2008/10/9 Delirium delirium@hackish.org:
The old system was laudable, but really only worked for a small minority of readers, usually active editors themselves. For everyone else, it just got confusing...
The old system did, however, tend to reduce the number of tendentious editors going around mass-changing date formats to their preferred format, because such editors could just set their preferences and not have the "wrong" format grate on them henceforth. Anecdotally, there's been a big spike in the past few weeks of that sort of garbage editing.
Really? I've seen a good bit of date-format changing in my recent stuff, but this is because I tend to write two or three different formats in the same article without realising, and someone usually comes along afterwards to fix it.
I've not noticed much in the way of retroactive changes, though. I suppose it'll settle down a bit, like colour/color...