On 05/09/06, Bill Clark wclarkxoom@gmail.com wrote:
There doesn't seem to be any code to handle this currently for AD, which is why it didn't occur to me right off the bat. You're right though, and it should be included. I'm busy over the next few days but I can add this into the patch sometime this week (along with whatever other changes people suggest).
On 9/5/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
It's been a vexed question on en:. I mentioned it on wikien-l, you may want to ask there for any missing features (though I can't think of any past automatic conversion).
Thanks for the pointer; I've subscribed to that list.
I went ahead and started looking into adding AD/CE rewriting functionality, and noticed something that might put a damper on those plans.. AD or CE only ever appear in the right (display) portion of a wikilinked date, as in:
... lasted from [[August 13]], [[10 BC]]–[[January 23]], [[15|AD 15]] ...
Both the current code and my patch would leave the date on the right entirely alone, since it contains explicit display text. This makes sense, since the editor actually went to the trouble of specifying how to display the date, and we wouldn't want to thoughtlessly override that.
So it seems we're left with three options:
1) Ignore wikilinked dates that contain explicit display text, leaving them untouched. 2) Change all wikilinked dates and associated display text according to user preferences. 3) Encourage a mass renaming of year articles from (e.g.) [[1984]] to [[AD 1984]].
Even though option 3 is completely unrealistic, I mention it because it actually makes the most sense (how did we get started having bare numbers assumed to be a date by default, anyway?). That said, I think option 2 is the best bet, so long as it's considered more important to have consistent date formatting than to honor the display text put in place by editors.
Note that this is already a problem on the current WP, since the following won't display according to a user's preferences anyway:
[[March 21]], [[1974|1974]]
The current solution is to follow option 1, and that's what's already in place in the patch I just submitted. I've posted some of this discussion there as well (bug 7239) in case people would rather follow up there.
I'm really really going to bed now and not going to work on this anymore for a few days, I swear, so I'll get back to this later.
-Bill Clark