"Bill Clark" wclarkxoom@gmail.com wrote in message news:741500800609082032x7df90e7by572b2d8c1447ae34@mail.gmail.com...
On 9/8/06, ScottL scott@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.
[SNIP]
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.
Why not have a rewrite rule, that looks at the format of the display text and rewrites it only if appropriate?
e.g.
[[1976|AD 1976]] is detected as being an AD date, and rewritten if necessary [[1976|the following year]] does not match, so no changes are made.
If the display text matches Year Epoch or Epoch Year (where Epoch = BC, AD, BCE or CE and ignoring case and whitespace) then rewrite according to user preferences, in all other cases leave as it is.
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)