[WikiEN-l] Linking Dates

[Marc Riddell]

on 10/8/08 7:02 PM, Andrew Gray at shimgray at gmail.com wrote:

> 2008/10/8 Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net>:
>> Folks,
>> 
>> Would someone help me here? What is the current policy regarding linking
>> dates such as Birth and Death in biography articles?
> 
> You're as surprised by it as the rest of us :-)
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:DATES#Date_autoformatting
> 
> The old "link all dates" is now deprecated, and we're advised to just
> write them in a standard form (14 November 2000 or November 14, 2000).
> It'll be interesting to see if this helps reduce overlinking
> 
> The old system was laudable, but really only worked for a small
> minority of readers, usually active editors themselves. For everyone
> else, it just got confusing...

Thanks, all, for your input. I do almost all of my editing in biographies
and wondered from the beginning why it was necessary. Now, my next question
is, when going in to edit an existing Article that has the dates linked,
should they be routinely de-linked?

Marc