On 9/8/06, ScottL <scott(a)mu.org> wrote:
> While I do not like the idea of someone using AWB to go through and
> change one to the other. If the feature works well enough in the
> preferences they could go through and rewikify the dates to make the
> feature detect them (leaving the displayed version alone). I think that
> is what is currently done when someone wikifies [[June 22, 2005]] a bot
> of some sort comes and changes it.
The problem is that AD/CE are only supposed to be displayed (according
to the manual of style) if you're dealing with a span of time that
crosses the BC-AD (or BCE-CE) boundary. In other words, this is
proper:
[[July 4]], [[1776 BC]]–[[July 4]], [[1776|AD 1776]]
...and this is proper:
[[March 21]], [[1974]]–[[October 16]],[[1975]]
...but this is not:
[[March 21]], [[1974|AD 1974]]–[[October 16]],[[1975|AD 1975]]
...and this is not:
[[July 4]], [[1776 BC]]–[[July 4]], [[1776]]
Now, it would certainly be possible to include this level of
context-awareness into the parser, but it's probably not a good idea.
So we're left with trusting the editors to provide the correct display
text in wikilinks, in the manner appropriate to the situation.
If we're going to keep using display text in wikilinks to provide the
AD/CE (as opposed to BC/BCE, which is mandatory and thus easily
parsed) then whatever date display mechanism we use, whether it's the
current one or my patched one or some other one, will have to deal
with this situation.
I'm leaning toward having the parser just rewrite the display text as
well as the link itself, since the other "reasonable" alternative is
to leave the display text alone, and (assuming we put in place my
BC/BCE rewriting patch) this could result in aesthetically unappealing
situations where BCE and AD are mixed in a date range, if the user has
BCE set as their preference (or BC and CE mixed for users who prefer
BC).
The display text is already provided automatically for users who set a
preference and for wikilinked dates that don't already include display
text, so there's already an expectation that dates won't necessarily
display according to the regular rules of interpreting wikicode.
Rewriting display text would make it impossible for editors to specify
something other than what users prefer to see, but I can't think of
any situations where that would be truly disasterous.
-Bill Clark