On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 10:52 AM, K. Peachey p858snake@yahoo.com.au wrote:
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 1:07 AM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
To be fair, the date preferences-as-wikilinks situation *had* led to overlinking. I'm fairly liberal in terms of linking and tend to overlink from the view of many people, but even I see that many of the date links were pointless. The trouble is, not all were pointless and people argued over the details while the bots mostly ignored restrictions and stripped date links regardless of objections. Sometimes, in the most ridiculous cases, the bot operator talked to the objectors, the links were restored with promises that the bot would be changed, and then the next bot run removed the links again! That's just inept.
Which is why i recommended/suggested a special character for dates, so you can allow autoformatting but not the automatic linking (although i guess you could have a option in your preferences for the people that liked it). Using a special character could have other uses as well i guess like automatic metadata attached to the article or something along those lines.
But for what purpose? So a few people see dates the way they want to? ANY special formatting just makes the project one notch more inaccessible for new editors. If someone walks in off the webstreet after hitting the "edit" button and sees a whole bunch of brackets and functions, templates and funny characters, they are likely to turn around and walk back out again. Some articles already look more like a complicated computer program than a piece of prose. We might as well call the whole thing geekopedia.
Sure, maybe we could find some whizzo technosolution. In a programmer's mind, elegance is DATE(20081225). Some of the suggested formulae above are, to say the least, inelegant. But the most elegant, simple solution is to leave the dates as they are. So what if some newbie off the interlane puts 25th December '08 into an article? Nobody is confused. Eventually a wikignome will happen along and fix it up.