Hello!
We will soon deploy some fixes for date parsing that especially affect
Czech and possibly other languages as well.
Wikidata’s parsing of dates in the Czech language has long been affected by
some issues (T221097 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T221097>), where
some reasonable representations couldn’t be parsed (e.g. 01.02.2023), while
others were parsed incorrectly: for example, 11.12.2023 (11 December 2023)
was parsed as 12 November 2023, and 07.05.1997 (7 May 1997) bizarrely
became 30 June 1997.
Matěj Suchánek <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Mat%C4%9Bj_Such%C3%A1nek>
has investigated these errors and implemented a solution, which will be
deployed on February 15. As far as we can tell, all the changes it produces
are positive: that is, if the way a date is parsed changes, then the old
behavior was bad, and the change is an improvement. Nevertheless, it’s
possible that some users expected the old behavior, or that some external
programs might even be broken by the change. Users who add time data to
Wikidata should make sure that the date shown to them as a result of their
edit is correct. If you want to test the behavior changes, the new code is
already live on Beta Wikidata.
We are currently looking into other languages that may be affected as well.
If you have any questions or want to provide feedback please leave us a
comment on this ticket <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T221097>.
Cheers,
--
Mohammed Sadat
*Community Communications Manager, Wikidata*
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0) 30 577 116 2466
https://wikimedia.de
Grab a spot in my calendar for a chat:
calendly.com/masssly.
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