Some discussion has occured in [[Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)]] about the formats of dates; i.e., whether or not [[January 2]], [[2003]] is American-Imperialist. (My feeling: yes, but that's not the only reason I like it.)
A suggestion was made to allow date strings to be wrapped in <date> - </date> tags which the Wikipediware will parse and render properly. I have written a Perl routine to not only do this, but also return either the American or the European format, based on a flag set in each user's preferences.
Questions:
How would I go about adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
Should I even bother adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
Does anyone care?
-- Sean Barrett | The more you sweat in peace, sean@epoptic.com | the less you bleed in war.
A suggestion was made to allow date strings to be wrapped in <date> - </date> tags which the Wikipediware will parse and render properly. I have written a Perl routine to not only do this, but also return either the American or the European format, based on a flag set in each user's preferences.
Questions: How would I go about adding this routine to the Wikipediware? Should I even bother adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
I don't want it. With some units (metres vs. feet etc.) I can understand the desire to provide automatic conversion, because many Europeans don't know the American system and vice versa. With dates, the common notations are reaonably unambiguous -- any reader, once familiar with our notation, can get used to it. As a German, I am already used to reading different date styles in English texts (mostly "February 27, 2003", "2/27/2003" and "27th of February, 2003" -- I haven't seen "27 February 2003" much, but maybe I wasn't paying attention). Having a German-style date in an English text (27. February 2003), on the other hand, would look alien to me.
Adding <date> tags also further complicates our syntax at little benefit. And I don't even want to think about converting all the existing dates.
What I do want is a consistent policy on the date style for each language. We should hold a vote on each Wikipedia to determine the preferred style.
Regards,
Erik
On 27 Feb 2003 at 14:08, Sean Barrett wrote:
Some discussion has occured in [[Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)]] about the formats of dates; i.e., whether or not [[January 2]], [[2003]] is American-Imperialist. (My feeling: yes, but that's not the only reason I like it.)
A suggestion was made to allow date strings to be wrapped in <date> - </date> tags which the Wikipediware will parse and render properly. I have written a Perl routine to not only do this, but also return either the American or the European format, based on a flag set in each user's preferences.
Questions:
How would I go about adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
Should I even bother adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
Does anyone care?
I have no time to follow the discussion you are talking about, but... While making date syntax more general please remember that there are other [[calendar]]s in usage around the world nowadays, not only Western invention (ie. [[Gregorian calendar]]) The number of [[Islamic calendar]] + [[Chinese calendar]] calendar users is quite impressive.
Regards Youandme
I have no time to follow the discussion you are talking about, but... While making date syntax more general please remember that there are other [[calendar]]s in usage around the world nowadays, not only Western invention (ie. [[Gregorian calendar]]) The number of [[Islamic calendar]] + [[Chinese calendar]] calendar
users
is quite impressive.
Regards Youandme
I will remember that only once Islamic or Chinese (or Jewish or Mayan or French Revolutionary or Discordian) dates are actually used on Wikipedia.
On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Sean Barrett wrote:
Some discussion has occured in [[Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)]] about the formats of dates; i.e., whether or not [[January 2]], [[2003]] is American-Imperialist. (My feeling: yes, but that's not the only reason I like it.)
A suggestion was made to allow date strings to be wrapped in <date> - </date> tags which the Wikipediware will parse and render properly.
Why a date tag? Common date formats should be quite easy to find programmatically; the rare false positives can be <nowiki>'d away. Adding more new tags (particularly for things like dates, of which we have many thousands!) would just be a royal pain in the buttocks.
I have written a Perl routine to not only do this, but also return either the American or the European format, based on a flag set in each user's preferences.
Can I get them in 2003-01-02 format instead? :)
How would I go about adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
It would be a help to post it or a link to it to the wikitech-l list.
Should I even bother adding this routine to the Wikipediware?
Does anyone care?
(shrug) It's really part of the same issue as US vs UK (and most everyone else) spellings and word usage. What's normal to one group appears galling to the other, and we allow both equally and have no official preference. (Though there may be a de facto greater presence of one or ther other due to the relative proportions of contributors... additionally, there are the titles of the day pages, which really should be consistent, whereever they happen to be at, and however many redirect forms will get you there.)
A separate issue is presentation of dates in, for instance, recentchanges etc. I for one would prefer to see YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS everywhere. But then, I leave my timezone setting at UTC so you know I'm a weirdo. ;)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber wrote:
A separate issue is presentation of dates in, for instance, recentchanges etc. I for one would prefer to see YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS everywhere.
I support that.
But then, I leave my timezone setting at UTC so you know I'm a weirdo. ;)
I thought I was the only one that did that -- but then I'm on the west coast. ;-)
Ec
Brion Vibber vibber@aludra.usc.edu writes:
Can I get them in 2003-01-02 format instead? :)
I'm all for it; cf. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 ; even in Germany and in some other country it's an official notation (beside the traditional way to write date and time). In wikipedia article we can use the ISO format and there could be a configuration option how the reader likes to see the day.
Unfortuantely, hackers often are more biased in adopting the ISO style than we, the normal crowd ;)
A separate issue is presentation of dates in, for instance, recentchanges etc. I for one would prefer to see YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS everywhere.
Me too!
But then, I leave my timezone setting at UTC so you know I'm a weirdo. ;)
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