Wikipedia:Date formatting and linking poll/Autoformatting responses: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:06, 13 April 2009

Revision as of 14:10, 13 April 2009

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#'''Support''' as the best solution to the related article inconsistencies, edit wars and the policy deadlocks that result without it (e.g. the above-mentioned [[WP:WPTC]] situation not to mention the historic inability to achieve consensus with date format proposals [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Proposal on international date format|such as this]]). Autoformatting provides a superior ability to adapt and distribute Wikipedia content in a global environment. Date format differences carry systemic bias issues e.g. MDY carries a particularly American systemic bias which if enforced on many articles would reflect poorly on Wikipedia as a global project (and that's [[WP:NPOV]]). Also some date formats used in practice ([[ISO 8601]], YMD) are excluded by policy, but could be retrieved with autoformatting. Most of the capability is already implemented in Wikimedia - it's [[wiktionary:low-hanging fruit|low-hanging fruit]] in terms of [[Internationalization and localization|i18n and L10n]] that should be cleaned up for date ranges and non-registered users, then we should move forward and once again make good use of it. [[User:Dl2000|Dl2000]] ([[User talk:Dl2000|talk]]) 01:18, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

#'''Support''' - I definitely like the idea of having the system (finally) format dates to my own preference, rather than whatever format an author likes. Personally, I prefer "YYYY-MM-DD", since that is what I am used to from computer programming. The other way I like to see dates is "DDDD, MMMM D, YYYY". The thought of being able to change dates around like that (something computers can do so easily) is very nice. I've always hated using wiki markup as a kludge to make that work, so I tended not to do so. But once this gets approved and we can start formatting dates automagically, that will be wonderful. It should be as automatic and transparent to the user as possible. Ideally, no special tags required. If a date is in the article and recognizable as a date, the software should adapt it. If there is something that's not a date but is recognized as one, there should be a simple tag (nowiki perhaps, being familiar and similar in purpose?) that would prevent false positives. --[[User:Willscrlt|<span style="color:#46E">'''Will'''</span><span style="color:#D13">scrlt</span>]]&nbsp;<small>([[User talk:Willscrlt|<span style="color:#46E">→“¡¿Talk?!”</span>]])</small> 14:06, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

#'''Support''' Readers who care enough to set a preference for date format should be able to see dates consistently displayed that way. Readers who do not care enough to set a preference just do not care, and the anti-formatting editors should not care about them either; at least those readers would see them in a consistent format that adds to a professional appearance. [[User:Chris the speller|Chris the speller]] ([[User talk:Chris the speller|talk]]) 14:10, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

=====I oppose the general concept of autoformatting=====