of messing with dates ;-) Marking dates with <date> (or something) wouldn't be bad, IMHO. Something like <date>2006-09-14</date> would be fine. Displayed as "14 September, 2006" on en "14. September 2006" on de with selectable overrides per logged-in user. I agree that scanning wikitext for text that looks like dates might technically not be the best solution. Also, having a date linked in order to get date display magic is against orthogonality of choices. But I admit, I don't know the history behind the current date handling logic. --Ligulem

Tels wrote: date<2006-09-14> is rather un-xml-ish. I wouldn't oppose to wikilinking all dates. But there are Wikipedians that want to be able to chose per each single date instance if it should be linked or not. I think the argument was "not to overlink" and some felt that a huge amount of incoming links to pages like [[2005]] are pointless (I don't care about either of these issues). But the [[..]] syntax rightfully suggests that we can *choose* to link or not to link on everything. Why not on dates exhibiting date display magic? Currently these *must* be wikilinked in order to get that popular date preferences magic. Which seems odd to me. Non-orthogonal. My problem is, that this whole linking/not linking, date preferences working/not working issue is a matter of constant debate, also on templates like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_web. And in that debate the anon users have no voice. Packaging dates into template calls like {{date|d=2006-09-14}} doesn't solve the underlying problem we have with dates. Such a template would be simply ignored by Wikipedians IMHO, because it serves no purpose. Also, on en the name is already taken ;-) --Ligulem

On 9/14/06, Neil Harris &lt;neil(a)tonal.clara.co.uk&gt; wrote: I totally agree with you for the syntax. Out of curiosity, when I proposed wrapping ISBN's in an {{ISBN|...}} template this way, no one liked the idea...but I'm not bitter. Steve

Neil Harris wrote: From my on-wiki experience (en wikipedia.org), I agree that template call syntax {{..}} is very popular among Wikipedians (a real killer syntax, I would say ;-) Technically, if we'd be allowed to go for {{date|2006-09-14}} - a template - we would end with yet another high use template just for the sake of syntax (ad-hoc rule: "No syntactic sugar templates"? ;-), which in this case I feel is a suboptimal idea as there aren't any editorial display format decisions to isolate (There is no "moving target" about the question how to display a date from an editorial viewpoint. There are just culture/language dependent display formats to choose from.) So if this is the preferred syntax, we really should think about sitting onto http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions and implement: {{#date:2006-09-14}} or {{#date:|2006-09-14}}, and additionally {{#uldate:2006-09-14}} or {{#uldate:|2006-09-14}} (for unlinked date?) How difficult would it be to extend ParserFunctions to implement {{#date:2006-09-14}}? --Ligulem

Steve Bennett wrote: I think we are completely out of sync here. The idea I had was that <date>2006-09-18</date> would for example be displayed as "September 18, 2006" on en.wikipedia.org *as defined by a per wiki setting* (an editable page in MediaWiki namespace?). An admin on en could change that to "18 September 2006" or whatever that wiki wants it (Duh, that would invalidate the cache of all pages. Smells like being the killer of that idea... :( ). Users with a login could override that setting and use their personal date display from the list shown in their preferences. As we have it now (but only for the dates displayed If editors on an article don't want to use the site wide display format for dates, then they can simply write the date as they do it today. Ok. I think I had some interesting feedbacks on this now. Thanks everybody for reading and commenting. Seems really to be the best thing not to mess with the date display for anons. --Ligulem

Ligulem wrote: I've added this to http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4582 I wonder if this <date> tag could be implemented as an extension... --Ligulem

Tels wrote: Cool! So at least it wouldn't be complicated to do - I'm looking forward to the end of your holiday ;-) I was mostly concerned about the dependency on the "default wiki date display format setting" (I assume this is already configurable somewhere) with all the myriads of date display formats, and the "user preferences" part of a possible implementation. Maybe I will give it a try as first MediaWiki hacking learning experience for a dumb client app programmer like I am (C++, Windows). Although, I doubt the quality of my concoction would be acceptable for a installation like Wikipedia ;-) --Ligulem

Nick Jenkins wrote: At least, I would say <date day="2006-09-14"/> to be compatible with current standards. And I have some doubts that <date day="2006-09-14"/> would be better accepted by Wikipedians than <date>2006-09-14</date>. If you do a char count, both are equal, but your variant requires an equal sign, which smacks more of "programming" (generally disliked by a strong subset of Wikipedians). But this is just a sub-aspect, so for me I don't care that much. --Ligulem