On 9/5/06, ScottL scott@mu.org wrote:
Technical solution anyone?
Well, there is the patch I submitted that started this whole argument..
The only issues I can see are:
1) What to do about AD/CE, and wikilinked dates with explicit display text in general, e.g. [[July 4]], [[1776|AD 1776]] -- the existing code won't reformat such dates according to user preferences as it is, so this isn't just a problem with the patch.
2) What to do about the non-English wikipedias. That's something I didn't think to test on my local installation (to be honest I'm not even sure how to change the language.. I assume it's just a value in LocalSettings.php but since I've never tried it...) and I'm not sure that my patch behaves nicely if the appropriate values aren't defined in languages/MessagesEn.php.
The default setting in my patch is to simply leave BC/BCE as they are, i.e. "No Preference." If people think it'll become a point of contention, then we can simply wait a while and look at the statistics of what preferences people actually set. If 90% of the English Wikipedia users set their preference to BCE, well then that would be a good argument in favor of making that the default. At least we'd actually have some numbers to go on, rather than just arguing about whether BC is religious POV or BCE is Political Correctness run amock or an Americanism or what.
-Bill