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

Revision as of 09:08, 22 September 2008

Revision as of 09:20, 22 September 2008

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Dates that were wikilinked (see below) would then be autoformatted according to the preference that had been chosen.

Autoformatting dates has had several disadvantages:

* Its effects can only be seen by registered editors, who are a small minority of Wikipedia's readership, and even then only if they change their date preferences ('''My preferences → Date and time → Date format''') from the default "No preference". Unregistered users cannot choose a date format preference; it has been editors who were most likely to set this preferences. 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 of readers see.

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** 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.

* 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 maycould be misleading or erroneous for dates on the Julian Calendar, if one thought this format was truly ISO 8601.