Wikipedia:Date formatting and linking poll/Autoformatting responses: Difference between revisions
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#'''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>]] <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)
#'''Support'''. This improves the look and feel of the encyclopedia, by providing the option for (registered) users to view their content in the most appropriate format for their needs. Although unregistered users cannot do this through a preferences setting, it might be possible to implement a localization cookie, or some such thing, that offers them the same option. For the casual unregistered user (of which there are many), by autoformatting, we could define a default state for each article, so that the edit wars could be confined to a localization template that sets default date formatting (and maybe other style conventions) for the entire article. With that, there is still a net benefit to all users in terms of formatting consistency, even though only some users would be aware of the additional benefit of setting their own preferred format. I do acknowledge that there could be a performance penalty due to parsing dates, but having implemented date parsing on other platforms, I can't see this as being a disproportionate disadvantage, computationally. Also, although I'm not familiar with the MediaWiki implementation, it seems reasonably simple to cache these computational results in a way that limits the penalty. Basically, unless the backend of MediaWiki is a mess, I doubt that there will be significant performance losses, compared to the regular loading of pages and evaluation of templates. Finally, any good implementation ought to avoid mandatory linking of the date (which appears to be the intent of the poll question)—but by the same token, the syntax chosen should not prevent date-linking, when appropriate. <font style="font-family:Constantia" size="3" color="#0077bb">[[User:TheFeds|'''''TheFeds''''']]</font> 16:23, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
=====I oppose the general concept of autoformatting=====
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