On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
Skyring wrote:
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.
There's no such push at all, and it's
a bit disingenuous to claim so, as
the only people making a "push" to convert date formats from one to
another are those in favor of a day-month-year universal standard. The
long-respected status quo is that if an article is on a subject that
isn't strongly tied to a particular dialect of English, then it uses
whatever the original author used, including for spellings, date
formats, etc. Changing from one to another is discouraged, as it's a
noise edit, and rather impolite to change one correct English dialect to
another, especially as there are much more important things to work on.
With respect, you are pushing U.S. date format on nations that don't
use it. Look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Brazil as an
example. Finding the date formats for various nations and cultures is
easy:
http://www.obout.com/calendar/tutorial_dateformat2.aspx is one
of many online tools. Just because six or seven years ago some nerdy
American wrote the first stub of an article using formats he was used
to, never imagining that Wikipedia would grow to become a respected
international project, is no reason to carry over inappropriate
formats.
I can't see any reason to stick with whatever the original author used
when there is a clear reason for change following our established
practice of using local units of measurement and currency. You
wouldn't want to use miles and pounds and U.S. dollars for an article
on France, would you?
Would you?
--
Peter in Canberra