Delirium wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
The old "link all dates" is now deprecated, and we're advised to just write them in a standard form (14 November 2000 or November 14, 2000). It'll be interesting to see if this helps reduce overlinking
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.
Reviving this thread, that does appear to be taking place (contrary to some more optimistic predictions that it wouldn't). The biggest offenders seem to be people whose hackles are raised by what they perceive as "American provincialism", and who feel that an international encyclopedia "ought to use the international date format", rather than follow the usual Wikipedia dialect practice, where we accept all the major variants, and strongly discourage edits that change one to another, unless the article's strongly associated with a specific English-speaking country where one dialect predominates.
Previously, such folks could be accomodated by simply changing their date preferences, keeping them from ever having to see an odious Amerikkkan date, but now they're required to resort to a crusade to get rid of Americanist date formats, preferably entirely, or at least confine them to US-only articles. There's even some proposals to change the current MOS (which basically says don't change date formats unless it's a UK/US/Australian/etc. subject) to accomodate their views: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)/P...
-Mark