On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Wilhelm Schnotz <wilhelm(a)nixeagle.org> wrote:
Regardless of who speaks what, the original poster is
referring to
debates over which format to use when. Ex: January 1, 2009 ; 1 January
2009 ; or even 2009 January 1.
With the automatic date formatting... People that *cared* about which
one they saw when reading articles could just change it in their
preferences. Now the only way to see dates in their preferred format
is to change articles to their format. This creates tension and
disputes, similar to how the spelling differences of Canadian,
English, US, Australia, etc cased disputes. (and still do cause
disputes). I think there are a few entries in [[WP:LAME]] on that
topic.
If auto formatting is tossed aside long term, we will have to create
conventions for articles similar to how spelling works to prevent more
lame editwars.
Yes, I think that this is the intention of the discussion on the MoS.
The problem with autoformatting is that it only worked for those very
few users who were registered and had date preferences set. Most
people reading Wikipedia are not registered, and hence see the
schemozzle of different date formats added by whatever editor thought
looked best at the time.
There's very little debate on which date format should be used for
articles on U.S. or UK subjects, but for articles on (say) France or
Brazil, there is a push to use U.S. date format, despite both of those
nations using International format. The existing conventions on units
of measurement and currency (where we use the units of that country)
are a better guide than attempting to link non-english speaking
nations to a variety of English.
--
Peter in Canberra