Unfortunately the #time parser function is not so international as you think: it fails in providing the correct date format appropriate for a language, because **even the format string** must be updated (for example see Chinese, Korean, Japanese that need specific suffixes, or languages that need variants for month names).

There's still currently no support for properly selecting a format showing specific elements of a date, in the appropriate order and with the correct separators).

However you can use it to format time of day (as far as I know there's no problem as long as you use a numeric format).

Before that, the common practice is to display only dates in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD), and let people translate the separation between date and time, and then use the time format separately (HH:MM is safe in all langiuages even if they prefer other separators; such as "20h30" in French instead of "20:30")

If you intend to use month names, there's for now no solution with the #time function except for a restricted set of languages where you know that names and separators will be correct.

2014-05-07 0:38 GMT+02:00 Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby@gmail.com>:
The {{#time:}} ParserFunction: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:ParserFunctions#.23time

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.


2014-05-06 19:43 GMT+02:00 James Alexander <jalexander@wikimedia.org>:

The  {{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. 

James Alexander
Legal and Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation


On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 7:47 AM, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
Doesn't MediaWiki offer for all Wikimedia wikis the necessary support for formating dates according to user preferences or local wiki defaults for signatures?
If so, the number 6 you want will be inappropriate in Arabic and in many date formats for South Asian languages using other digits.
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).

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).
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.
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)

CLDR data has this info and there's even a demo in the Unicode CLDR website.



2014-05-06 2:07 GMT+02:00 James Alexander <jalexander@wikimedia.org>:
Hi All,

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 ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy ) and was recently approved by the board. You can find the banner text to translate (using the translate extension) at https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Translate&group=Centralnotice-tgroup-PPChangeNotice2014&filter= .

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.

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.

If you'd prefer you can also send me the translation off list and I'm happy to insert it. The current text is:
Our Privacy Policy is changing on 6 June 2014.
To learn more, click here.

We also have the 'close' text (shown you hover over the close button) saying: Close

James Alexander
Legal and Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation

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