Bill Clark wrote:
On 9/5/06, ScottL scott@mu.org wrote:
Technical solution anyone?
Well, there is the patch I submitted that started this whole argument..
The only issues I can see are:
- What to do about AD/CE, and wikilinked dates with explicit display
text in general, e.g. [[July 4]], [[1776|AD 1776]] -- the existing code won't reformat such dates according to user preferences as it is, so this isn't just a problem with the patch.
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.
The default setting in my patch is to simply leave BC/BCE as they are, i.e. "No Preference." If people think it'll become a point of contention, then we can simply wait a while and look at the statistics of what preferences people actually set. If 90% of the English Wikipedia users set their preference to BCE, well then that would be a good argument in favor of making that the default. At least we'd actually have some numbers to go on, rather than just arguing about whether BC is religious POV or BCE is Political Correctness run amock or an Americanism or what.
-Bill
Well outside of defaults and policy I think the data itself would be interesting.
SKL