Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 08:01, 13 November 2003

Revision as of 08:12, 13 November 2003

Line 154:

I don't see how ISO 8601 is even remotely relevant, and would object to it being used at all, and would change any usage of it. ISO 8601 specifies a format for computer-readable dates, not human-readable dates. It is something used by CS and Engineering people, not encyclopedia writers. You will note that no major manual of style even knows of the ''existence'' of ISO 8601, let alone recommends its use. In short, it is wholly unsuitable to an encyclopedia. To see just how uninterested in human readability ISO 8601 is, their allowed encodings for the date/time "13:10:30 on February 14, 1993" are "19930214T131030" or "1993-02-14T13:10:30" (quoted directly from the standard). This is obviously ridiculous for use in written text, which is why people who write encyclopedias don't refer to ISO documents. --[[User:Delirium|Delirium]] 08:01, Nov 13, 2003 (UTC)

: And apparently the ISO itself agrees with me: the news section of http://www.iso.org/ does not use ISO 8601 dates, instead using dates of the form ''4 November 2003'' (the only use of ISO 8601 is in a computer context: the last-modified timestamp). --[[User:Delirium|Delirium]] 08:12, Nov 13, 2003 (UTC)