<div dir="ltr">We could still use templates for formatting dates. Note that this is more complex than you think: compare these two correct dates in French:<div>- 1<sup><small>er</small></sup> avril 2014</div>
<div>- 2 avril 2014</div><div>but the following is clearly incorrect:</div><div><div>- 1 avril 2014</div></div><div>So there are suffixes appended conditionally to so,e parts of a date element, which depend on their value (above: the day number in the month).</div>
<div><br></div><div>There are also othe complications: some locales do not use the Gregorian calendar, and it makes no sense combining the localized dated with a UTC time without a proper separation (uwing additional words, not just punctuation or space separation)</div>
<div><br></div><div>Some wikis use templates (that use themselves the #time function internally) but these templates are not usable in central notices.</div><div><br></div><div>For me it is just simpler to avoid all formating code in central notices, let people translate them fully without this complication, and inform translators if the date must be changed (the safest way is to mark a new translation so that the older one will be marked fuzzy you'll know if these dates have been updated in translations).</div>
<div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2014-05-07 0:46 GMT+02:00 James Alexander <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jalexander@wikimedia.org" target="_blank">jalexander@wikimedia.org</a>></span>:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">That makes sense... I'll be honest though that'm hesitant to use it in something like a banner where we're also asking for translations from those who see the banner (through the translate link, though I will probably remove that from anonymous and mobile views). Asking people to play with the time parser codes just seems like going a bit too far away from what I can expect for a casual translator.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><div class=""><br clear="all"><div><div>James Alexander</div><div>Legal and Community Advocacy</div>
<div>Wikimedia Foundation</div>
<div>(415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur<br></div></div>
<br><br></div><div><div class="h5"><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 3:38 PM, Jon Harald Søby <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jhsoby@gmail.com" target="_blank">jhsoby@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">The {{#time:}} ParserFunction: <a href="https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:ParserFunctions#.23time" target="_blank">https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:ParserFunctions#.23time</a><div>
<br>
</div><div>Tell translators in the description to fill in whatever code from that list is correct in their language. So for English it'll be "j F Y", for Norwegian "j. F Y", for Farsi "xij xiF xiY" (I think). And then in the code it'll be just {{#time:j F Y|2014-06-06}}, and you tell translators to keep the date the same, but change the codes if necessary.<br>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2014-05-06 19:43 GMT+02:00 James Alexander <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jalexander@wikimedia.org" target="_blank">jalexander@wikimedia.org</a>></span>:<div>
<div><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">The <span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"> {{formatnum:6}} makes sense, I can add that in, (as I said earlier I'm happy for people to change it for their own numerical system, but that would certainly be easier). I don't know about a good way to call the formate date function sadly :-/ I tried to pick the 'most' universal option but it certainly isn't perfect and I completely agree with you that a format date format would be useful. </span></div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><div><br clear="all"><div><div>James Alexander</div><div>Legal and Community Advocacy</div>
<div>Wikimedia Foundation</div>
<div><a href="tel:%28415%29%20839-6885%20x6716" value="+14158396885" target="_blank">(415) 839-6885 x6716</a> @jamesofur<br></div></div>
<br><br></div><div><div><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 7:47 AM, Philippe Verdy <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:verdy_p@wanadoo.fr" target="_blank">verdy_p@wanadoo.fr</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">Doesn't MediaWiki offer for all Wikimedia wikis the necessary support for formating dates according to user preferences or local wiki defaults for signatures?<div>If so, the number 6 you want will be inappropriate in Arabic and in many date formats for South Asian languages using other digits.</div>
<div>MediaWiki offers {{formatnum:6}} for this purpose, it is easy to infer where it is in the translation if you intend to change it. However June is also the 6th month of the year (same day number) and you may wonder which field is the day part if you don't know if the date uses "d;m;y" or "m:d;y" formatting order (some languages don"t really have names for Gregorian dates, but append a speific suffix to numbers to indicate if this is a year, month or day, such as Chinese).</div>
<div><br></div><div>A very small script will generate the formated dates that are then easy to update in translations, even if you don't want to use templates for that (because templates are wiki-dependant and their name vary).</div>
<div>But things would be even easier if all wikis had a parserfunction for formatting dates given a matching language code (if the format is unknown for that language, just use the ISO 8601 format yyy-mm-dd which is not ambiguous in all existing languages, even if it is not the most usual format for that language.</div>
<div>I just hope that one day we'll have a parser function like {{formatdate:2014-06-06|ymd|language-code}} that will format the date using the 3 fields (not padded with zero if not needed, but not rounded to 2 digits with the appropriate order, suffixes and separators, and possibly their names; all in the appropriate script)</div>
<div><br></div><div>CLDR data has this info and there's even a demo in the Unicode CLDR website.</div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2014-05-06 2:07 GMT+02:00 James Alexander <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jalexander@wikimedia.org" target="_blank">jalexander@wikimedia.org</a>></span>:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div><div dir="ltr">Hi All,<div><br></div><div>The Legal team will be announcing later this week (currently planned for Wednesday) the start of a 30 day notice period that the privacy policy will be changing. This is the privacy policy that was discussed over a multi month period on wiki ( <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy" target="_blank">https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy</a> ) and was recently approved by the board. You can find the banner text to translate (using the translate extension) at <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Translate&group=Centralnotice-tgroup-PPChangeNotice2014&filter=" target="_blank">https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Translate&group=Centralnotice-tgroup-PPChangeNotice2014&filter=</a> .</div>
<div><br></div><div>If possible (transliteration is fine) we want to keep the day part of the date ( 6 ) as a number so that, if the announcement date gets pushed back for some reason or another, we can adjust the official starting date without affecting the translations much.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Michelle is still finishing the blog post itself but the plan is to have it available for translation as well so that over the course of the month we can get it up in as many translations as possible.</div>
<div><br></div><div>If you'd prefer you can also send me the translation off list and I'm happy to insert it. The current text is:</div><div>Our Privacy Policy is changing on 6 June 2014.<br></div><div>To learn more, click here.<br>
</div><div><br></div><div>We also have the 'close' text (shown you hover over the close button) saying: Close</div><span><font color="#888888"><div><br clear="all"><div><div>James Alexander</div><div>
Legal and Community Advocacy</div>
<div>Wikimedia Foundation</div>
<div><a href="tel:%28415%29%20839-6885%20x6716" value="+14158396885" target="_blank">(415) 839-6885 x6716</a> @jamesofur<br></div></div>
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