On 08/02/2009, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.neko@gmail.com wrote:
I know all that. But thats really a minor software issue. We could for example allow IP's to set such preferences. Or display a default dating format based on the IP. If the IP is from the US, display the US dating format, else display international standard.
I think there would tend to be problems with caching. Some ISPs/caches probably straddle national boundaries, and that would tend to mean that where two users either side of the boundary viewing the same pages one would tend to get the wrong format, because the URL would be the same. The normal way that is dealt with on the web is with the ? symbol in the URL which bypasses the cache (together with a cookie), but that's probably a bad idea for the wikipedia, it would increase the traffic quite a bit. Another way would be to encode the standards to be used in the URL in some way, but there's disadvantages for that as well.
The javascript idea where the page dynamically calculates it in the browser may have more legs though, at least for dates, and possibly other viewing preferences also.