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)/…
-Mark