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

Revision as of 19:57, 12 November 2008

Revision as of 16:14, 15 November 2008

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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.

** 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.