There are two issues here and a non-issue.
First the non-issue: there is NO ISSUE to do with AMBIGUITY. No-one is trying to replace April 1 1999 with 1/4/99, 01/04/99, 01/04/1999, 04/01/99, 1999/04/01 or any other all-numeric format. The spelled-out month in "1 April" OR "April 1" takes care of that. ISO is irrelevant to the entire discussion.
Issue No 1: "1 April" or "April 1". WHO CARES? Anyone who can't count up on his fingers and decide "1 April" and "April 1" both mean April Fools' Day, please email me right away. I have a bridge that I sure you will be interested in.
Issue No 2: The degree to which we should mandate one style or another. This one is the ONLY important one. Obviously the date articles should all be named the same way.
(Whichever way. I don't care, and neither should anyone else. Utter trivia.)
HOWEVER, mandating that all in-text dates conform to this style is absurd and restrictive. If a date links to a date page, sure, write it whichever way the link works. Ouside of that, we have no business requiring contributors to use any particular style.
If anyone wants to know which way I myself write a date, then you will have to find some of the articles I've contributed to and work it out for yourselves. I honestly don't know what I usually write, but I do vary it to suit the particular sentence from time to time. Sometimes one or another way suits the context, is clearer and conveys the point better. When writing history, sometimes it is the DAY that matters most ("... on the *8th* December, the President made a speech to say that ..."), other times it is the MONTH that matters ("...it was not until *October* 4 that action was finally taken to ... "). It all depends. Mostly, of course, it doesn't matter either way.
By all means have the date articles named whichever way is most desired. When I want to link to a date, I'll write it whichever way makes the link turn blue. But when I'm crafting the body of an entry, I should hope I've got better things to do with my mind than stuff about trying to remember which particular order the Wikipedia Style Guide Nazis are insisting on.
Tony (Tannin)
Tony Wilson (Tannin)
On Mon, 3 Mar 2003, Tony Wilson wrote:
Issue No 1: "1 April" or "April 1". WHO CARES? Anyone who can't count up on his fingers and decide "1 April" and "April 1" both mean April Fools' Day, please email me right away.
Okay, I'll e-mail you right away...
A month followed by a number means a month within a year, to me. In an article about Roman history, an unlinked date of the form "April 1" could mean April in the year 1 AD, and so could easily be ambiguous. Hope that helps.
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
Tony Wilson wrote:
But when I'm crafting the body of an entry, I should hope I've got better things to do with my mind than stuff about trying to remember which particular order the Wikipedia Style Guide Nazis are insisting on.
I thought the opening paragraphs of the actual manual of Style page made it clear:
the average contributor is NOT expected to follow the style guidelines, in the same way that we don't expect perfect spealling.