This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Years and dates archives |
---|
|
Note: I have added nowiki's to correct some broken templates. Please see earlier versions of this page for the correct content. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:04, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
Dates like 1582-10-10 appear to be in ISO 8601 format. This is especially true for autoformatted dates, because the user preferences window indicates this format with the text "2001-01-15T16:12:34", which is unmistakably in the ISO 8601 format. The ISO 8601 format requires the use of the Gregorian calendar, and for dates before that calender was introduced, the proleptic Gregorian calendar. Browsing a few articles suggests that many editors do not understand this convention, and are therefore presenting incorrect dates to readers. Also, a date in a non-numeric format such as 10 October 1582 will generally be presumed to be in the Julian calendar (since it is before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar) so if it is autoformatted, the meaning of the date changes depending on the reader's preference setting.
Please note that discussions on this matter have been quite amicable and this RFC is only to attract a wider audience.
-- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 17:46, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
I have moved the recent addition:
Because readers who are logged in and have set a date and time preference to "2001-01-15T16:12:34" will see what seems to be an ISO 8601 format date, and because ISO 8601 format only uses the Gregorian calendar (or the proleptic Gregorian calendar before that calendar went into force in various areas), articles autoformatting any date before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the area discussed in the article should explicitly state that the proleptic Gregorian calendar is used in the article. A date in any calendar except the (proleptic) Gregorian calendar must not be autoformatted.
to here for further discussion, because it affects so many article and we should give careful consideration to whether this should be addressed separately from a general removal of links on dates -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 11:55, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
The MOS contains the text:
Does that mean that autoformatting is not safe for dates prior to 1583? Lightmouse ( talk) 08:56, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Hmm. This is worrying. Are you saying that all the current links for dates prior to 1583 are safe? It is just editors that create new links that need to watch out? Lightmouse ( talk) 09:26, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
I agree. There are general problems with autoformatting that apply to all dates. I was not aware until now that dates prior to 1583 have a specific error condition that will almost certainly remain uncorrected. I propose that the current text:
is changed to:
Lightmouse ( talk) 10:41, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
The guideline is wrong, as is the proposal. For example William Shakespeare died on April 23 1616. If what you are saying is true then nearly every date article on Wikipedia will need changing, and the dates of events in the general articles will have different dates from those in the date articles. It will also effect categories for births and deaths of those born around January 1. Indeed for some years Christmas day will not be in the right year let alone on the right day.-- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 11:02, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Philip, I'm not sure what you mean by "if what you are saying is true then nearly every date article on Wikipedia will need changing". Could you explain? What is a "date article"? -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 20:06, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Random832 asked at the Village pump (policy) page "for what years should the Julian calendar be applied? Between 1582 and 1923 it is ambiguous." It depends on the subject matter of the article, but whatever is done should be explicitly stated in the article. If it were me, and the article was not connected to any particular location, I would make the transition at 1582. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 18:22, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
When reading Wikipedia's William Shakespeare article with date/time preferences set to ISO 8601 format, we read:
William Shakespeare (baptised 1564-04-26 – died 1616-04-23)[a]
.
.
.
a. ^ Dates use the Julian calendar, used in England throughout Shakespeare's lifespan. Under the Gregorian calendar, which was adopted in Catholic countries in 1582, Shakespeare died on May 3.[187]
So the format of the date proclaims it is in the Gregorian proleptic calendar, but the footnote proclaims it is in the Julian calendar, so the article contradicts itself. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 18:17, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
There seems to be a conflict of what is expected of autoformatting:
1 - That it correctly interprets and formats the date, which is NEVER going to happen. Any date from 1582 until the date of Gregorian switchover in the relevant locale, you'd also need to know which calendar (Gregorian or Julian), which implies a need to incorporate location into the date. And which date is being used for new year, 25 March or 1 January?
2 - That it formats a text string into the format preferred by the reader. While I can see the point that it's not going to help most readers, it will help registered users, those who are more likely to get into edit-wars over date format than casual readers. If autoformat forestalls edit wars I'm all for it.
Bazj (
talk) 23:57, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
The Swiss web site mentioned by Philip is the personal web site of Peter Meyer. Ordinarily it would be considered unreliable, although I have seen it mentioned favorably in a number of places. In any case, he has no authority to change an ISO standard that explicitly says it uses only the Gregorian calendar. Furthermore, section 3.4 of the standard, "Characters used in the representations" does mention single letters with special meanings, like "T" and "Z", but does not mention Meyer's "J" or "G". The instant you put a "G" or a "J" onto what would otherwise be an ISO 8601 date, it becomes a Peter Meyer date.
Wikipedia does indeed say we should ordinarily use either the Julian or Gregorian calendar, whichever was in general use in the area described in the article. That's the right thing to do. (What to do in an area that used some other calendar is not so clear.) Wikipedia also strongly implies that dates in the YYYY-MM-DD format are ISO 8601 format, and even if we didn't imply it, readers would infer it anyway. Thus, every article that presents a date in the YYYY-MM-DD format is proclaiming that it is in the Gregorian calendar. If the article has a note to the contrary, the article contradicts itself.
We could attempt to create the "English Wikipedia Standard Date Format" and try to explain how it might be either Julian or Gregorian, depending on the country discussed, but that would be a terrible idea. It would be better to just not use the ISO 8601 format, or autoformatting, for any date preceeding 14 September 1725, as well as any date in the Julian calendar after that date. I'm starting to think this needs wider attention, perhaps at the Village Pump. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 17:25, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Since three days have passed since the last comment in this thread, I think it's time to sum up editor's conclusions.
The purpose of this straw poll is to find out if editors opinions on two questions:
Note that the below chart does not allow ~~~~ signatures to be used. You must copy/paste or hand-edit your signature. For assistance in writing your signature, you may copy the time below in red from the preview window after refreshing while in edit mode:
19:22, 27 April 2024 (UTC)
Editor | ISO 8601 governs dates like "1582-10-10" | Prohibit such dates & autolinking if not in (proleptic) Gregorian calendar |
---|---|---|
Gerry Ashton 23:52, 21 August 2008 (UTC) | Y | Y |
User:Blank | ? | ? |
User:Blank | ? | ? |
User:Blank | ? | ? |
User:Blank | ? | ? |
ISO 8601 is the best-known standard for this format, and there are many mentions within Wikipedia MOSs and cite templates of these dates being ISO or ISO 8601. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 23:58, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
Although the discussion always seems to go off at various tangents when the issue is raised (like when I raised it above), I still see no argument of any weight against deprecating the linking of dates (except in special cases), and plenty of arguments (and apparent consensus) in favour. If no-one can come up with a valid counterargument, I'm going to start feeling bold and editing the guideline accordingly.-- Kotniski ( talk) 10:57, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
Excellent idea Keith! Please go ahead and change the software. We're not heading for an article-by-article basis: this is where we're at. The delinking being done on this basis has been generally met with a positive response. The arguments for it are strong. Those not in favour of depreciating autoformatting seem to think it can be fixed. If you've been following the issue, you'd understand why those in favour of depreciation have given up hope in having it fixed. We're everywhere near the stage of changing the guidelines. Let them be changed but heed Tony's call about allowing a little room to move (at least for now) for those who still think it's a good thing. JIMp talk· cont 14:00, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
[[2005-06-08]]
method, which isn’t for producing ISO formats, but was intended to take an ISO-formatted input with which to output dates with spelled-out month names *but it only does so for registered edtiors* (terribly unwise since 99.9% of readers see numeric-only dates). I suggest a bot be made that goes in to articles, looks for any other hard-coded dates to see how they are formated (14 Feb or Feb, 14), and which then converts the ISO-input dates to hard-coded ones.
Greg L (
talk) 20:54, 16 August 2008 (UTC)Here's the text: I think this is the insertion we're looking for (in italics) in the "Date autoformatting" section. It will promote the simplification of wikitext, an increase in the salience of our high-value links, and the reduction of colour-clutter in our article text. It's a good example where a straight move towards simplicity in process immediately improves the product.
[[5 November]] or [[November 5]]; [[5 November]] [[1989]] or [[November 5]], [[1989]]
). The square brackets instruct the MediaWiki software to format the item according to the
date preferences for registered users who have chosen a setting and are logged in. This should not generally be used unless there is a particular reason to do so. Careful consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of the autoformatting mechanism should be made before applying it: the mechanism does not work for the vast majority of readers, such as unregistered users and registered users who have not made a setting, and can affect readability and appearance if there are already numerous high-value links in the text.I've also inserted the US style into the example, for users who do have "a particular reason to do so"; I don't know why that was ever left out. Tony (talk) 00:51, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Support It's time to rid WP of these links to nothing of worth. JIMp talk· cont 11:39, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Support Lightmouse ( talk) 11:50, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Support, if editors haven't read the comprehensive discourse already taken place, maybe they should familiarize themselves with the discussions on this page as well as the archived material. This discussion has now moved along, autodate formatting offers few advantages to the vast majority of readers/users who use wikipedia. The proposal, immediately above, of using markup such as <span class="wpAutoDate">17 August 2008</span> would put the onus on editors removing wikilinks although the case was not made for why we are keeping them in the first place. No one is advocating removal, merely deprecating the use of a format that is not that useful. FWiW, I would still favour the wikilinking of dates to lists such as the "year in film or "year in aviation." Bzuk ( talk) 19:52, 17 August 2008 (UTC).
Support. Autoformatting doesn’t benefit the vast majority of readers. There was simply never any proper justification for creating a tool where only registered editors can see the editorial effect so 99.9% of Wikipedia’s readership see only a default style that could have been set in fixed text. Further, using the tool introduces the disadvantage of generating links to random irrelevant trivia. Even though the tool is widely used, that’s no reason whatsoever MOSNUM can’t call for editors no longer *adding* them to new articles and for explicitly allowing editors to change from autoformat to fixed text. Further, bots can later be made to do that drudgery for us. Greg L ( talk) 03:56, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Support. I have yet to see any compelling reasons for auto-formatting. So a few users can avoid seeing "16 November 2003" in some articles and "November 16, 2003" in others? They (or rather, we) still are the exact same users who think there are no problems with seeing "colour" in some articles and "color" in others, so what harm could date format differences do? Among the drawbacks of auto-formatting, the most serious is the hiding of inconsistencies from precisely those who would be most likely to fix them. My suggestion is to apply WP:ENGVAR to date formats while wikilinking only extremely relevant dates, and then the whole date ( November 16, 2003), which would make for meaningful backlinks. -- Jao ( talk) 13:04, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Support - Agree completely with the rationale of Jao above, and others. There are no compelling reasons to continue autoformatting, to my knowledge. — Mattisse ( Talk) 15:27, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Support - Tony's proposal (with the "should" modification) states it clearly and benefits the greatest number of readers. If and when the developers decide to introduce coding to allow everyone to select a preference and to display so automatically, we can get by without. Askari Mark (Talk) 18:52, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Support - many good reasons already given above. I also support Jao's idea: "My suggestion is to apply WP:ENGVAR to date formats while wikilinking only extremely relevant dates, and then the whole date ( November 16, 2003), which would make for meaningful backlinks." Teemu Leisti ( talk) 13:20, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
Support Tony's proposal above. Autoformatting as it is currently implemented does not have the kind of benefit that might justify its use, given that the blue links in articles should be of high value to the reader. EdJohnston ( talk) 13:44, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
Support - plenty of good reasons to get rid of auto-formatting and none to preserve it. The auto-formatting hackery (and hacks to work around hacks for those hacks) is superfluous. Editors ought to write dates without adornment and without ambiguity; 'August 22, 2008' or '22 August 2008', just like they might write any other three words. Its not rocket science. -- Fullstop ( talk) 17:21, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
I believe that a reasonable person would determine that there is overwhelming consensus to add the following sentence to the section “Date autoformatting”:
This should not generally be used unless there is a particular reason to do so.
The movement from mandatory to optional has occurred, in various forms, over more than two years. This has come to a head in the discussion here and elsewhere over the past six weeks, culminating in calls from numerous experienced editors for further movement. Their arguments are plainly set out here; in addition, I submit that the views expressed in favour of removing DA by some 50 other editors, most of whom are not regular participants at the MoS talk pages, be taken into account as secondary evidence of wider consensus in the project. Their comments have been cut and pasted into a central page here. In addition, the current seeking of consensus was flagged at the Village Pump.
Arguments have been put against the move, apparently based on the following good-faith motivations.
I put it to you that there is ample evidence on this page and elsewhere of compelling rebuttals of the opposing views. A number of people began the debate on the negative side and switched to strong support. Users Ckatz, EncMstr, BillCJ and Francis Shonken have expressed their opposition to the move, but have not contributed to the debate on this page; except for EncMstr, whose views are of the first type above, it has not been easy to locate and encapsulate substantive arguments by these users (F Schonken would only refer, repeatedly, to this debate from two years ago).
I will insert the sentence into MOSNUM forthwith. Thank you all for your contributions. Tony (talk) 01:38, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
Having read through the various discussions I would like to offer a middle ground outcome when it comes to auto formatting. There is still the option of improving the auto formatting methods but this is a an option until that is worked upon. This may suffice until that time.
This removes redundent wikilinking where it is not necessary but allows clarification where it is obviously needed. Seddσn talk Editor Review 01:51, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Oppose: If ISO dates are ambiguous, there's a better solution than linking: don't use them. There are only two advantages of ISO dates I can think of.
So don't link ISO dates, better just avoiding them. JIMp talk· cont 15:43, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
Oppose. Instead, I support Tony's proposal, for reasons already enumerated. Teemu Leisti ( talk) 00:53, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
Oppose. To the extent that DA is to be deprecated, Seddon's middle-ground proposal is OBE; as for ISO dates, the rarer they are, the better. Askari Mark (Talk) 02:42, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
Following MOS decission that linking dates not automatically the prefered approach, discussion had at the Cite XXX family of templates about removing autowikilinking, but allowing the option of a per-article only-if-a-consensus basis of selecting US or International style of dates approapriate for article topic and so make references use a consistant style of dates as appears in the actual text of an article. Discussion centred on Template talk:Cite web to add a datestyle parameter, but with plan to then role-out across the citation templates.
First attempt had to be nearly instantly reverted, as others not using the templates as we (i.e. largely myself) had appreciated and actual implementation proved not quite what others had expected. So after some very helpful discussions and a number of alternative suggestions (and large number of examples set out), I think the proposal is ready for re-implementation. However we lack a breadth of other editors' input, so seems sensible for me to post a heads-up here, as the cite templates clearly must be subserviant to MOSDATE :-)
As a few quick sandbox examples for an updated cite web:
{{User:davidruben/sandbox4|author=Author |title=Title |url=http://example.org |date=August 24, 2007 |publication=Pub |accessdate=2008-08-18 |datestyle=}}
Author (August 24, 2007). " Title". Retrieved on 2008-08-18.
{{User:davidruben/sandbox4|author=Author |title=Title |url=http://example.org |date=August 24, 2007 |publication=Pub |accessdate=2008-08-18 |datestyle=mdy}}
Author (August 24, 2007). " Title". Retrieved on August 18, 2008.
{{User:davidruben/sandbox4|author=Author |title=Title |url=http://example.org |date=August 24, 2007 |publication=Pub |accessdate=2008-08-18 |datestyle=dmy}}
Author (24 August 2007). " Title". Retrieved on 18 August 2008.
see Template talk:Cite web#Review of current and sandbox coding - examples and now Template talk:Cite web#Proposal to go #2 - thank you David Ruben Talk 23:14, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
First off, I completely understand most of the reasons to remove date linking - the wikilink function is being overloaded with date autoformatting to distasterous results, as normally happens with badly thought out overloaded operators. Approaching the mediwiki devs resulted in no immediately plans to correct this. As a result, it does make sense to remove this function.
However, are we 100% that there will never be some extension or addition to Mediawiki that will give us the ability to autoformat dates via some other means (template/magic word, whatever)? My understanding is that if there was a magic template that took in any recognizable date format and spat out the date formatted to the user prefs (with some mechanism for non-logged in users and per page to see a consistent date format), we'd be all over that in a heartbeat. Let's assume the template also dealt with date ranges, the Gregorian calender per-1600 issue, IP geo-tracking, etc, in that it is a magic bullet for date autoformatting. (I don't know the programming for this extension, but I can see the template creation being rather easy as long as the extension is flexible as such). My concern thus is if there is going to be a possibility of date autoforatting via a sensible means, we are going to want to go back to that, and thus to do that we will need to re-iterate through all articles to find such dates. The mechanism being done now is stripping an easy (despite the illogical nature) method of computer-assisted detection of dates such that if we convert to this hypothetical scheme, it's going to take a lot of extra work.
Presuming that we haven't ruled out a future mediawiki change, my suggestion is that any dates stripped of wikilink presently need to be wrapped instead with a dummy template, "date" or "d" or something short. Presently, that template would simply regurgitate the date (no formatting at all), but the key is that now a script/bot can identify dates. This gives us a lightweight placeholder for all dates such that we can readdress the possibility of autoformatting in the future, with the turnaround to reconvert dates to autoformatted ones rather trivial - it would just be a matter of modifying this "date" template. Only if we are 100% sure that mediawiki will never have this ability can this aspect be ignored. However, my impression is that there's still room for such an addition. -- MASEM 13:45, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
What makes this really galling is that someone actually did the development work to auto-format the dates without link-syntax. It just needs testing and implementing Rich Farmbrough, 01:37 21 August 2008 (GMT).
Guys, it should be a no-brainer that editors on WP should be viewing the text as our readers out there view it. I have no idea why people wish to spend more than 15 seconds of their valuable time discussing it. The differences are just so trivial, and both forms are readily comprehensible by all anglophones. Tony (talk) 14:16, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Now that the subpage on date autoformatting has been created, I suggest further discussion of its contents take place on its talk page. The content seems to have settled in the last couple of days, except that there's still no consensus on whether to say that autoformatting is "deprecated", "discouraged", or what have you. (I'm placing this notice simultaneously in all the topics that deal primarily with autoformatting.) Teemu Leisti ( talk) 10:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
The autoformatting table is a detailed explanation of how a tool works, not style guidance. The convert template is mentioned in MOSNUM and we provide a link to its explanation page. I propose that we do the same with autoformatting i.e. the details are moved to an explanation page that we mention in MOSNUM. Lightmouse ( talk) 22:26, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
I think this was a good move, and helped edit the new subpage a bit. Now that it's there, I propose further discussion of the subject be moved to the subpage's talk page. Teemu Leisti ( talk) 14:48, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Now that the subpage on date autoformatting has been created, I suggest further discussion of its contents take place on its talk page. The content seems to have settled in the last couple of days, except that there's still no consensus on whether to say that autoformatting is "deprecated", "discouraged", or what have you. (I'm placing this notice simultaneously in all the topics that deal primarily with autoformatting.) Teemu Leisti ( talk) 10:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
I think it’s pretty clear from the preceding discussions that a consensus exists for discouraging further application of DAs. Furthermore, when it’s clearly explained why it’s being deprecated, many originally dissenting editors have changed their mind. Considering that this is a major change in the expected appearance of Wikipedia articles, I think this MOS change should be presented in the VP, along with the rationale. Furthermore, I believe a simple statement of the rationale should also appear in the passage in MOSNUM because when people understand the rationale, they’re more disposed to accept it.
That said, there is another related issue that I don’t believe there is consensus on (and reading Masem’s recent posts, it is assumed by some as also a given), and that is the issue of mass removal of existing DAs. As can be noted by the protests of Tony’s trial removals in several articles and a few other editors’ personal crusades, the jury is out on that issue. Implementing such large-scale removals without a consensus of the community as a whole – vice a limited number of interested parties here – can be expected to be no less disruptive than that incurred over the mass deletions of non-free and a majority of fair-use images (which at least had legal reasons behind it, not merely stylistic ones). Face it, a lot of work has gone into inserting them (in accordance with what most editors have understood to be the preferred approach), and ripping it all out at once, with little or no input (much less warning), will lead to a lot of unnecessarily hurt feelings and the loss of a number of discouraged or angry editors. Wikipedians hate being dictated to by a minority of experts.
Accordingly, I’d encourage asking the community’s preference for eliminating them. Mass, perhaps bot-automated, removal is one option. Another is to leave them to the consensus of the editors of each article to decide. (Then they become part of the solution.) I’d prefer the second option to be the default until such time as there is a public consensus for the former. Askari Mark (Talk) 03:16, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
As a result, the “[[2005-06-06]]
” format was made. Why? I have no idea. Whoever thought that one up should be blocked for a week for damaging Wikipedia. It has only recently dawned our our consciousness here on Talk:MOSNUM what we’ve been doing all along with tools such as these. We editors think we’re getting
June 6,
2005, but virtually the entire English-speaking world sees
2005-
06-06 in all its linked-to-worthless-trivia glory (and all its ambiguousness). This particular format is where deprecation should begin and it can’t possibly happen fast enough for my taste. Anyone who thinks Wikipedia is doing anyone a favor by making 99.9% of our readership parse out a date like that is just fooling them-self.
We editors need to be looking at all the exact same editorial content as the rest of our readership. If we aren’t, we’re just pulling the editorial blinds down on problems that need to be addressed here on MOSNUM. Greg L ( talk) 17:55, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
Um, the rhetoric has been a little over the top for quite a while. Autoformatting was created to solve a problem with interminable edit wars between two groups of editors who did have a problem looking at June 6, 2005 when they wanted 6 June 2005 or vice-versa. Undoing the formatting is already starting some edit skirmishes. I don't like the links myself, but I like a stable Wikipedia a lot more. The obvious (to me) and quick solution to most of the problem would be to have the software autoformat [[June 6]], [[2005]] but render it without links. "[[June 6]], [[2005]]" would appear without links as "June 6, 2005" for those preferring MDY, "6 June 2005" for those preferring DMY, "2005-06-06" for those prefering ISO, and "June 6, 2005" for registered users without a pref and for those not logged in. A creative solution might even add a new preference to render dates with or without links (default no). Gimmetrow 21:00, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
You might argue then that we should simply then make the translation tools work for all readers—including unregistered I.P. editors (as you’ve already written here innumerable times). And I’ll say again: if you think you can convince the developers to make a wholesale change to the architecture and underpinnings of Wikipedia’s servers so they look to our readers’ I.P. address and spoon-feeds custom content depending on which country the readers’ live in, be my guest. Go ahead and try. Those of here with experience in these matters know that nothing at all like that will happen anytime in the foreseeable future.
Besides, all that effort just so someone from the U.S. can be sheltered from the shock of being exposed to “6 August 2005’' is simple foolishness that isn’t worth the fuss. There’s nothing at all wrong with looking at either “August 6, 2005” or “6 August 2005’'; both are absolutely unambiguous and clear. All the editors who were battling over this can act like grownups and follow a simple guideline for choosing the most article-appropriate date format. And I’m sure you can survive perfectly well if you actually have to read what regular I.P. readers see; I know I can. Greg L ( talk) 21:57, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
Greg L, you have convinced me that date delinking is a bad idea. Gimmetrow 23:00, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
Now that the subpage on date autoformatting has been created, I suggest further discussion of its contents take place on its talk page. The content seems to have settled in the last couple of days, except that there's still no consensus on whether to say that autoformatting is "deprecated", "discouraged", or what have you. (I'm placing this notice simultaneously in all the topics that deal primarily with autoformatting.) Teemu Leisti ( talk) 10:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
Our well-established guidelines for which of the two standard date formats should be used in an article, here, say this:
*Articles related to other countries that commonly use one of the two acceptable formats above should use that format.
This is all very well for articles, say, on contemporary Venezuala, which uses US spelling in its English, but international date format; however, I've heard editors say that "hey, this medieval topic shouldn't be in US formatting", or " Beethoven should be changed to international" (it was a couple of months ago, on that very basis).
I think this is an unintended consequence of the guideline that wasn't thought through at the time. I'm not at all comfortable with the implications of the current wording: I believe it should be left up to the editors of each article to decide (usually on the basis of the first editor's choice), as is widely the case until the occasional editor points to this guideline. It matters nought to me that 19th-century Russian composer Tschaikovsky is written in US format.
May I propose an addition to stop this happening? It's longer than I'd hoped for, but I think it does the trick:
*Articles related to other countries that commonly use one of the two acceptable formats above should use that format. (However, this should not be interpreted as requiring per se the conversion of US to international format where a topic, particularly a historical topic, is largely connected with locations in non-anglophone countries that do not or did not use the modern US format.)
My only misgiving is that there may be widespread support for transforming such articles to international format; I've yet to see this expressed, though. Your thoughts, please? Tony (talk) 05:31, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
My only misgiving is that there may be widespread support for transforming such articles to international format. I can't see a problem with this. In fact, Wikipedia being an international effort, why not have all dates in international format? -- Pete ( talk) 10:31, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
If it's acceptable, for example, for all European historical articles that use US format to be changed to international, it's fine by me. In that case, the current guidelines are quite satisfactory. Tony (talk) 12:41, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
I see no reason to extend this beyond English-speaking countries, for which it was intended. An established style should be left alone. Don't most editors have more important things to do? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:32, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
Whether they conflict depends on the meaning of "clear ties" (which is another reason to avoid it). Do most Popes have clear ties to Italy? or is the Catholic Church an international organization? Either is arguable, but many of the Papal articles have been written in American; the Catholic Encyclopedia uses a mixed style(23 August, 2008).. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:48, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
People that care about the sequence used in countries can create a separate page defining those countries where the dmy sequence is not the more common format. Mosnum itself does not need to get involved in such details. Lightmouse ( talk) 11:59, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
I don't think we should care what format is used for dates in countries that don't use English. In any case their dates are not going to look English. Does the fact that Poles write 1. kwietnia 1968r. mean that when writing about Poland we should write 1 April 1968 because that's most similar to the native format? Does this also mean that we should use "color" rather than "colour" in writing about Poland because it's more similar to the Polish word "kolor"? I think the established ENGVAR rules about spelling can be carried over to date formats too.-- Kotniski ( talk) 07:19, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
All: Seeing no opposition to the proposal, and seeing a clear consensus regarding the wisdom of date autoformatting, I moved the Date autoformatting section to a subpage. Please see Proposal to move autoformatting table to its own page. Greg L ( talk) 19:50, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
Now that the subpage on date autoformatting has been created, I suggest further discussion of its contents take place on its talk page. The content seems to have settled in the last couple of days, except that there's still no consensus on whether to say that autoformatting is "deprecated", "discouraged", or what have you. (I'm placing this notice simultaneously in all the topics that deal primarily with autoformatting.) Teemu Leisti ( talk) 10:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
A bit farther up the page, Tony1 commented that some of the editors opposed to deprecating DA - myself included - had not participated in the discussion. Frankly, attitudes such as what Greg L and others have been expressing are precisely why I've not participated. What, exactly, is the point, when one can only expect to be ridiculed, mocked, and treated like a child? Terms like "spoon-feed", "privileged" and "act like grownups" have no place in this discussion, and serve only to alienate anyone who disagrees with the "deprecate" opinion. Furthermore, why has the ludicrous notion that editors using the settings are somehow a "privileged elite" been tolerated in this discussion? Administrators - who are selected by the wider community and entrusted with the ability to delete pages and block users - are considered to be regular editors with extra tools (a description I agree with). How, then, does clicking on "register" and using the preferences make one "privileged" or "elite"? When did reading the instructions become a stepping-stone to a higher "status"? -- Ckatz chat spy 20:04, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
First, it is indeed pleasing to see this discussion properly characterized as a "debate!" (We don't have a "dispute" about this, nor do we have a "consensus." We have well-intentioned and reasonable editors who currently disagree, and are working together cooperatively towards a solution that will promote the best interests of our collaborative project.)
A fundamental assumption underlying the position of some editors is that we can discuss this all we want, and we can change the behavior of editors, but we can't change the underlying functionality of our project (the English-language Wikipedia website). Readers of those editors' contributions might perceive attitudes varying from frustration and resentment to resignation and acceptance. Those experienced editors encourage readers to tilt at windmills if they wish, but they don't expect any solutions to be forthcoming.
I don't share that view. but I would like to see it made explicit. Please, would those editors who do hold that opinion make explicit that they are shaping a MOS guideline, and thus shaping the behavior of all editors, specifically because they cannot shape the website software? Once that view is clearly stated, and we reach (reluctantly, for some of use) consensus on it, we can hope this debate will lead to a collaborative consensus for future action. ( sdsds - talk) 21:59, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
←I'm very sorry that the debate has occasionally become emotional. As one of the main proponents of the reform, I'd like to apologise to anyone for whom the enthusiasm of those in favour of the change was experienced as emotionally negative and distrustful. What more can I say? Only that heat has been expressed by both sides: a quick look at User talk:Colonies Chris/Archive/2008/Aug demonstrates that; or don't look at it, and let's move on. We can only try to minimise strong language here, since passion is always going to try to burst out of committed people. Tony (talk) 02:49, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Now that the subpage on date autoformatting has been created, I suggest further discussion of its contents take place on its talk page. The content seems to have settled in the last couple of days, except that there's still no consensus on whether to say that autoformatting is "deprecated", "discouraged", or what have you. (I'm placing this notice simultaneously in all the topics that deal primarily with autoformatting.) Teemu Leisti ( talk) 10:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
This is extraordinarily strong, and is currently being used to flip the format on hundreds of articles. Indeed, one dedicated editor seems to spend his time doing nothing else. As Tony has pointed out, if the alternative to autoformatting is Date Wars, removing it will not be popular; it may not be desirable. We should tone this down, at least to recognize our long-standing rule that established styles should not be lightly changed. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:30, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
The point here is that an editor, Pete, came to an article that was well into using a dating convention of month-date-year from the beginning, placed a comment on the talk page, well over a week after the established convention, espousing that a day-month-year convention should now be adhered to because Georgia and Russia use this dating. A few editors agree and a few opposed, no consensus, rather more like a vote, and began changing the established convention. 2008 South Ossetia war is already involved in a rather heated NPOV debate concerning the substance of the article. Established editors of this article have been using the month-date-year convention and all of a sudden, on a on-going, multi-edits per day, even edits per hour article, we now have to deal with a dating war. This is counter productive. Whether the non-English speaking country uses month-day-year or day-month-year, overrides the established convention? This is not an article on The United States (month-day-year) or on The United Kingdom (day-month-year). Are Georgian's and Russian's going to come to English Wiki to read about the conflict instead of articles written in their own languages, as opposed to English speaking readers? I don't see the point of engaging in a date war, against an articles established dating convention simply to satisfy an obscure MOS. Continuity of style within the article should be the hallmark, and not the exception to enforce a MOS that does nothing, I repeat nothing, to improve the article substance.-- «JavierMC»| Talk 21:31, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
←Perhaps. Anderson: first, allow me to copy-edit it: If an article has strong ties to another country that consistently uses a particular date format, that format should be considered for use in the article. Now, my misgivings:
(unindent) It just looks exceedingly odd to see U.S.A. style dates in an intrinsically European article like Robert Schumann. It detracts from credibility. I must have missed when the rule for the English variant changed, but a while ago it said to use the variant practiced most in the related country. So generally, an article bound to European subjects would mostly use U.K. style spellings. That gives a much more coherent style. Units, spellings and dates can be combined. U.S.A. style spellings, units and dates in articles related to the U.S.A. (and a few other countries), U.K. spellings and international units and dates in most other country related articles. − Woodstone ( talk) 18:17, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Please vote for all you can approve.
Definitely first choice 124.176.108.76 ( talk) 13:53, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
I can't make head or tale of this poll. I've long since become accepting of the fact that in many ways, other people's minds work differently to mine, so if other people can get a clear result out of it, let me know and I'll try to follow along if there's a consensus.
I've suggested other words elsewhere, and here's my reasoning for saying why neither proposal above is the best.
So that's my reasoning, and I like to think that my proposed wording is in line with the best practices of Wikipedia, especially in that I have carefully considered suggestions and criticism made here by my fellow editors. And finally, here is my preferred wording:
Articles on topics with strong ties to a particular nation should generally use the more common date format for that nation.
Reasoned comments? -- Pete ( talk) 00:51, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
Woodstone proposed on talk that we fold this into ENGVAR: Articles in British (and other Commonwealth) English use the International format; articles in American use American. I have some reservations about this; as Tony says, actual usage isn't that neatly divided - and it would have to be phrased carefully to avoid the implication that we have to use the same format in text and in the footnotes. But the idea is certainly worth discussing; others may be able to solve the problems: the slight mismatch between this and the US/Commonwealth division can probably be dealt with by a well-placed normally. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:27, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
On thinking about it, it seems reasonable to make the section on formats a corollary to ENGVAR; this is unlikely to be abused to prohibit ISO formats in footnotes, and if it is, we can deal. We can add date to ENGVAR later. I therefore propose,
Where exactly above was the resolution to "discourage" date linking? The reasons expressed in #Date autoformatting don't make a lot of sense. What exactly are "articles that are intrinsically historical in nature"? And this sentence seems very much wrong: "As such, the very individuals who are largely responsible for ensuring editorial content is correct and appropriate in articles, are unable to see what the vast majority of readers see." If it's claimed that few editors set a date pref, then the majority of editors do see exactly what readers-not-logged-in see. Gimmetrow 23:50, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
With preferences just for we editors, we could go ape-shit with this whole concept of having *special* content just for us. We could have UK/US preferences enabling us to code just so we don’t have to look at spelling we happen to disapprove of. Do you think this would make Wikipedia a better place? Clearly not, as magic x-ray glasses that work only for editors only whitewash over editorial disputes that need to be properly dealt with via well crafted MOS guidelines. Greg L ( talk) 00:29, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
To see the "benifits" of WP autoformatting you must be logged in and have your preferences set. This is easy to demonstrate: just log out and see what happens; then log in, reset your prefs to "No preference" and see the same thing happen ... and here's an idea: leave your prefs that way so you're not one of those editors "unable to see what the vast majority of readers see." So, are registered editors "a small minority of Wikipedia’s readership"? I don't know that I can prove that beyond reasonable doubt but considering that WP so often appears so high on web searches (e.g. Google), I think it's more likely true than not. Of these registered users how many have their date prefs set? Well, again, hard to say but a new editor will be bound to ask something along the lines of "Now why all these links to nothing of any worth?" and they'll find out and probably go set their prefs if they haven't already done so. They'll happily go editing for years before it dawns on them "Oh, with my prefs set I can't see the mess that the rest of the world sees, perhaps I'll remove them." Indeed this is something which seems a rather new realisation even amongst those of us following this autoformatting issue. Thus "the very individuals who are largely responsible for ensuring editorial content is correct" (editors with prefs set) can't see this mess that the World sees and thus don't fix it. Remove your date preferences everyone, I urge you, that is if you really want to be an editor here. Is it truely disputed that "the use of these formatting tools tends to produce overlinked articles"? Any article with a link to something unconnected to the topic at hand is, by definition, overlinked. These date and year articles have little to do with the vast majority of articles. Autoformatting on WP must be done via linking. Is this not as solid a proof as any reasonable intellegent being might ask for? JIMp talk· cont 07:04, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
You are right. There is not the focus of attention. There was never any policy saying all cities should be linked. Nor was there any tool that formatted city spelling variants while also linking. If you delink seventeen links to London, people won't complain. If you delink seventeen links to 1990s people formally complained but few do now. Lightmouse ( talk) 13:22, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
It might be a reasonable step now to not endorse any autolinking, but specifically deprecate ISO dates in text. The vast majority that does not autoformat is probably more disconcerted by them than by seeing British or American format where they would have expected the other. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:42, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
I see that the text has been made identical with the subpage WP:Autoformatting. The purpose of making that subpage was to move the discussion of autoformatting away from here. I have substituted the summary:
I think this at least has the advantage of asserting nothing that is widely disputed, and explaining what autoformatting is. If someone wants to include a stronger deprecation, please consider proposing it on talk first. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:27, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
←Oran, don't be fooled by Anderson's "half dozen", first put about at VP. I think I counted double that above, and there are of course the scores who have voted with their feet in actively supporting removal, or in expressing favourable comments. Their comments are gathered here. I see no groundswell of opposition in the community, but sniping from a few disgruntled users who find themselves significantly outnumbered and, in particular, are short of good arguments. Tony (talk) 01:52, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Why not say "deprecate"? Because what we want out of this is a wave of editors saying "Date formatting is not a good idea, and this is why. Can we change this page, please?" We do not want "Out of my way, peasants! I'm on a mission from MOS, and I'm going to delink this page whether you like it or not."
His Grace's ancestors may well have done things the second way, but it's not civility nowadays. ;> Experience suggests that the line between these two is, all too often, whether the wording of this page can be read as a mandate. This is why I oppose mandates in general. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:57, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
That is exactly what happened to me. I did a long article linking the dates, and the next day, ALL MY DATES WERE UNLINKED? I was very confused! I went here, but I don't see what evidence there is that dates are no longer linked. All it says is "this happened on August 24". I don't call that evidence.-- HandGrenadePins ( talk) 11:18, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
Now that the subpage on date autoformatting has been created, I suggest further discussion of its contents take place on its talk page. The content seems to have settled in the last couple of days, except that there's still no consensus on whether to say that autoformatting is "deprecated", "discouraged", or what have you. (I'm placing this notice simultaneously in all the topics that deal primarily with autoformatting.) Teemu Leisti ( talk) 10:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
I do not understand the stuff about Gregorian calendars but it worries me that I might not be able to rely on an ISO format as meaning an ISO date. If this is true, should it be added to The use of these tools has two disadvantages:? Lightmouse ( talk) 12:41, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
If that is true, then autoformatting must be forbidden for non-Gregorian dates. Lightmouse ( talk) 14:52, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
We are not talking about '03-15-1500' because it is not a valid autoformat and is not valid ISO format. My question is only about valid ISO formats such as '1066-10-09'. Take it slowly for me because I don't understand the stuff about Gregorian dates. Let me try the question the other way. Is autoformatting safe for non-Gregorian dates? Lightmouse ( talk)
Thanks. I do not care about the calendars, nor do many editors/readers. All I care about is that a tool created for somewhat aesthetic reasons is safe. Your explanations are clear enough to show that there is a reasonable chance of a concealed error prior to 15 October 1582 and a non-zero chance of error even after that. This is an important and very specific issue. I have added something to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Date autoformatting. Regards Lightmouse ( talk) 18:16, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Moved from Lightmouse talk page: begin
Moved from Lightmouse talk page: end
Please can people look at the edit history of Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Date autoformatting. The issue that I believe is important is that editors need to be told that autoformatting is unsafe and specifically must not be used before a certain date. I am confused by the changes that Pmanderson is adding about ISO itself being a problem and his statement above which sounded unpleasant to me. Can we all agree the wording whilst remaining polite? Lightmouse ( talk) 19:19, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
PMAnderson's statement "autoformatting before 1582 is perfectly safe as long as ISO is not involved" assumes a software improvement that has not yet occurred, that is, the removal of the "2001-01-15T16:12:34" from the My Preferences → Date and time menu. So long as that option exists, a date originally written in a format that implies the Julian calendar, like "4 October 1582", may be presented in a format that is required to be in the Gregorian calendar, like "1582-10-04". -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 19:36, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
In what way do the two calenders produce dates that look different? Abtract ( talk) 20:14, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Gerry, thank you for that document. One of the things it says is: The use of this calendar for dates preceding the introduction of the Gregorian calendar (also called the proleptic Gregorian calendar) should only be by agreement of the partners in information interchange. Anybody who chooses to autoformat into ISO, therefore, should not presume that xe is seeing proleptic Gregorian dates unless xe is party to an agreement to do so. Since xe will not be (Wikimedia will not so agree), this is a non-problem. Why do we need to worry about hypothetical editors who assume half a standards document is binding on us and the other half isn't? We are not the Fool-killer. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:47, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Could someone please point me to the consensus for "deprecating" the use of this tool? And, as an aside, why on earth are you guys worrying about a distinction in date format that almost no-one reading it will understand? Surely all the "standard" format is saying is "this is the date using the calender in force at the time"? Abtract ( talk) 21:28, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Abstract mentioned "also you didn't show me the consensus which I assume is massive since this is a large change." Although I have come to see autoformatting as more trouble than it's worth, even if it is restricted to avoid Gregorian/Julian ambiguity, I'm not leading the charge. For example, I have no plans to remove autoformatting from any article unless that article has either a Gregorian/Julian error, or a hodgepoge of different date formats. So someone else will have to point you to the consensus. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 22:41, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Question from a confused but experienced date editor
I thought I had this clear in my head but now I am confused. On the basis of what I read here, I thought that it was unsafe for me to apply square brackets to dates like '10 September 1471'. See the text that I added in the history of
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Date autoformatting saying autoformatting must not be used for dates prior to 15 October 1582. I thought the text was a fair summary of what people said here but PManderson said If you don't understand or care about calendars, please don't edit instructions dealing with them. Autoformatting before 1582 is perfectly safe as long as ISO is not involved and has changed the guidance to say text several times and it now says that ISO dates before 1582 should not be wikilinked. Few people actual enter ISO dates and will ignore this guidance if it only applies to ISO input. PManderson clearly knows more about calenders than I do, as he says but I would like somebody just to double check the answer to this question. If editors carry on writing dates like
14 October
1582, will autoformatting adjust the days so that it becomes the correct ISO date for any reader that selects ISO as a preference?
Lightmouse (
talk) 10:07, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
I've just recently discovered that the policy expressed on these pages appears to have changed to advise against linking the dates, on the gounds that "the majority of readers aren't logged-in users with preferences set", and that "there's no point in linking to useless articles about dates, which have nothing to do with the article in question".
Now, I agree with the second point: but the fact that the linking of the dates is a clickable link to another article is merely just a by-product of the main purpose of linking dates, and surely does no harm.
The fact that it's only the minority of people who are logged-in editors who have set preferences should be irrelevant. Even if 999 people out of 1000 don't benefit from the date linking, the fact remains that 1 person does. And it's likely that that one person is someone who does care about date formatting. Why take away the preferences of that person, merely to reduce the number of links? I mean, what harm does it really do to have useless links?
Of course, ideally the software could be written so that it was possible to format dates according to user preferences, but to not make them clickable links. But as it is, who really cares about the redundant links?
I know that some people think this is a non-issue, but to some other people it is quite an important one. The fact is that the USA is the only single country in the world which uses Month, Day, Year as a standard format. Now, my point here is not to discuss the merits or logic of International vs. American date formatting. I fully respect that there are millions of Americans who have grown up with M/D/Y format, and are in no hurry to change - and nor would I want them to. However, to the rest of the world it simply appears odd.
One of the wonderful things about Wikipedia is how internationally-spirited we are: recognising differences between countries, and finding ways to cooperate. It makes it a richer website, to have everyone working together rather than imposing their own nationalistic views on others. One of the things I especially like is the policy on national varieties of English, which states that there is no single correct form of English, and all are accepted - but where possible, internationally-neutral words should be used instead of ones which are specific to one country to the exclusion of others. It's the right way to go, as it encourages cooperation and reduces edit warring - which is time-wasting and destructive.
My point here is that we should similarly keep the capability for different users to view dates as they wish to. The policy is respectful to everyone, and inclusive. If we get rid of this preference possibility, then we open ourselves up to edit wars - where new (and old) editors will feel uncomfotable with a formatting unfamiliar to themselves, and try to "correct" it - and then of course other editors change it back. We can avoid all this simply be keeping the date linking - and a few redundant links are a very small price to pay for that. EuroSong talk 12:40, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Mark Trethowan ([[15 March]] [[1936]]–[[April 23]], [[1974]]) was a fine gentleman
, "Mark Trethowan (
15 March
1936–
April 23,
1974) was a fine gentleman", looks fine to anyone with preferences set, but looks jumbled to anyone who doesn't, which is the vast majority of readers.
Orderinchaos 13:07, 26 August 2008 (UTC) [Code for "Mark Trethowan" example inserted by me, for reader convenience. —
SMcCandlish [
talk] [
cont] ‹(-¿-)› 14:26, 27 August 2008 (UTC)]
[[12 March]]–[[15 March]] [[1892]]
doesn't actually work. For anyone with US-style dates set, this will render as
12 March–
March 15,
1892. All of this stuff has been covered many times before, in the archives of this page. The only thing that has changed is there is a critical-enough mass of editors agreeing to be
WP:BOLD and just deal with the problem, sorry that we may be that the developers spent a lot of time working on a deeply broken date formatting system. —
SMcCandlish [
talk] [
cont] ‹(-¿-)› 14:39, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Response to Eurosong: "Even if 999 people out of 1000 don't benefit from the date linking, the fact remains that 1 person does. And it's likely that that one person is someone who does care about date formatting. Why take away the preferences of that person, merely to reduce the number of links? I mean, what harm does it really do to have useless links?"
←For what it's worth, in my view it's not worth it to make everyone add brackets around dates (adding one more thing for editors to remember and cluttering the underlying code) for the benefit of a tiny fraction of our readers. Where the benefit is so small and questionable at that, and the amount of work required to do it is so large, it'd be better to just let it go. — Remember the dot ( talk) 01:36, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
With about 800,000 article having linked dates already the "amount of work" is not large - moreover the purpose of the MoS is not to "make everyone" do anything, it is set standards towards which articles can be moved to provide a "good" and consistent look and feel. The average content editor, who writes parts of maybe two or three articles, cannot be expected to absorb the MoS - changeable as it is. That is a job for the editors who do know it, including gnomes and bots. However it is reasonable to cite the MoS - trouble is this occasionally leads to it changing for no very good reason. For example it used to espouse a.m. and p.m. now it is am and pm I believe. Well I had changed all the occurrences to the then preferred style, maybe lightmouse or someone has changed them all back. There are good reasons for both styles, but flip-flopping is a real waste of people's energy. Rich Farmbrough, 05:38 29 August 2008 (GMT).
Richard, either dotted or undotted is fine: Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Times. RTD, we can't possibly expect all articles to suddenly dispense with date autoformatting; however, the fact that quite a few people are carefully running a bot to delink is highly beneficial, for three reasons: (1) it advertises (by links in the edit summaries, and other advice provided on talk pages in the process) the existence of the new guideline—this, one hopes, will gradually coopt WPians in general into the task over months or years; (2) it does at least make the change for those articles where it is run—typically FAs, GAs, and other important articles; and (3) it enables the script-writers to iron out any remaining technical issues. Rushing and and madly delinking, as you put it, would require thousands of articles a day to be treated; this is just not going to happen. Tony (talk) 07:53, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
Frankly to suggest that by formatting a date ISO style we need to comply with the relevant ISO standard seems a little over the top. Other date formats undoubtedly comply with other international standards on the formatting style without necessarily agreeing on content issues. Rich Farmbrough, 14:18 26 August 2008 (GMT).
I can understand people being willing to tolerate a small potential for date error in return for an aesthetic benefit. What I can't understand is having two different statements of the technical problem. As I understand it, the technical problem applies to all non-Gregorian dates even if input in US format. The other viewpoint is that the technical problem only applies if the date is input in ISO format as described in this change. Can the calendar cogniscenti look at that and see which viewpoint is correct? Lightmouse ( talk) 16:07, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
The technical problem arises in two cases, in articles before 1582:
Dates autoformatted from one conventional format to the other are not a problem. Dates which are clearly Gregorian are never a problem, any more than 2008-08-26 is. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:09, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Here's the current wording on date formats:
This has had consensus approval for some time, even if only through WP:SILENCE. Discussion on change is ongoing, spread over several sections on the talk page, and apparently inextricably linked with the deprecation on linking dates.
I see multiple proposals of preferred wording, with none having overwhelming or indeed majority support.
Pmanderson proposed removing the second guideline entirely: [3]
Tony proposed (with misgivings):
My own proposal is based on the following.
Here's my proposed wording:
One point to note is that nobody thinks that the order of the elements of the date will present any confusion to readers. If it is February 14, 1789 or 14 February 1789, everyone is clear as to which day in history we are talking about. So we are really talking about preferences for format in
There seems to be general agreement that forcing all readers to see dates in American format or International format is a bad thing, and agreement emerged that the format should be linked to the article. Articles about the U.S. should use month day year, and articles about the United Kingdom should use day month year. Articles about Canada should use either format, with the proviso that established formats should not be changed without good reason.
Autoformatting solved the problem of what format editors prefered to see for themselves. Now, with autoformatting deprecated, this again becomes problematical, and we are going to have editors previously shielded from "the wrong format" by their preferences, exposed to it in all its chaotic application through Wikipedia. It is important that we get these guideline(s) right, otherwise we are going to see editors changing date formats to whatever they see as a fair thing. -- Pete ( talk) 03:01, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
One of the major objections to auto-formatting linked dates seems to be that most users see a mishmash of date formats and only the tiny percentage of users who are logged in get the auto-formatting.
So why not change that?
Pick a format and have linked dates automatically displayed in that format for un-logged users. Granted, there would doubtless be disputes about what format to pick. I'd suggest a US standard on the grounds that Alexa seems to indicate that more traffic comes to Wikipedia from the United States than all other 'English speaking' countries combined, but it really doesn't matter. The primary benefit would be in showing a consistent format, whatever it may be. Yes, it would be better if we could query the user's browser preferences for the format or base it on the location of their IP address, but this would give all users consistent date formatting and could be set to a default format most of them are comfortable with. Better yet would be removing the links, but still autoformatting unless a specific date is marked to not do so. However, all of these things, including disabling autoformat, would require code changes. If code changes need be made I'd vote for changes which remove or reduce items of dispute... rather than just shifting which side of the dispute the soothsayers currently deem 'consensus'. -- CBD 10:51, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
{{DEFAULTDATEFORMAT:xy}}
) which overrides that default on a per-article basis (so it's posible to put{{DEFAULTDATEFORMAT:UK}}
in the e.g.
Winston Churchill article, and have all wikilinked dates in it displayed as d m y). But this idea is certainly not original, it's not too simple, still has some pitfalls, and ultimately does not offer that much of a utility over simply delinking all dates.
GregorB (
talk) 11:33, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
That section needs work. Presently it appears to imply that all date formats (for whatever purpose) in all reference citations must be in 2008-01-27 format, because all of the {{ Cite}}-family templates format accessdate in this manner, and all the dates in the refs must be consistent. The date parameter of these templates is an open field, and I think most editors have been doing either [[January 27]], [[2008]], or [[27 January]] [[2008]]. Many of them also support year, month and day parameters (and format them a particular way that differs from template to template; some of of these will either have to be stripped of this functionality, or it will have to be changed in all of them to use 2008-01-27 format, unlinked. This is all assuming that what the section seems to be saying is what it is saying. It could well be the intent that publication dates be formatted in the same way as the article prose, not in 2008-01-27 form. I'n not really sure (and more to the point, no one else will be either).
Furthermore, the new version of the guidelines need to state more explicitly that the 2008-01-27 form is not used in main article prose, only 27 January 2008 or January 27, 2008. Right now it gives those two formats, but does not specifically deprecate 2008-01-27.
I've made a few minor clarity/consistency twiddles since the change, but have not attempted to resolved the above issues, since I'm not sure what the consensus actually is! — SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 13:59, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
SWTPC6800's approach does not help for newspaper stories (whether paper or online) because it is customary to give the full date for those, not just the month and year. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 21:41, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
I think it's about time the page was protected until consensus is agreed on the wording. I can't see anyone's proposal having support enough to warrant a change to the status quo. Changing the wording to your preferred version and hoping nobody notices a controversial change is no solution. Neither is edit-warring until one side drops from exhaustion. That's not the way we do things here. At least it's not the way things should be. -- Pete ( talk) 23:59, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
(Later) I've made a request for protection. It is obvious that a dispute exists and we should sort it out ourselves, rather than force some poor admin to trawl through the mess to make a decision via AN/I. -- Pete ( talk) 00:21, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
Acting at the suggestion of User:Ssilver at my talk page, I've added a footnote in the date autoformatting section indicating that it's an important and recent change. No substantive change. Tony (talk) 04:02, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
I further tried to clarify the section. New readers will not need to know about "autoformatting", they just need to know not to blue-link dates. Also, I think the $10 word "deprecated" is unnecessarily obscure, and it would be better to say something like "discouraged" or "should not be used - see WP:OVERLINK". Best regards, -- Ssilvers ( talk) 13:59, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Years and dates archives |
---|
|
Note: I have added nowiki's to correct some broken templates. Please see earlier versions of this page for the correct content. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 15:04, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
Dates like 1582-10-10 appear to be in ISO 8601 format. This is especially true for autoformatted dates, because the user preferences window indicates this format with the text "2001-01-15T16:12:34", which is unmistakably in the ISO 8601 format. The ISO 8601 format requires the use of the Gregorian calendar, and for dates before that calender was introduced, the proleptic Gregorian calendar. Browsing a few articles suggests that many editors do not understand this convention, and are therefore presenting incorrect dates to readers. Also, a date in a non-numeric format such as 10 October 1582 will generally be presumed to be in the Julian calendar (since it is before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar) so if it is autoformatted, the meaning of the date changes depending on the reader's preference setting.
Please note that discussions on this matter have been quite amicable and this RFC is only to attract a wider audience.
-- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 17:46, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
I have moved the recent addition:
Because readers who are logged in and have set a date and time preference to "2001-01-15T16:12:34" will see what seems to be an ISO 8601 format date, and because ISO 8601 format only uses the Gregorian calendar (or the proleptic Gregorian calendar before that calendar went into force in various areas), articles autoformatting any date before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the area discussed in the article should explicitly state that the proleptic Gregorian calendar is used in the article. A date in any calendar except the (proleptic) Gregorian calendar must not be autoformatted.
to here for further discussion, because it affects so many article and we should give careful consideration to whether this should be addressed separately from a general removal of links on dates -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 11:55, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
The MOS contains the text:
Does that mean that autoformatting is not safe for dates prior to 1583? Lightmouse ( talk) 08:56, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Hmm. This is worrying. Are you saying that all the current links for dates prior to 1583 are safe? It is just editors that create new links that need to watch out? Lightmouse ( talk) 09:26, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
I agree. There are general problems with autoformatting that apply to all dates. I was not aware until now that dates prior to 1583 have a specific error condition that will almost certainly remain uncorrected. I propose that the current text:
is changed to:
Lightmouse ( talk) 10:41, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
The guideline is wrong, as is the proposal. For example William Shakespeare died on April 23 1616. If what you are saying is true then nearly every date article on Wikipedia will need changing, and the dates of events in the general articles will have different dates from those in the date articles. It will also effect categories for births and deaths of those born around January 1. Indeed for some years Christmas day will not be in the right year let alone on the right day.-- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 11:02, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Philip, I'm not sure what you mean by "if what you are saying is true then nearly every date article on Wikipedia will need changing". Could you explain? What is a "date article"? -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 20:06, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Random832 asked at the Village pump (policy) page "for what years should the Julian calendar be applied? Between 1582 and 1923 it is ambiguous." It depends on the subject matter of the article, but whatever is done should be explicitly stated in the article. If it were me, and the article was not connected to any particular location, I would make the transition at 1582. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 18:22, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
When reading Wikipedia's William Shakespeare article with date/time preferences set to ISO 8601 format, we read:
William Shakespeare (baptised 1564-04-26 – died 1616-04-23)[a]
.
.
.
a. ^ Dates use the Julian calendar, used in England throughout Shakespeare's lifespan. Under the Gregorian calendar, which was adopted in Catholic countries in 1582, Shakespeare died on May 3.[187]
So the format of the date proclaims it is in the Gregorian proleptic calendar, but the footnote proclaims it is in the Julian calendar, so the article contradicts itself. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 18:17, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
There seems to be a conflict of what is expected of autoformatting:
1 - That it correctly interprets and formats the date, which is NEVER going to happen. Any date from 1582 until the date of Gregorian switchover in the relevant locale, you'd also need to know which calendar (Gregorian or Julian), which implies a need to incorporate location into the date. And which date is being used for new year, 25 March or 1 January?
2 - That it formats a text string into the format preferred by the reader. While I can see the point that it's not going to help most readers, it will help registered users, those who are more likely to get into edit-wars over date format than casual readers. If autoformat forestalls edit wars I'm all for it.
Bazj (
talk) 23:57, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
The Swiss web site mentioned by Philip is the personal web site of Peter Meyer. Ordinarily it would be considered unreliable, although I have seen it mentioned favorably in a number of places. In any case, he has no authority to change an ISO standard that explicitly says it uses only the Gregorian calendar. Furthermore, section 3.4 of the standard, "Characters used in the representations" does mention single letters with special meanings, like "T" and "Z", but does not mention Meyer's "J" or "G". The instant you put a "G" or a "J" onto what would otherwise be an ISO 8601 date, it becomes a Peter Meyer date.
Wikipedia does indeed say we should ordinarily use either the Julian or Gregorian calendar, whichever was in general use in the area described in the article. That's the right thing to do. (What to do in an area that used some other calendar is not so clear.) Wikipedia also strongly implies that dates in the YYYY-MM-DD format are ISO 8601 format, and even if we didn't imply it, readers would infer it anyway. Thus, every article that presents a date in the YYYY-MM-DD format is proclaiming that it is in the Gregorian calendar. If the article has a note to the contrary, the article contradicts itself.
We could attempt to create the "English Wikipedia Standard Date Format" and try to explain how it might be either Julian or Gregorian, depending on the country discussed, but that would be a terrible idea. It would be better to just not use the ISO 8601 format, or autoformatting, for any date preceeding 14 September 1725, as well as any date in the Julian calendar after that date. I'm starting to think this needs wider attention, perhaps at the Village Pump. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 17:25, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Since three days have passed since the last comment in this thread, I think it's time to sum up editor's conclusions.
The purpose of this straw poll is to find out if editors opinions on two questions:
Note that the below chart does not allow ~~~~ signatures to be used. You must copy/paste or hand-edit your signature. For assistance in writing your signature, you may copy the time below in red from the preview window after refreshing while in edit mode:
19:22, 27 April 2024 (UTC)
Editor | ISO 8601 governs dates like "1582-10-10" | Prohibit such dates & autolinking if not in (proleptic) Gregorian calendar |
---|---|---|
Gerry Ashton 23:52, 21 August 2008 (UTC) | Y | Y |
User:Blank | ? | ? |
User:Blank | ? | ? |
User:Blank | ? | ? |
User:Blank | ? | ? |
ISO 8601 is the best-known standard for this format, and there are many mentions within Wikipedia MOSs and cite templates of these dates being ISO or ISO 8601. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 23:58, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
Although the discussion always seems to go off at various tangents when the issue is raised (like when I raised it above), I still see no argument of any weight against deprecating the linking of dates (except in special cases), and plenty of arguments (and apparent consensus) in favour. If no-one can come up with a valid counterargument, I'm going to start feeling bold and editing the guideline accordingly.-- Kotniski ( talk) 10:57, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
Excellent idea Keith! Please go ahead and change the software. We're not heading for an article-by-article basis: this is where we're at. The delinking being done on this basis has been generally met with a positive response. The arguments for it are strong. Those not in favour of depreciating autoformatting seem to think it can be fixed. If you've been following the issue, you'd understand why those in favour of depreciation have given up hope in having it fixed. We're everywhere near the stage of changing the guidelines. Let them be changed but heed Tony's call about allowing a little room to move (at least for now) for those who still think it's a good thing. JIMp talk· cont 14:00, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
[[2005-06-08]]
method, which isn’t for producing ISO formats, but was intended to take an ISO-formatted input with which to output dates with spelled-out month names *but it only does so for registered edtiors* (terribly unwise since 99.9% of readers see numeric-only dates). I suggest a bot be made that goes in to articles, looks for any other hard-coded dates to see how they are formated (14 Feb or Feb, 14), and which then converts the ISO-input dates to hard-coded ones.
Greg L (
talk) 20:54, 16 August 2008 (UTC)Here's the text: I think this is the insertion we're looking for (in italics) in the "Date autoformatting" section. It will promote the simplification of wikitext, an increase in the salience of our high-value links, and the reduction of colour-clutter in our article text. It's a good example where a straight move towards simplicity in process immediately improves the product.
[[5 November]] or [[November 5]]; [[5 November]] [[1989]] or [[November 5]], [[1989]]
). The square brackets instruct the MediaWiki software to format the item according to the
date preferences for registered users who have chosen a setting and are logged in. This should not generally be used unless there is a particular reason to do so. Careful consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of the autoformatting mechanism should be made before applying it: the mechanism does not work for the vast majority of readers, such as unregistered users and registered users who have not made a setting, and can affect readability and appearance if there are already numerous high-value links in the text.I've also inserted the US style into the example, for users who do have "a particular reason to do so"; I don't know why that was ever left out. Tony (talk) 00:51, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Support It's time to rid WP of these links to nothing of worth. JIMp talk· cont 11:39, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Support Lightmouse ( talk) 11:50, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
Support, if editors haven't read the comprehensive discourse already taken place, maybe they should familiarize themselves with the discussions on this page as well as the archived material. This discussion has now moved along, autodate formatting offers few advantages to the vast majority of readers/users who use wikipedia. The proposal, immediately above, of using markup such as <span class="wpAutoDate">17 August 2008</span> would put the onus on editors removing wikilinks although the case was not made for why we are keeping them in the first place. No one is advocating removal, merely deprecating the use of a format that is not that useful. FWiW, I would still favour the wikilinking of dates to lists such as the "year in film or "year in aviation." Bzuk ( talk) 19:52, 17 August 2008 (UTC).
Support. Autoformatting doesn’t benefit the vast majority of readers. There was simply never any proper justification for creating a tool where only registered editors can see the editorial effect so 99.9% of Wikipedia’s readership see only a default style that could have been set in fixed text. Further, using the tool introduces the disadvantage of generating links to random irrelevant trivia. Even though the tool is widely used, that’s no reason whatsoever MOSNUM can’t call for editors no longer *adding* them to new articles and for explicitly allowing editors to change from autoformat to fixed text. Further, bots can later be made to do that drudgery for us. Greg L ( talk) 03:56, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Support. I have yet to see any compelling reasons for auto-formatting. So a few users can avoid seeing "16 November 2003" in some articles and "November 16, 2003" in others? They (or rather, we) still are the exact same users who think there are no problems with seeing "colour" in some articles and "color" in others, so what harm could date format differences do? Among the drawbacks of auto-formatting, the most serious is the hiding of inconsistencies from precisely those who would be most likely to fix them. My suggestion is to apply WP:ENGVAR to date formats while wikilinking only extremely relevant dates, and then the whole date ( November 16, 2003), which would make for meaningful backlinks. -- Jao ( talk) 13:04, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Support - Agree completely with the rationale of Jao above, and others. There are no compelling reasons to continue autoformatting, to my knowledge. — Mattisse ( Talk) 15:27, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Support - Tony's proposal (with the "should" modification) states it clearly and benefits the greatest number of readers. If and when the developers decide to introduce coding to allow everyone to select a preference and to display so automatically, we can get by without. Askari Mark (Talk) 18:52, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Support - many good reasons already given above. I also support Jao's idea: "My suggestion is to apply WP:ENGVAR to date formats while wikilinking only extremely relevant dates, and then the whole date ( November 16, 2003), which would make for meaningful backlinks." Teemu Leisti ( talk) 13:20, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
Support Tony's proposal above. Autoformatting as it is currently implemented does not have the kind of benefit that might justify its use, given that the blue links in articles should be of high value to the reader. EdJohnston ( talk) 13:44, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
Support - plenty of good reasons to get rid of auto-formatting and none to preserve it. The auto-formatting hackery (and hacks to work around hacks for those hacks) is superfluous. Editors ought to write dates without adornment and without ambiguity; 'August 22, 2008' or '22 August 2008', just like they might write any other three words. Its not rocket science. -- Fullstop ( talk) 17:21, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
I believe that a reasonable person would determine that there is overwhelming consensus to add the following sentence to the section “Date autoformatting”:
This should not generally be used unless there is a particular reason to do so.
The movement from mandatory to optional has occurred, in various forms, over more than two years. This has come to a head in the discussion here and elsewhere over the past six weeks, culminating in calls from numerous experienced editors for further movement. Their arguments are plainly set out here; in addition, I submit that the views expressed in favour of removing DA by some 50 other editors, most of whom are not regular participants at the MoS talk pages, be taken into account as secondary evidence of wider consensus in the project. Their comments have been cut and pasted into a central page here. In addition, the current seeking of consensus was flagged at the Village Pump.
Arguments have been put against the move, apparently based on the following good-faith motivations.
I put it to you that there is ample evidence on this page and elsewhere of compelling rebuttals of the opposing views. A number of people began the debate on the negative side and switched to strong support. Users Ckatz, EncMstr, BillCJ and Francis Shonken have expressed their opposition to the move, but have not contributed to the debate on this page; except for EncMstr, whose views are of the first type above, it has not been easy to locate and encapsulate substantive arguments by these users (F Schonken would only refer, repeatedly, to this debate from two years ago).
I will insert the sentence into MOSNUM forthwith. Thank you all for your contributions. Tony (talk) 01:38, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
Having read through the various discussions I would like to offer a middle ground outcome when it comes to auto formatting. There is still the option of improving the auto formatting methods but this is a an option until that is worked upon. This may suffice until that time.
This removes redundent wikilinking where it is not necessary but allows clarification where it is obviously needed. Seddσn talk Editor Review 01:51, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
Oppose: If ISO dates are ambiguous, there's a better solution than linking: don't use them. There are only two advantages of ISO dates I can think of.
So don't link ISO dates, better just avoiding them. JIMp talk· cont 15:43, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
Oppose. Instead, I support Tony's proposal, for reasons already enumerated. Teemu Leisti ( talk) 00:53, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
Oppose. To the extent that DA is to be deprecated, Seddon's middle-ground proposal is OBE; as for ISO dates, the rarer they are, the better. Askari Mark (Talk) 02:42, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
Following MOS decission that linking dates not automatically the prefered approach, discussion had at the Cite XXX family of templates about removing autowikilinking, but allowing the option of a per-article only-if-a-consensus basis of selecting US or International style of dates approapriate for article topic and so make references use a consistant style of dates as appears in the actual text of an article. Discussion centred on Template talk:Cite web to add a datestyle parameter, but with plan to then role-out across the citation templates.
First attempt had to be nearly instantly reverted, as others not using the templates as we (i.e. largely myself) had appreciated and actual implementation proved not quite what others had expected. So after some very helpful discussions and a number of alternative suggestions (and large number of examples set out), I think the proposal is ready for re-implementation. However we lack a breadth of other editors' input, so seems sensible for me to post a heads-up here, as the cite templates clearly must be subserviant to MOSDATE :-)
As a few quick sandbox examples for an updated cite web:
{{User:davidruben/sandbox4|author=Author |title=Title |url=http://example.org |date=August 24, 2007 |publication=Pub |accessdate=2008-08-18 |datestyle=}}
Author (August 24, 2007). " Title". Retrieved on 2008-08-18.
{{User:davidruben/sandbox4|author=Author |title=Title |url=http://example.org |date=August 24, 2007 |publication=Pub |accessdate=2008-08-18 |datestyle=mdy}}
Author (August 24, 2007). " Title". Retrieved on August 18, 2008.
{{User:davidruben/sandbox4|author=Author |title=Title |url=http://example.org |date=August 24, 2007 |publication=Pub |accessdate=2008-08-18 |datestyle=dmy}}
Author (24 August 2007). " Title". Retrieved on 18 August 2008.
see Template talk:Cite web#Review of current and sandbox coding - examples and now Template talk:Cite web#Proposal to go #2 - thank you David Ruben Talk 23:14, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
First off, I completely understand most of the reasons to remove date linking - the wikilink function is being overloaded with date autoformatting to distasterous results, as normally happens with badly thought out overloaded operators. Approaching the mediwiki devs resulted in no immediately plans to correct this. As a result, it does make sense to remove this function.
However, are we 100% that there will never be some extension or addition to Mediawiki that will give us the ability to autoformat dates via some other means (template/magic word, whatever)? My understanding is that if there was a magic template that took in any recognizable date format and spat out the date formatted to the user prefs (with some mechanism for non-logged in users and per page to see a consistent date format), we'd be all over that in a heartbeat. Let's assume the template also dealt with date ranges, the Gregorian calender per-1600 issue, IP geo-tracking, etc, in that it is a magic bullet for date autoformatting. (I don't know the programming for this extension, but I can see the template creation being rather easy as long as the extension is flexible as such). My concern thus is if there is going to be a possibility of date autoforatting via a sensible means, we are going to want to go back to that, and thus to do that we will need to re-iterate through all articles to find such dates. The mechanism being done now is stripping an easy (despite the illogical nature) method of computer-assisted detection of dates such that if we convert to this hypothetical scheme, it's going to take a lot of extra work.
Presuming that we haven't ruled out a future mediawiki change, my suggestion is that any dates stripped of wikilink presently need to be wrapped instead with a dummy template, "date" or "d" or something short. Presently, that template would simply regurgitate the date (no formatting at all), but the key is that now a script/bot can identify dates. This gives us a lightweight placeholder for all dates such that we can readdress the possibility of autoformatting in the future, with the turnaround to reconvert dates to autoformatted ones rather trivial - it would just be a matter of modifying this "date" template. Only if we are 100% sure that mediawiki will never have this ability can this aspect be ignored. However, my impression is that there's still room for such an addition. -- MASEM 13:45, 20 August 2008 (UTC)
What makes this really galling is that someone actually did the development work to auto-format the dates without link-syntax. It just needs testing and implementing Rich Farmbrough, 01:37 21 August 2008 (GMT).
Guys, it should be a no-brainer that editors on WP should be viewing the text as our readers out there view it. I have no idea why people wish to spend more than 15 seconds of their valuable time discussing it. The differences are just so trivial, and both forms are readily comprehensible by all anglophones. Tony (talk) 14:16, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Now that the subpage on date autoformatting has been created, I suggest further discussion of its contents take place on its talk page. The content seems to have settled in the last couple of days, except that there's still no consensus on whether to say that autoformatting is "deprecated", "discouraged", or what have you. (I'm placing this notice simultaneously in all the topics that deal primarily with autoformatting.) Teemu Leisti ( talk) 10:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
The autoformatting table is a detailed explanation of how a tool works, not style guidance. The convert template is mentioned in MOSNUM and we provide a link to its explanation page. I propose that we do the same with autoformatting i.e. the details are moved to an explanation page that we mention in MOSNUM. Lightmouse ( talk) 22:26, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
I think this was a good move, and helped edit the new subpage a bit. Now that it's there, I propose further discussion of the subject be moved to the subpage's talk page. Teemu Leisti ( talk) 14:48, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Now that the subpage on date autoformatting has been created, I suggest further discussion of its contents take place on its talk page. The content seems to have settled in the last couple of days, except that there's still no consensus on whether to say that autoformatting is "deprecated", "discouraged", or what have you. (I'm placing this notice simultaneously in all the topics that deal primarily with autoformatting.) Teemu Leisti ( talk) 10:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
I think it’s pretty clear from the preceding discussions that a consensus exists for discouraging further application of DAs. Furthermore, when it’s clearly explained why it’s being deprecated, many originally dissenting editors have changed their mind. Considering that this is a major change in the expected appearance of Wikipedia articles, I think this MOS change should be presented in the VP, along with the rationale. Furthermore, I believe a simple statement of the rationale should also appear in the passage in MOSNUM because when people understand the rationale, they’re more disposed to accept it.
That said, there is another related issue that I don’t believe there is consensus on (and reading Masem’s recent posts, it is assumed by some as also a given), and that is the issue of mass removal of existing DAs. As can be noted by the protests of Tony’s trial removals in several articles and a few other editors’ personal crusades, the jury is out on that issue. Implementing such large-scale removals without a consensus of the community as a whole – vice a limited number of interested parties here – can be expected to be no less disruptive than that incurred over the mass deletions of non-free and a majority of fair-use images (which at least had legal reasons behind it, not merely stylistic ones). Face it, a lot of work has gone into inserting them (in accordance with what most editors have understood to be the preferred approach), and ripping it all out at once, with little or no input (much less warning), will lead to a lot of unnecessarily hurt feelings and the loss of a number of discouraged or angry editors. Wikipedians hate being dictated to by a minority of experts.
Accordingly, I’d encourage asking the community’s preference for eliminating them. Mass, perhaps bot-automated, removal is one option. Another is to leave them to the consensus of the editors of each article to decide. (Then they become part of the solution.) I’d prefer the second option to be the default until such time as there is a public consensus for the former. Askari Mark (Talk) 03:16, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
As a result, the “[[2005-06-06]]
” format was made. Why? I have no idea. Whoever thought that one up should be blocked for a week for damaging Wikipedia. It has only recently dawned our our consciousness here on Talk:MOSNUM what we’ve been doing all along with tools such as these. We editors think we’re getting
June 6,
2005, but virtually the entire English-speaking world sees
2005-
06-06 in all its linked-to-worthless-trivia glory (and all its ambiguousness). This particular format is where deprecation should begin and it can’t possibly happen fast enough for my taste. Anyone who thinks Wikipedia is doing anyone a favor by making 99.9% of our readership parse out a date like that is just fooling them-self.
We editors need to be looking at all the exact same editorial content as the rest of our readership. If we aren’t, we’re just pulling the editorial blinds down on problems that need to be addressed here on MOSNUM. Greg L ( talk) 17:55, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
Um, the rhetoric has been a little over the top for quite a while. Autoformatting was created to solve a problem with interminable edit wars between two groups of editors who did have a problem looking at June 6, 2005 when they wanted 6 June 2005 or vice-versa. Undoing the formatting is already starting some edit skirmishes. I don't like the links myself, but I like a stable Wikipedia a lot more. The obvious (to me) and quick solution to most of the problem would be to have the software autoformat [[June 6]], [[2005]] but render it without links. "[[June 6]], [[2005]]" would appear without links as "June 6, 2005" for those preferring MDY, "6 June 2005" for those preferring DMY, "2005-06-06" for those prefering ISO, and "June 6, 2005" for registered users without a pref and for those not logged in. A creative solution might even add a new preference to render dates with or without links (default no). Gimmetrow 21:00, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
You might argue then that we should simply then make the translation tools work for all readers—including unregistered I.P. editors (as you’ve already written here innumerable times). And I’ll say again: if you think you can convince the developers to make a wholesale change to the architecture and underpinnings of Wikipedia’s servers so they look to our readers’ I.P. address and spoon-feeds custom content depending on which country the readers’ live in, be my guest. Go ahead and try. Those of here with experience in these matters know that nothing at all like that will happen anytime in the foreseeable future.
Besides, all that effort just so someone from the U.S. can be sheltered from the shock of being exposed to “6 August 2005’' is simple foolishness that isn’t worth the fuss. There’s nothing at all wrong with looking at either “August 6, 2005” or “6 August 2005’'; both are absolutely unambiguous and clear. All the editors who were battling over this can act like grownups and follow a simple guideline for choosing the most article-appropriate date format. And I’m sure you can survive perfectly well if you actually have to read what regular I.P. readers see; I know I can. Greg L ( talk) 21:57, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
Greg L, you have convinced me that date delinking is a bad idea. Gimmetrow 23:00, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
Now that the subpage on date autoformatting has been created, I suggest further discussion of its contents take place on its talk page. The content seems to have settled in the last couple of days, except that there's still no consensus on whether to say that autoformatting is "deprecated", "discouraged", or what have you. (I'm placing this notice simultaneously in all the topics that deal primarily with autoformatting.) Teemu Leisti ( talk) 10:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
Our well-established guidelines for which of the two standard date formats should be used in an article, here, say this:
*Articles related to other countries that commonly use one of the two acceptable formats above should use that format.
This is all very well for articles, say, on contemporary Venezuala, which uses US spelling in its English, but international date format; however, I've heard editors say that "hey, this medieval topic shouldn't be in US formatting", or " Beethoven should be changed to international" (it was a couple of months ago, on that very basis).
I think this is an unintended consequence of the guideline that wasn't thought through at the time. I'm not at all comfortable with the implications of the current wording: I believe it should be left up to the editors of each article to decide (usually on the basis of the first editor's choice), as is widely the case until the occasional editor points to this guideline. It matters nought to me that 19th-century Russian composer Tschaikovsky is written in US format.
May I propose an addition to stop this happening? It's longer than I'd hoped for, but I think it does the trick:
*Articles related to other countries that commonly use one of the two acceptable formats above should use that format. (However, this should not be interpreted as requiring per se the conversion of US to international format where a topic, particularly a historical topic, is largely connected with locations in non-anglophone countries that do not or did not use the modern US format.)
My only misgiving is that there may be widespread support for transforming such articles to international format; I've yet to see this expressed, though. Your thoughts, please? Tony (talk) 05:31, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
My only misgiving is that there may be widespread support for transforming such articles to international format. I can't see a problem with this. In fact, Wikipedia being an international effort, why not have all dates in international format? -- Pete ( talk) 10:31, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
If it's acceptable, for example, for all European historical articles that use US format to be changed to international, it's fine by me. In that case, the current guidelines are quite satisfactory. Tony (talk) 12:41, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
I see no reason to extend this beyond English-speaking countries, for which it was intended. An established style should be left alone. Don't most editors have more important things to do? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:32, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
Whether they conflict depends on the meaning of "clear ties" (which is another reason to avoid it). Do most Popes have clear ties to Italy? or is the Catholic Church an international organization? Either is arguable, but many of the Papal articles have been written in American; the Catholic Encyclopedia uses a mixed style(23 August, 2008).. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:48, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
People that care about the sequence used in countries can create a separate page defining those countries where the dmy sequence is not the more common format. Mosnum itself does not need to get involved in such details. Lightmouse ( talk) 11:59, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
I don't think we should care what format is used for dates in countries that don't use English. In any case their dates are not going to look English. Does the fact that Poles write 1. kwietnia 1968r. mean that when writing about Poland we should write 1 April 1968 because that's most similar to the native format? Does this also mean that we should use "color" rather than "colour" in writing about Poland because it's more similar to the Polish word "kolor"? I think the established ENGVAR rules about spelling can be carried over to date formats too.-- Kotniski ( talk) 07:19, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
All: Seeing no opposition to the proposal, and seeing a clear consensus regarding the wisdom of date autoformatting, I moved the Date autoformatting section to a subpage. Please see Proposal to move autoformatting table to its own page. Greg L ( talk) 19:50, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
Now that the subpage on date autoformatting has been created, I suggest further discussion of its contents take place on its talk page. The content seems to have settled in the last couple of days, except that there's still no consensus on whether to say that autoformatting is "deprecated", "discouraged", or what have you. (I'm placing this notice simultaneously in all the topics that deal primarily with autoformatting.) Teemu Leisti ( talk) 10:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
A bit farther up the page, Tony1 commented that some of the editors opposed to deprecating DA - myself included - had not participated in the discussion. Frankly, attitudes such as what Greg L and others have been expressing are precisely why I've not participated. What, exactly, is the point, when one can only expect to be ridiculed, mocked, and treated like a child? Terms like "spoon-feed", "privileged" and "act like grownups" have no place in this discussion, and serve only to alienate anyone who disagrees with the "deprecate" opinion. Furthermore, why has the ludicrous notion that editors using the settings are somehow a "privileged elite" been tolerated in this discussion? Administrators - who are selected by the wider community and entrusted with the ability to delete pages and block users - are considered to be regular editors with extra tools (a description I agree with). How, then, does clicking on "register" and using the preferences make one "privileged" or "elite"? When did reading the instructions become a stepping-stone to a higher "status"? -- Ckatz chat spy 20:04, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
First, it is indeed pleasing to see this discussion properly characterized as a "debate!" (We don't have a "dispute" about this, nor do we have a "consensus." We have well-intentioned and reasonable editors who currently disagree, and are working together cooperatively towards a solution that will promote the best interests of our collaborative project.)
A fundamental assumption underlying the position of some editors is that we can discuss this all we want, and we can change the behavior of editors, but we can't change the underlying functionality of our project (the English-language Wikipedia website). Readers of those editors' contributions might perceive attitudes varying from frustration and resentment to resignation and acceptance. Those experienced editors encourage readers to tilt at windmills if they wish, but they don't expect any solutions to be forthcoming.
I don't share that view. but I would like to see it made explicit. Please, would those editors who do hold that opinion make explicit that they are shaping a MOS guideline, and thus shaping the behavior of all editors, specifically because they cannot shape the website software? Once that view is clearly stated, and we reach (reluctantly, for some of use) consensus on it, we can hope this debate will lead to a collaborative consensus for future action. ( sdsds - talk) 21:59, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
←I'm very sorry that the debate has occasionally become emotional. As one of the main proponents of the reform, I'd like to apologise to anyone for whom the enthusiasm of those in favour of the change was experienced as emotionally negative and distrustful. What more can I say? Only that heat has been expressed by both sides: a quick look at User talk:Colonies Chris/Archive/2008/Aug demonstrates that; or don't look at it, and let's move on. We can only try to minimise strong language here, since passion is always going to try to burst out of committed people. Tony (talk) 02:49, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Now that the subpage on date autoformatting has been created, I suggest further discussion of its contents take place on its talk page. The content seems to have settled in the last couple of days, except that there's still no consensus on whether to say that autoformatting is "deprecated", "discouraged", or what have you. (I'm placing this notice simultaneously in all the topics that deal primarily with autoformatting.) Teemu Leisti ( talk) 10:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
This is extraordinarily strong, and is currently being used to flip the format on hundreds of articles. Indeed, one dedicated editor seems to spend his time doing nothing else. As Tony has pointed out, if the alternative to autoformatting is Date Wars, removing it will not be popular; it may not be desirable. We should tone this down, at least to recognize our long-standing rule that established styles should not be lightly changed. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:30, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
The point here is that an editor, Pete, came to an article that was well into using a dating convention of month-date-year from the beginning, placed a comment on the talk page, well over a week after the established convention, espousing that a day-month-year convention should now be adhered to because Georgia and Russia use this dating. A few editors agree and a few opposed, no consensus, rather more like a vote, and began changing the established convention. 2008 South Ossetia war is already involved in a rather heated NPOV debate concerning the substance of the article. Established editors of this article have been using the month-date-year convention and all of a sudden, on a on-going, multi-edits per day, even edits per hour article, we now have to deal with a dating war. This is counter productive. Whether the non-English speaking country uses month-day-year or day-month-year, overrides the established convention? This is not an article on The United States (month-day-year) or on The United Kingdom (day-month-year). Are Georgian's and Russian's going to come to English Wiki to read about the conflict instead of articles written in their own languages, as opposed to English speaking readers? I don't see the point of engaging in a date war, against an articles established dating convention simply to satisfy an obscure MOS. Continuity of style within the article should be the hallmark, and not the exception to enforce a MOS that does nothing, I repeat nothing, to improve the article substance.-- «JavierMC»| Talk 21:31, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
←Perhaps. Anderson: first, allow me to copy-edit it: If an article has strong ties to another country that consistently uses a particular date format, that format should be considered for use in the article. Now, my misgivings:
(unindent) It just looks exceedingly odd to see U.S.A. style dates in an intrinsically European article like Robert Schumann. It detracts from credibility. I must have missed when the rule for the English variant changed, but a while ago it said to use the variant practiced most in the related country. So generally, an article bound to European subjects would mostly use U.K. style spellings. That gives a much more coherent style. Units, spellings and dates can be combined. U.S.A. style spellings, units and dates in articles related to the U.S.A. (and a few other countries), U.K. spellings and international units and dates in most other country related articles. − Woodstone ( talk) 18:17, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Please vote for all you can approve.
Definitely first choice 124.176.108.76 ( talk) 13:53, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
I can't make head or tale of this poll. I've long since become accepting of the fact that in many ways, other people's minds work differently to mine, so if other people can get a clear result out of it, let me know and I'll try to follow along if there's a consensus.
I've suggested other words elsewhere, and here's my reasoning for saying why neither proposal above is the best.
So that's my reasoning, and I like to think that my proposed wording is in line with the best practices of Wikipedia, especially in that I have carefully considered suggestions and criticism made here by my fellow editors. And finally, here is my preferred wording:
Articles on topics with strong ties to a particular nation should generally use the more common date format for that nation.
Reasoned comments? -- Pete ( talk) 00:51, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
Woodstone proposed on talk that we fold this into ENGVAR: Articles in British (and other Commonwealth) English use the International format; articles in American use American. I have some reservations about this; as Tony says, actual usage isn't that neatly divided - and it would have to be phrased carefully to avoid the implication that we have to use the same format in text and in the footnotes. But the idea is certainly worth discussing; others may be able to solve the problems: the slight mismatch between this and the US/Commonwealth division can probably be dealt with by a well-placed normally. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:27, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
On thinking about it, it seems reasonable to make the section on formats a corollary to ENGVAR; this is unlikely to be abused to prohibit ISO formats in footnotes, and if it is, we can deal. We can add date to ENGVAR later. I therefore propose,
Where exactly above was the resolution to "discourage" date linking? The reasons expressed in #Date autoformatting don't make a lot of sense. What exactly are "articles that are intrinsically historical in nature"? And this sentence seems very much wrong: "As such, the very individuals who are largely responsible for ensuring editorial content is correct and appropriate in articles, are unable to see what the vast majority of readers see." If it's claimed that few editors set a date pref, then the majority of editors do see exactly what readers-not-logged-in see. Gimmetrow 23:50, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
With preferences just for we editors, we could go ape-shit with this whole concept of having *special* content just for us. We could have UK/US preferences enabling us to code just so we don’t have to look at spelling we happen to disapprove of. Do you think this would make Wikipedia a better place? Clearly not, as magic x-ray glasses that work only for editors only whitewash over editorial disputes that need to be properly dealt with via well crafted MOS guidelines. Greg L ( talk) 00:29, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
To see the "benifits" of WP autoformatting you must be logged in and have your preferences set. This is easy to demonstrate: just log out and see what happens; then log in, reset your prefs to "No preference" and see the same thing happen ... and here's an idea: leave your prefs that way so you're not one of those editors "unable to see what the vast majority of readers see." So, are registered editors "a small minority of Wikipedia’s readership"? I don't know that I can prove that beyond reasonable doubt but considering that WP so often appears so high on web searches (e.g. Google), I think it's more likely true than not. Of these registered users how many have their date prefs set? Well, again, hard to say but a new editor will be bound to ask something along the lines of "Now why all these links to nothing of any worth?" and they'll find out and probably go set their prefs if they haven't already done so. They'll happily go editing for years before it dawns on them "Oh, with my prefs set I can't see the mess that the rest of the world sees, perhaps I'll remove them." Indeed this is something which seems a rather new realisation even amongst those of us following this autoformatting issue. Thus "the very individuals who are largely responsible for ensuring editorial content is correct" (editors with prefs set) can't see this mess that the World sees and thus don't fix it. Remove your date preferences everyone, I urge you, that is if you really want to be an editor here. Is it truely disputed that "the use of these formatting tools tends to produce overlinked articles"? Any article with a link to something unconnected to the topic at hand is, by definition, overlinked. These date and year articles have little to do with the vast majority of articles. Autoformatting on WP must be done via linking. Is this not as solid a proof as any reasonable intellegent being might ask for? JIMp talk· cont 07:04, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
You are right. There is not the focus of attention. There was never any policy saying all cities should be linked. Nor was there any tool that formatted city spelling variants while also linking. If you delink seventeen links to London, people won't complain. If you delink seventeen links to 1990s people formally complained but few do now. Lightmouse ( talk) 13:22, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
It might be a reasonable step now to not endorse any autolinking, but specifically deprecate ISO dates in text. The vast majority that does not autoformat is probably more disconcerted by them than by seeing British or American format where they would have expected the other. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:42, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
I see that the text has been made identical with the subpage WP:Autoformatting. The purpose of making that subpage was to move the discussion of autoformatting away from here. I have substituted the summary:
I think this at least has the advantage of asserting nothing that is widely disputed, and explaining what autoformatting is. If someone wants to include a stronger deprecation, please consider proposing it on talk first. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:27, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
←Oran, don't be fooled by Anderson's "half dozen", first put about at VP. I think I counted double that above, and there are of course the scores who have voted with their feet in actively supporting removal, or in expressing favourable comments. Their comments are gathered here. I see no groundswell of opposition in the community, but sniping from a few disgruntled users who find themselves significantly outnumbered and, in particular, are short of good arguments. Tony (talk) 01:52, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Why not say "deprecate"? Because what we want out of this is a wave of editors saying "Date formatting is not a good idea, and this is why. Can we change this page, please?" We do not want "Out of my way, peasants! I'm on a mission from MOS, and I'm going to delink this page whether you like it or not."
His Grace's ancestors may well have done things the second way, but it's not civility nowadays. ;> Experience suggests that the line between these two is, all too often, whether the wording of this page can be read as a mandate. This is why I oppose mandates in general. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:57, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
That is exactly what happened to me. I did a long article linking the dates, and the next day, ALL MY DATES WERE UNLINKED? I was very confused! I went here, but I don't see what evidence there is that dates are no longer linked. All it says is "this happened on August 24". I don't call that evidence.-- HandGrenadePins ( talk) 11:18, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
Now that the subpage on date autoformatting has been created, I suggest further discussion of its contents take place on its talk page. The content seems to have settled in the last couple of days, except that there's still no consensus on whether to say that autoformatting is "deprecated", "discouraged", or what have you. (I'm placing this notice simultaneously in all the topics that deal primarily with autoformatting.) Teemu Leisti ( talk) 10:18, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
I do not understand the stuff about Gregorian calendars but it worries me that I might not be able to rely on an ISO format as meaning an ISO date. If this is true, should it be added to The use of these tools has two disadvantages:? Lightmouse ( talk) 12:41, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
If that is true, then autoformatting must be forbidden for non-Gregorian dates. Lightmouse ( talk) 14:52, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
We are not talking about '03-15-1500' because it is not a valid autoformat and is not valid ISO format. My question is only about valid ISO formats such as '1066-10-09'. Take it slowly for me because I don't understand the stuff about Gregorian dates. Let me try the question the other way. Is autoformatting safe for non-Gregorian dates? Lightmouse ( talk)
Thanks. I do not care about the calendars, nor do many editors/readers. All I care about is that a tool created for somewhat aesthetic reasons is safe. Your explanations are clear enough to show that there is a reasonable chance of a concealed error prior to 15 October 1582 and a non-zero chance of error even after that. This is an important and very specific issue. I have added something to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Date autoformatting. Regards Lightmouse ( talk) 18:16, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Moved from Lightmouse talk page: begin
Moved from Lightmouse talk page: end
Please can people look at the edit history of Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Date autoformatting. The issue that I believe is important is that editors need to be told that autoformatting is unsafe and specifically must not be used before a certain date. I am confused by the changes that Pmanderson is adding about ISO itself being a problem and his statement above which sounded unpleasant to me. Can we all agree the wording whilst remaining polite? Lightmouse ( talk) 19:19, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
PMAnderson's statement "autoformatting before 1582 is perfectly safe as long as ISO is not involved" assumes a software improvement that has not yet occurred, that is, the removal of the "2001-01-15T16:12:34" from the My Preferences → Date and time menu. So long as that option exists, a date originally written in a format that implies the Julian calendar, like "4 October 1582", may be presented in a format that is required to be in the Gregorian calendar, like "1582-10-04". -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 19:36, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
In what way do the two calenders produce dates that look different? Abtract ( talk) 20:14, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Gerry, thank you for that document. One of the things it says is: The use of this calendar for dates preceding the introduction of the Gregorian calendar (also called the proleptic Gregorian calendar) should only be by agreement of the partners in information interchange. Anybody who chooses to autoformat into ISO, therefore, should not presume that xe is seeing proleptic Gregorian dates unless xe is party to an agreement to do so. Since xe will not be (Wikimedia will not so agree), this is a non-problem. Why do we need to worry about hypothetical editors who assume half a standards document is binding on us and the other half isn't? We are not the Fool-killer. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:47, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Could someone please point me to the consensus for "deprecating" the use of this tool? And, as an aside, why on earth are you guys worrying about a distinction in date format that almost no-one reading it will understand? Surely all the "standard" format is saying is "this is the date using the calender in force at the time"? Abtract ( talk) 21:28, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Abstract mentioned "also you didn't show me the consensus which I assume is massive since this is a large change." Although I have come to see autoformatting as more trouble than it's worth, even if it is restricted to avoid Gregorian/Julian ambiguity, I'm not leading the charge. For example, I have no plans to remove autoformatting from any article unless that article has either a Gregorian/Julian error, or a hodgepoge of different date formats. So someone else will have to point you to the consensus. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 22:41, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
Question from a confused but experienced date editor
I thought I had this clear in my head but now I am confused. On the basis of what I read here, I thought that it was unsafe for me to apply square brackets to dates like '10 September 1471'. See the text that I added in the history of
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Date autoformatting saying autoformatting must not be used for dates prior to 15 October 1582. I thought the text was a fair summary of what people said here but PManderson said If you don't understand or care about calendars, please don't edit instructions dealing with them. Autoformatting before 1582 is perfectly safe as long as ISO is not involved and has changed the guidance to say text several times and it now says that ISO dates before 1582 should not be wikilinked. Few people actual enter ISO dates and will ignore this guidance if it only applies to ISO input. PManderson clearly knows more about calenders than I do, as he says but I would like somebody just to double check the answer to this question. If editors carry on writing dates like
14 October
1582, will autoformatting adjust the days so that it becomes the correct ISO date for any reader that selects ISO as a preference?
Lightmouse (
talk) 10:07, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
I've just recently discovered that the policy expressed on these pages appears to have changed to advise against linking the dates, on the gounds that "the majority of readers aren't logged-in users with preferences set", and that "there's no point in linking to useless articles about dates, which have nothing to do with the article in question".
Now, I agree with the second point: but the fact that the linking of the dates is a clickable link to another article is merely just a by-product of the main purpose of linking dates, and surely does no harm.
The fact that it's only the minority of people who are logged-in editors who have set preferences should be irrelevant. Even if 999 people out of 1000 don't benefit from the date linking, the fact remains that 1 person does. And it's likely that that one person is someone who does care about date formatting. Why take away the preferences of that person, merely to reduce the number of links? I mean, what harm does it really do to have useless links?
Of course, ideally the software could be written so that it was possible to format dates according to user preferences, but to not make them clickable links. But as it is, who really cares about the redundant links?
I know that some people think this is a non-issue, but to some other people it is quite an important one. The fact is that the USA is the only single country in the world which uses Month, Day, Year as a standard format. Now, my point here is not to discuss the merits or logic of International vs. American date formatting. I fully respect that there are millions of Americans who have grown up with M/D/Y format, and are in no hurry to change - and nor would I want them to. However, to the rest of the world it simply appears odd.
One of the wonderful things about Wikipedia is how internationally-spirited we are: recognising differences between countries, and finding ways to cooperate. It makes it a richer website, to have everyone working together rather than imposing their own nationalistic views on others. One of the things I especially like is the policy on national varieties of English, which states that there is no single correct form of English, and all are accepted - but where possible, internationally-neutral words should be used instead of ones which are specific to one country to the exclusion of others. It's the right way to go, as it encourages cooperation and reduces edit warring - which is time-wasting and destructive.
My point here is that we should similarly keep the capability for different users to view dates as they wish to. The policy is respectful to everyone, and inclusive. If we get rid of this preference possibility, then we open ourselves up to edit wars - where new (and old) editors will feel uncomfotable with a formatting unfamiliar to themselves, and try to "correct" it - and then of course other editors change it back. We can avoid all this simply be keeping the date linking - and a few redundant links are a very small price to pay for that. EuroSong talk 12:40, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Mark Trethowan ([[15 March]] [[1936]]–[[April 23]], [[1974]]) was a fine gentleman
, "Mark Trethowan (
15 March
1936–
April 23,
1974) was a fine gentleman", looks fine to anyone with preferences set, but looks jumbled to anyone who doesn't, which is the vast majority of readers.
Orderinchaos 13:07, 26 August 2008 (UTC) [Code for "Mark Trethowan" example inserted by me, for reader convenience. —
SMcCandlish [
talk] [
cont] ‹(-¿-)› 14:26, 27 August 2008 (UTC)]
[[12 March]]–[[15 March]] [[1892]]
doesn't actually work. For anyone with US-style dates set, this will render as
12 March–
March 15,
1892. All of this stuff has been covered many times before, in the archives of this page. The only thing that has changed is there is a critical-enough mass of editors agreeing to be
WP:BOLD and just deal with the problem, sorry that we may be that the developers spent a lot of time working on a deeply broken date formatting system. —
SMcCandlish [
talk] [
cont] ‹(-¿-)› 14:39, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Response to Eurosong: "Even if 999 people out of 1000 don't benefit from the date linking, the fact remains that 1 person does. And it's likely that that one person is someone who does care about date formatting. Why take away the preferences of that person, merely to reduce the number of links? I mean, what harm does it really do to have useless links?"
←For what it's worth, in my view it's not worth it to make everyone add brackets around dates (adding one more thing for editors to remember and cluttering the underlying code) for the benefit of a tiny fraction of our readers. Where the benefit is so small and questionable at that, and the amount of work required to do it is so large, it'd be better to just let it go. — Remember the dot ( talk) 01:36, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
With about 800,000 article having linked dates already the "amount of work" is not large - moreover the purpose of the MoS is not to "make everyone" do anything, it is set standards towards which articles can be moved to provide a "good" and consistent look and feel. The average content editor, who writes parts of maybe two or three articles, cannot be expected to absorb the MoS - changeable as it is. That is a job for the editors who do know it, including gnomes and bots. However it is reasonable to cite the MoS - trouble is this occasionally leads to it changing for no very good reason. For example it used to espouse a.m. and p.m. now it is am and pm I believe. Well I had changed all the occurrences to the then preferred style, maybe lightmouse or someone has changed them all back. There are good reasons for both styles, but flip-flopping is a real waste of people's energy. Rich Farmbrough, 05:38 29 August 2008 (GMT).
Richard, either dotted or undotted is fine: Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Times. RTD, we can't possibly expect all articles to suddenly dispense with date autoformatting; however, the fact that quite a few people are carefully running a bot to delink is highly beneficial, for three reasons: (1) it advertises (by links in the edit summaries, and other advice provided on talk pages in the process) the existence of the new guideline—this, one hopes, will gradually coopt WPians in general into the task over months or years; (2) it does at least make the change for those articles where it is run—typically FAs, GAs, and other important articles; and (3) it enables the script-writers to iron out any remaining technical issues. Rushing and and madly delinking, as you put it, would require thousands of articles a day to be treated; this is just not going to happen. Tony (talk) 07:53, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
Frankly to suggest that by formatting a date ISO style we need to comply with the relevant ISO standard seems a little over the top. Other date formats undoubtedly comply with other international standards on the formatting style without necessarily agreeing on content issues. Rich Farmbrough, 14:18 26 August 2008 (GMT).
I can understand people being willing to tolerate a small potential for date error in return for an aesthetic benefit. What I can't understand is having two different statements of the technical problem. As I understand it, the technical problem applies to all non-Gregorian dates even if input in US format. The other viewpoint is that the technical problem only applies if the date is input in ISO format as described in this change. Can the calendar cogniscenti look at that and see which viewpoint is correct? Lightmouse ( talk) 16:07, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
The technical problem arises in two cases, in articles before 1582:
Dates autoformatted from one conventional format to the other are not a problem. Dates which are clearly Gregorian are never a problem, any more than 2008-08-26 is. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:09, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
Here's the current wording on date formats:
This has had consensus approval for some time, even if only through WP:SILENCE. Discussion on change is ongoing, spread over several sections on the talk page, and apparently inextricably linked with the deprecation on linking dates.
I see multiple proposals of preferred wording, with none having overwhelming or indeed majority support.
Pmanderson proposed removing the second guideline entirely: [3]
Tony proposed (with misgivings):
My own proposal is based on the following.
Here's my proposed wording:
One point to note is that nobody thinks that the order of the elements of the date will present any confusion to readers. If it is February 14, 1789 or 14 February 1789, everyone is clear as to which day in history we are talking about. So we are really talking about preferences for format in
There seems to be general agreement that forcing all readers to see dates in American format or International format is a bad thing, and agreement emerged that the format should be linked to the article. Articles about the U.S. should use month day year, and articles about the United Kingdom should use day month year. Articles about Canada should use either format, with the proviso that established formats should not be changed without good reason.
Autoformatting solved the problem of what format editors prefered to see for themselves. Now, with autoformatting deprecated, this again becomes problematical, and we are going to have editors previously shielded from "the wrong format" by their preferences, exposed to it in all its chaotic application through Wikipedia. It is important that we get these guideline(s) right, otherwise we are going to see editors changing date formats to whatever they see as a fair thing. -- Pete ( talk) 03:01, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
One of the major objections to auto-formatting linked dates seems to be that most users see a mishmash of date formats and only the tiny percentage of users who are logged in get the auto-formatting.
So why not change that?
Pick a format and have linked dates automatically displayed in that format for un-logged users. Granted, there would doubtless be disputes about what format to pick. I'd suggest a US standard on the grounds that Alexa seems to indicate that more traffic comes to Wikipedia from the United States than all other 'English speaking' countries combined, but it really doesn't matter. The primary benefit would be in showing a consistent format, whatever it may be. Yes, it would be better if we could query the user's browser preferences for the format or base it on the location of their IP address, but this would give all users consistent date formatting and could be set to a default format most of them are comfortable with. Better yet would be removing the links, but still autoformatting unless a specific date is marked to not do so. However, all of these things, including disabling autoformat, would require code changes. If code changes need be made I'd vote for changes which remove or reduce items of dispute... rather than just shifting which side of the dispute the soothsayers currently deem 'consensus'. -- CBD 10:51, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
{{DEFAULTDATEFORMAT:xy}}
) which overrides that default on a per-article basis (so it's posible to put{{DEFAULTDATEFORMAT:UK}}
in the e.g.
Winston Churchill article, and have all wikilinked dates in it displayed as d m y). But this idea is certainly not original, it's not too simple, still has some pitfalls, and ultimately does not offer that much of a utility over simply delinking all dates.
GregorB (
talk) 11:33, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
That section needs work. Presently it appears to imply that all date formats (for whatever purpose) in all reference citations must be in 2008-01-27 format, because all of the {{ Cite}}-family templates format accessdate in this manner, and all the dates in the refs must be consistent. The date parameter of these templates is an open field, and I think most editors have been doing either [[January 27]], [[2008]], or [[27 January]] [[2008]]. Many of them also support year, month and day parameters (and format them a particular way that differs from template to template; some of of these will either have to be stripped of this functionality, or it will have to be changed in all of them to use 2008-01-27 format, unlinked. This is all assuming that what the section seems to be saying is what it is saying. It could well be the intent that publication dates be formatted in the same way as the article prose, not in 2008-01-27 form. I'n not really sure (and more to the point, no one else will be either).
Furthermore, the new version of the guidelines need to state more explicitly that the 2008-01-27 form is not used in main article prose, only 27 January 2008 or January 27, 2008. Right now it gives those two formats, but does not specifically deprecate 2008-01-27.
I've made a few minor clarity/consistency twiddles since the change, but have not attempted to resolved the above issues, since I'm not sure what the consensus actually is! — SMcCandlish [ talk] [ cont] ‹(-¿-)› 13:59, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
SWTPC6800's approach does not help for newspaper stories (whether paper or online) because it is customary to give the full date for those, not just the month and year. -- Gerry Ashton ( talk) 21:41, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
I think it's about time the page was protected until consensus is agreed on the wording. I can't see anyone's proposal having support enough to warrant a change to the status quo. Changing the wording to your preferred version and hoping nobody notices a controversial change is no solution. Neither is edit-warring until one side drops from exhaustion. That's not the way we do things here. At least it's not the way things should be. -- Pete ( talk) 23:59, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
(Later) I've made a request for protection. It is obvious that a dispute exists and we should sort it out ourselves, rather than force some poor admin to trawl through the mess to make a decision via AN/I. -- Pete ( talk) 00:21, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
Acting at the suggestion of User:Ssilver at my talk page, I've added a footnote in the date autoformatting section indicating that it's an important and recent change. No substantive change. Tony (talk) 04:02, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
I further tried to clarify the section. New readers will not need to know about "autoformatting", they just need to know not to blue-link dates. Also, I think the $10 word "deprecated" is unnecessarily obscure, and it would be better to say something like "discouraged" or "should not be used - see WP:OVERLINK". Best regards, -- Ssilvers ( talk) 13:59, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |