Wikipedia:Date formatting and linking poll: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:14, 30 March 2009

Revision as of 14:16, 30 March 2009

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-->'''Fundamental principle that there should not be two classes of users.''' Because some registered editors would see different dates formats from everyone else (see [[Wikipedia:Why_dates_should_not_be_linked#Overview_and_objective|Wikipedia:DONOTLINKDATES]]), it would inevitably lead to an inconsistent mess of date formats.<p><!--

-->'''Complex and laborious.''' Tagging tens of millions of dates with a marker such as '''<code><nowiki>{{</nowiki>''#formatdate''<nowiki>|March 11, 2009}}</nowiki></code>''' (double the number of keystrokes—even more if '''<code><nowiki>|dmy/md</nowiki></code>''' is added), and specially tagging nearly three million articles to establish a default date format, would be an enormous price to pay for the very minor "benefit" of viewing dates in a specific format, and would complicate matters for new and casual editors. [[WP:MOSNUM#Date formats|MOSNUM]] already has simple, well-accepted rules for date formatting, which require no markup. In the context of attempting to achieve a simple solution, WikiMedia's Chief Technical Officer, Brion Vibber, [https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4582#c65 has stated:] "My personal recommendation would be to remove all date {{nowrap|autoformatting …".}}<p><!--

-->'''Metadata fallacy.''' Markup is unnecessary to produce metadata. We already have powerful search tools, including the much-underused Wikipedia-constrained google search (site:en.wikipedia.org), and category searches. For ''markup'' to be useful, an option would be needed to enable editors to see all marked-up dates as though “linked”—anotherlinked—another layer of complexity; [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/March_14&limit=500 What links here] for a date or year page produces a list of thousands of articles whose only common factor is that some event, related in some way to the topic, happened on that date or year; such low-quality metadata is virtually worthless to editors of future time-based projects.<p><!--

-->'''Development risks.''' The failure of the original autoformatting was largely due to the ''ad hoc'' imposition of a design by programmers acting without agreed specifications (clear objectives) by the community. The so-called fixes suggested are of limited scope and functionality, and have not been agreed to by the community. We should not risk allowing "solutions" to be tacked on bit by bit over the next few years, requiring increasingly complicated syntax even further remote from the average editor. Among these issues would be non-breaking spaces, [[Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Longer_periods|AD/BC]], [[Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Slashes|slashed]], [[Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Dates|ISO]] and [[Gregorian calendar|Gregorian]]/[[Julian_calendar|Julian]] dates. [[Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Dates|Date ranges]]—avoiding the clunkiness and forced repetitions that the original system involved—would be a significant challenge.}}

{{Wikipedia:Date formatting and linking poll/Autoformatting responses}}