On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 12:58 PM, K. Peachey <p858sn...@yahoo.com.au> wrote: >> All White Cat is saying is that the wikipedia needs markup(s) to >> handle dates. And in fact, right now there are multiple markups >> available, including American-style ones. > Thats not mark up, what your describing is style/layout. The markup > would be the wikicode surronding it it. > > For example it would be nice if we had a custom markup for date that > didn't link it, that could detect what was contained in it would be > nice and used the users perfernece for formatting first then fell back > to something else like the browser detection or a decided format (at > the moment it would appear to be American Dates). > I'm talking about something like <<DATE>> and then it would do > autoformatting of the date and it would also assist in the metadata > contained in the page as well, and also have the ability to force a > certain style and define date names as well (eg: > <<2008-12-25|f=Friday, 25 December 2008|name=Christmas Day (2008)>>)
It would be nice, maybe, but hardly practical. Many dates are direct quotes, or have been agreed to be in a specific format. A case in point is the article on the September 11, 2001 attacks. How do you separate out the dates that should be kept unchanged from those that swing with the reader? And, as something like 99% of Wikipedia's users do not have registered accounts, doing an IP lookup for most article views is an enormous overhead. Having some techno syntax for forcing date formatting confuses new editors. Why not just let people enter the dates any way they see fit, and some wikiwonk like me will come along and fix them in due course. After all, few people are going to be confused about which date is meant in either of the two text formats we support: 25 December 2008 is the same date as December 25, 2008. What is frustrating is the demands from some chauvinists that American dates be used in non-American articles. France uses International format dates (14 July 1789), but oh, the battles that rage when American dates are tidied up from such articles! You can almost hear the teeth grinding when I do a sweep through British articles and change the dates there. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hazel_Byford,_Baroness_Byford&diff=next&oldid=243822628 -- 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
