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

Revision as of 22:38, 19 February 2009

Revision as of 05:05, 17 March 2009

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Since at least 2004, it has been possible for registered users to set a preference regarding the way dates appear to them. Wikilinking all {{nowrap|dates / years}} purely for the use of autoformatting is now discouraged (See [[MOS:UNLINKDATES]]).

There wereare four possible formats to choose from:

* '''MonthName Day, Year''' as in January 15, 2001 (symbolized as MMMM dD, YYYY)

* '''Day MonthName Year''' as in 15 January 2001 (symbolized as dD MMMM YYYY)

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* '''Year-MonthNumber-Day''' as in 2001-01-15 (symbolized as YYYY-MM-DD) Though not identified as such on the preferences page, this is the same way dates are displayed in [[ISO 8601]] format.

Dates that wereare wikilinked (see below) would then beare autoformatted according to the preferenceuser's thatchosen had been chosenpreference.

Autoformatting dates has had several disadvantages:

* Its effects can only be seen by registered editors, who areselect a small minority of Wikipedia's readership, and even then only if they change their date preferencespreference ('''My preferences → Date and time → Date format'''). from(As thewith defaultother "Nointerface preference".modifications, Unregisteredunregistered users are unable to access Wikipedia's preference settings and as such cannot choose a date format preference.) Therefore, most of the very individuals who have been largely responsible for the correctness and good style of articles have not seen what the vast majority{{fact|date=November 2008}} of readers see.

** As a result, editors did not notice that the source code often had two (or possibly more) date formats in the same article, while most users saw inconsistent date formats on the same page.

** Some dates were entered in source code in one or more of the last two formats. While most editors did not notice this, most users saw a format that was much less familiar to them than either MDY or DMY.

* Autoformatting wasis implemented by wikilinking dates. The resulting links point to articles on notable events that happened on that particular date or year. Since these lists of historical trivia typically have little or nothing to do with the subject of the article linked from, the links are superfluous, and only serve to clutter articles unnecessarily. All links from articles should be of ''high value to the reader'', that is, following them should genuinely help the reader understand the topic more fully. (See [[WP:CONTEXT]].)

* The last format, being most like ISO 8601, was sometimes referred to as ''being'' ISO format. However, ISO 8601 format implies use of the [[Gregorian calendar]], and Wikipedia normally uses the [[Julian calendar]] for historic dates before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar—all dates before 1582, many before 1752, and some as late as the twentieth century. <!--Dates before 1583 should not be wikilinked, lest they be autoformatted.|This is advice, not a statement of disadvantages--> Autoformatting into and out of this format could be misleading or erroneous for dates on the Julian Calendar, if one thought this format was truly ISO 8601.

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*<nowiki>[[November 5]], [[1989]]</nowiki>

The square brackets instruct the MediaWiki software to format the item according to thea user's [[m:Help:Date formatting and linking|date preferences]] for registered users who have chosen a setting and are logged in.

The following table shows how the autoformatting mechanism behaves. The preference settings that a logged-in, registered user can choose are displayed in the second row. The year and the day-month combination are wikilinked separately, except for dates in the [[ISO 8601]] format. Full date formats not found in the first column are not autoformatted when wikilinked, and are likely to produce a redlink; for instance,

*<nowiki>[[2005 May 15]]</nowiki> ''will present'' "[[2005 May 15]]", and

*<nowiki>[[April 17, 1883]]</nowiki> ''will present'' "[[April 17, 1883]]"