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

Revision as of 11:10, 13 April 2009

Revision as of 13:30, 13 April 2009

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# — [[User:Jake Wartenberg|<font color="#21421E" face="Harrington">Jake</font>]] [[User_talk:Jake_Wartenberg|<font color="#21421E" face="Harrington">Wartenberg</font>]] 23:49, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

# (Disclosure - I was contacted privately to contribute after expressing an opinion last year, and would not have seen this discussion otherwise) - Oppose - What will the default format be? If it forces all articles into the same format, that will be bad - UK articles should default to UK format and USA articles should default to USA format. So the only way to make it work is to have two format statements (one for USA format, one for UK format) - and it's just not worth it for such a minor thing. Adds too much complexity to editing for no good reason. [[User:Peter Ballard|Peter Ballard]] ([[User talk:Peter Ballard|talk]]) 11:10, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

# '''Oppose'''. No benefit (and only grief) for the wiki. Moreover, the pro arguments are not convincing.

#:<nowiki>#</nowiki>1 Proponents for date formatting allege that date-formatting is necessary to extract meta-data. That is false.

#:* Meta-data has nothing whatsoever to do with date-formatting.

#:* Meta-data is not a property of markup. If dates with markup have meta-data, and &ndash; as is implied &ndash; dates without markup do not have meta-data, then (it follows that) meta-data must be a property of markup. The implied ability to auto-generate meaningful content from markup would be, uh, [http://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl%3A+miracle pretty miraculous.]

#:* The meta-data instrinsic to dates has nothing to do with how how dates are written or formatted. Regardless of whether a date was formatted by hand, or with <nowiki>[[ ]], or {{#formatdate}}</nowiki>, the information that can be culled from that date will always remain the same. For example, that "12 April 2009" is a Sunday, that it is the 102nd day of the year, and so on.

#:<nowiki>#</nowiki>2 Proponents for date formatting allege that "date markup has been identified" (?) "as central to the development of new features".

#:* Those "features" have not been developed yet. We can't be expected to vote on vaporware.

#:* Wikipedia is not a giant sandbox. If proponents want to develop new features, then they are welcome to do it elsewhere first, and then come back here for feedback.

#:* Date-markup has existed for "almost six years now". Nothing whatsoever has been done with it in that time.

#:<nowiki>#</nowiki>3 Proponents for date formatting presuppose that automation depends on dates being marked up. This is false.

#:* It is not difficult to [http://www.google.com/search?q=%2212+April+2009%22+OR+%22April+12,+2009%22 find all instances of a certain date]. From those 80 million hits, of which only a minute fraction are marked up, it should be obvious that one does not need to markup a date to find references to it.

#:* It is not at all difficult for software to "find" dates in text. Special markup is neither necessary nor desirable. Every reasonably-competent programmer can put together a routine to parse a text for dates. Such a routine is not significantly more complex than a routine that searches for any other combination of words.

#:<nowiki>#</nowiki>4 Proponents have alleged that (server-side) "[d]ate autoformatting allows greater consistency". This is false.

#:* Automated date formatting ala <nowiki>[[ ]] or {{#formatdate}}</nowiki> does not facilitate greater consistency than what can be accomplished if editors were to write out their dates by hand.

#:* Articles have a whole gamut of consistency issues. Consistency is not just limited to date formatting style, but also includes citation style, ndash/mdash style, era style, and ENGVAR style.<br />MOS has guidelines for ''all'' these issues, and there is no reason whatsoever why date formatting should warrant special treatment.

#:* Editors are obliged to work cooperatively. This means that &ndash; before they begin editing an article &ndash; they also take the time to determine where the content that they wish to add should go. This means that they also honor the style already in use in an article. Not just citation style, dash style, era style, and ENGVAR style, etc, but date style as well.

#:* It is not the task of servers to ensure consistency within articles. What server-side date-formatting automation ''does'' do is allow editors to disregard existing date-formatting conventions. Proponents for date markup sell this as an argument for "more choices". But what they really want is a license to say "what do I care what dateformat, engvar, era, citation style is in use? I'm going to use my preferred one, and the technology should sort it out!" Needless to say, that is outrageously inconsiderate, and &ndash; from a technical point of view &ndash; myopic.

#:Summary: There is no "problem". Ergo, there is also nothing that requires a "solution". The original date-formatting solution (DateFormatter.php) was implemented to quell edit warring over date style. In the meanwhile we have gotten a fairly robust MOS guidelines for that and other style issues, and DateFormatter.php is no longer necessary. We don't need another hack to replace the first hack. We need editors to conform with MOS, which is a "site-wide standard" already in place. If anons/newbies fail to adhere to that "site-wide standard", then we can have a bot clean up after them. If established editors persistently refuse to adhere to that "site-wide standard", then we ought to community-block them (Arbcom decisions on style warring are a precendent). MOS rules, and the community doesn't need [[WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT|endless drama]] over non-problems. -- [[User:Fullstop|Fullstop]] ([[User talk:Fullstop|talk]]) 13:30, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

=====I am neutral on the general concept of autoformatting=====