On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Wilhelm Schnotz <wilh...@nixeagle.org> wrote: > Regardless of who speaks what, the original poster is referring to > debates over which format to use when. Ex: January 1, 2009 ; 1 January > 2009 ; or even 2009 January 1. > > With the automatic date formatting... People that *cared* about which > one they saw when reading articles could just change it in their > preferences. Now the only way to see dates in their preferred format > is to change articles to their format. This creates tension and > disputes, similar to how the spelling differences of Canadian, > English, US, Australia, etc cased disputes. (and still do cause > disputes). I think there are a few entries in [[WP:LAME]] on that > topic. > > If auto formatting is tossed aside long term, we will have to create > conventions for articles similar to how spelling works to prevent more > lame editwars.
Yes, I think that this is the intention of the discussion on the MoS. The problem with autoformatting is that it only worked for those very few users who were registered and had date preferences set. Most people reading Wikipedia are not registered, and hence see the schemozzle of different date formats added by whatever editor thought looked best at the time. There's very little debate on which date format should be used for articles on U.S. or UK subjects, but for articles on (say) France or Brazil, there is a push to use U.S. date format, despite both of those nations using International format. The existing conventions on units of measurement and currency (where we use the units of that country) are a better guide than attempting to link non-english speaking nations to a variety of English. -- Peter in Canberra _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
