Eclecticology wrote:

The ISO format is based on numerical dates. Thus for the example it would be 2003-06-24. It includes hyphens and has leading zeros for days and months. To the extent that I have been applying them I would enter such a date as [[2003]]-[[06-24]]. The first hyphen is outside of the link, and I have written redirects for the numerical dates on an as required basis.

I didn't bother putting that one in because there didn't seem to be much support for it on the voting page. I can put it in if you want. It will be infinitesimally slower than the rest due to the need for month name->number conversion.

tarquin-

...

It seems a little bats that at a time when our databse is struggling, we're adding more load to the system for something so trivial.

This should not add substantial load if properly coded, since it's just a search/replace operation with a fairly specific match (only triggers on linked dates).

That's my thinking too, although I haven't tested it. There's no extra DB access, which by far forms the lion's share of the time required to display a page. CPU load is about 5-6 lightweight preg_replace calls. They all match a limited number of characters, and start with "[[". I thought long and hard about various possible implementations: say, a single more complex regex plus some PHP code to distinguish between the various cases, but I decided that would take longer. Ditto for somehow incorporating it into replaceInternalLinks(). The only faster thing way I can think of is writing it in C. Setting up the regular expressions from the month name array is done once per script run (stored in static variables), so if a tight loop of addWikiText calls is slow, it won't be my fault.

It will help us present a consistent picture throughout all our pages while not giving up some editorial liberty. I therefore fully support the implementation of this feature, unless the code is completely nuts ;-)

Yes, well you'll be able to judge that for yourself soon if I stop typing emails and start doing some real work. :)

-- Tim Starling.

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