Erik wrote:
Today Mav changed this to the effect that the style "Month Day" should be used on pages about US/world topics, and "Day Month" on pages about British topics.
No - that's not what I wrote. I wrote that whatever date style that is already in an article should, in general, be respected the same way as we already respect American/International English spellings. I then added that it might be preferable to use the formats which are more appropriate to the subject matter. So a purely Americana article might read better if it had American date and spelling styles and a purely British topic might read better if International date and spelling styles are used. This is a compromise since there was no clear majority supporting either style as absolute policy. So we must tolerate both. If we do not then whatever side losses is going to /very/ pissed and many of them may leave or fork the project based on such a minor difference.
This is analog to our currently (IMHO silly) rule to have British spelling on British pages, US spelling on .. pretty much every other page. This further leads to a split into a British Wikipedia and an "American" Wikipedia.
If you want to see a real split (sic fork) see what happens if we outlaw one or another spelling style. Date formats are directly analogous to the spelling situation.
Of course, no similar rule exists for German style if I wrote "17. June" in an article about a German subject, I would be called a vandal after three reverts.
German style? Why the straw man? We are talking about two competing /English language/ styles. What the Germans do is their own business and has no bearing on the subject at hand.
Interestingly, what Mav did is in contradiction to the current distribution of opinion on the talk page
The distribution of opinion is that a large group of people want to have the International style be the absolute standard and another large group want to have the American style be the absolute standard. Both sides should be able to live with a compromise that allows both. Just like our policy on spelling.
.... Mav has now turned a separate option into policy, namely the one of separating between UK and US/world topics.
Again this is a mischaracterization. See above.
I do not think that we should have a UK-Wikipedia and a US/World- Wikipedia. Personally, I would love to have the following compromise:
* US-style spelling in all articles * British style dates in all articles
And then World War III starts between American and non-American Wikipedians.
But the worst solution is one where every article looks different. That conveys an unprofessional image: That we only can maintain consistency on a single page, but not throughout our encyclopedia.
An even worse situation than that is the pissing off of very large segments of our contributors by choosing one spelling or date style over the other. The day articles are already at the American style and that is where they should stay (thus respecting and tolerating the date style choice of the original authors of those pages). But there are redirects from the International date style to each of these pages. Contributors can therefore choose which date style they think is best for them and for the article in question.
I don't buy the argument that we look unprofessional by tolerating variant spelling and date formats. We /would/ look unprofessional if we lost a large segment of our users because we made an absolute policy to use one or the other style though.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)