Tels wrote:
But if you mark them with date<2006-09-14> or the more wiki like {{date| d=2006-09-14}} (or your <date></date>, but wikitext was the reason why I stopped writing HTML in the first place), then they could be automatically linked, too :)
date<2006-09-14> is rather un-xml-ish.
I wouldn't oppose to wikilinking all dates. But there are Wikipedians that want to be able to chose per each single date instance if it should be linked or not. I think the argument was "not to overlink" and some felt that a huge amount of incoming links to pages like [[2005]] are pointless (I don't care about either of these issues). But the [[..]] syntax rightfully suggests that we can *choose* to link or not to link on everything. Why not on dates exhibiting date display magic? Currently these *must* be wikilinked in order to get that popular date preferences magic. Which seems odd to me. Non-orthogonal.
My problem is, that this whole linking/not linking, date preferences working/not working issue is a matter of constant debate, also on templates like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_web. And in that debate the anon users have no voice.
Packaging dates into template calls like {{date|d=2006-09-14}} doesn't solve the underlying problem we have with dates. Such a template would be simply ignored by Wikipedians IMHO, because it serves no purpose. Also, on en the name is already taken ;-)
--Ligulem