Wikipedia:Date formatting and linking poll: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 23:07, 29 March 2009

Revision as of 03:01, 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”—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><!--