Structured data is useful and to be fair natural dates weren t even possible last year Splarka I think put in the time parser function and it did have some problems at first Anyway it basically leverages a rather robust date time template in php5 0 You can do stuff like next Thursday after a date as well as specify timezone by location handling daylight savings time adjustments correctly The template basically wraps the time function and relies on it to do the date arithmetic needed for the dtend calculation which the old end date template doesn t do at all To be fair earlier template developers were aware of the time function but ran into some of its earlier limitations that have been fixed for instance So now it works much better and as for templates using dates the wikitext will be a lot clearer for novice contributors to understand