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

Revision as of 05:05, 17 March 2009

Revision as of 07:04, 17 March 2009

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Autoformatting dates has had several disadvantages:

* Its effects can only be seen by the small minority of readers who are registered editors and who selecthave selected a date preference ('''My preferences → Date and time → Date format'''). (As with other interface modifications, unregistered 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.

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

The square brackets instruct the MediaWiki software to format the item according to a user'sthe [[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 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,