[WikiEN-l] Dates: Your vote is needed

[Daniel Mayer]

Erik wrote:
>Today Mav changed this to the effect that the style 
>"Month Day" should be  used on pages about US/world 
>topics, and "Day Month" on pages about British topics. 

No - that's not what I wrote. I wrote that whatever date style that is already 
in an article should, in general, be respected the same way as we already 
respect American/International English spellings. I then added that it might 
be preferable to use the formats which are more appropriate to the subject 
matter. So a purely Americana article might read better if it had American 
date and spelling styles and a purely British topic might read better if 
International date and spelling styles are used. This is a compromise since 
there was no clear majority supporting either style as absolute policy. So we 
must tolerate both. If we do not then whatever side losses is going to /very/ 
pissed and many of them may leave or fork the project based on such a minor 
difference. 

>This is analog to our currently (IMHO silly) rule to have  
>British spelling on British pages, US spelling on .. pretty 
>much every  other page. This further leads to a split into a 
>British Wikipedia and an "American" Wikipedia. 

If you want to see a real split (sic fork) see what happens if we outlaw one 
or another spelling style. Date formats are directly analogous to the 
spelling situation. 

>Of course, 
>no similar rule exists for German style   if I wrote "17. June"
>in an article about a German subject, I would be  called a 
>vandal after three reverts.

German style? Why the straw man? We are talking about two competing /English 
language/ styles. What the Germans do is their own business and has no 
bearing on the subject at hand.

>Interestingly, what Mav did is in contradiction to the 
>current distribution of opinion on the talk page

The distribution of opinion is that a large group of people want to have the 
International style be the absolute standard and another large group want to 
have the American style be the absolute standard. Both sides should be able 
to live with a compromise that allows both. Just like our policy on spelling.

>....
>Mav has now turned a separate option into policy, 
>namely the  one of separating between UK and 
>US/world topics.

Again this is a mischaracterization. See above.  

>I do not think that we should have a UK-Wikipedia 
>and a US/World- Wikipedia. Personally, I would love to 
>have the following compromise:
>
>        * US-style spelling in all articles
>        * British style dates in all articles

And then World War III starts between American and non-American Wikipedians.

>But the worst solution is one where every article looks 
>different. That conveys an unprofessional image: That 
>we only can maintain consistency on  a single page, 
>but not throughout our encyclopedia.

An even worse situation than that is the pissing off of very large segments of 
our contributors by choosing one spelling or date style over the other. The 
day articles are already at the American style and that is where they should 
stay (thus respecting and tolerating the date style choice of the original 
authors of those pages). But there are redirects from the International date 
style to each of these pages. Contributors can therefore choose which date 
style they think is best for them and for the article in question. 

I don't buy the argument that we look unprofessional by tolerating variant 
spelling and date formats. We /would/ look unprofessional if we lost a large 
segment of our users because we made an absolute policy to use one or the 
other style though. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)