Talk:Date and time representation by country

message: It should be mentioned that in some common speech in sweden, the hour is left out. 15:30 could be said as "halv" ("Half"). It's not very specific due to the short length of an hour, but it's commonly used in speech. Ran4 20:27, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That sounds similar to the English use of "half past". I presume a lot of languages have that. N4m3 (talk) 21:21, 15 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Sweden

message: If military time is spoken with the words hours, than shouldn't be the 1440-hour clock? Zginder 21:25, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Working for the US Navy, we speak that time as "fourteen forty hours". The top of the hour is spoken as "hundred hours", such as "thirteen hundred hours" for 1300. Groink 07:38, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Military

message: When Canada uses numbers to write their dates, is it in the dd-mm-yyyy or mm-dd-yyyy format?  --124.106.134.220 08:29, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Canada uses the ISO8601 format ("yyyy-mm-dd") officially.  That's why it appears thus on government documents. Bushcutter (talk) 22:11, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Canada 

message: The article says that, for instace, 1:55 is pronounce "five 'til two" (which is common), as well as "five until two" which is vitually unheard of. Without any citation of this form, I think I will delete it. If anyone can produce a reference for this obscure form, I will let it stand. I cannot find it in actual use anywhere.
:I would say "five to two" is also common  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.89.162.154 (talk) 14:17, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  United States 

message: An anon edit on 2 March 2006 changed all occurances of "o'clock" to "O'Clock". This looks very unusual to me and clearly requires a reference. Markus Kuhn 00:29, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  O' Clock 

message: In the Australia time section, it says that a full-stop is the preferred time separator, but that the colon is also common. I disagree with this. I think the colon is far more common than the full-stop. I'm going to put citation needed. Dgen 06:00, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This is pure nonsense. 12 AM is midnight, 12 PM is the middle of the day - get over it. Perhaps you would prefer everyone to write 12:00:01 AM and 12:00:01 PM to make sure it really is "correct". What difference does one second after the hour make? Everyone understands that 12 PM is "after noon" just the same as you would understand 12:01 PM really is in the afternoon. Midnight is not "after noon" as it is the beginning of the next day i.e. 0:00:00. If you really want to be technically correct then "after noon" will change every single day depending on the highest point of the sun - so at he height of summer this would be around 2pm.
I just changed the colon/full-stop thing around.  The colon is a million times more common.203.13.90.2 (talk) 01:49, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Australia 

message: In the UK at least, and it seems very probably elsewhere, there are three distinct contexts for the Week :
*Business - Mon-Sun very common, I believe
*Ordinary - Sun-Sat traditional, Mon-Sun increasingly common
*Church - Genesis notwithstanding, the Prayer Book presumes Sun-Sat. Church diaries?
Perhaps each of the three should be included in each "national" section; certainly it should not be assumed that there is always a uniform preference.
82.163.24.100 16:05, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sun-Sat is broadly consistent with Genesis.  --Rumping 12:21, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Consistent with the Jewish tradition of resting on the Sabbath = Saturday, but not consistent with the Constantine I-decreed Christian tradition of resting on the Sabbath = Sunday. Check Sunday#Sunday_and_the_Sabbath for a detailed discussion regarding the Christian confusion on this issue. Markus Kuhn 14:58, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Just scroll up to Sunday#Position during the week and it shows that having Sunday (the Lord's Day) as a day of rest need not alter the first day of the week for Christians.  The New Testament is clear that Easter and the empty tomb was the first day of the week (Matthew 28:1, Mark 16:9, Luke 24:1, John 20:1).  Moving the first day to Monday is a secular tradition to ensure that a weekend is contained within a single week.--Rumping 02:20, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  General week 

message: In many wikipedia articles, both the British and American versions of the date appear. Since our world is becoming more dependent upon cultural lines, it may become necessary for the entire world to have one date format. I wonder which format in wikipedia is proper for a multicultural reference. Will 9/11 be known as 11/9 in the future in America? For now, I suggest all US articles should have the proper format, but this issue will become more important. If September 11 becomes 11 September in this country (US), it would probably be a pretty big deal since it is quite a famous date. Times are a changin' and international influence, especially in the academic field is censoring away another one of America's identities- as evident on the Declaration of Independence and Statue of Liberty.
:Check out ISO 8601 for the most sensible global long-term solution. Markus Kuhn 00:53, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Also note that ISO 8601 does not chance, only changes 9/11 to 09-11 not 11/9, and 9/11/2001 to 2001-09-11. Zginder (talk) (Contrib) 14:30, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Globalization 

message: The article has a rather bad off topic problem. Note that phrases such as "half past seven" and the like are not notation, and are as such off-topic in this article. The same applies to descriptions of pronunciation and particular words for divisions of the day. GregorB (talk) 20:16, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I think, especially in this particular context, verbal pronunciation is an important practical aspect of a written notation, and would not describe it as off-topic. How do you pronounce 2009-02-18 in different languages? Markus Kuhn (talk) 15:07, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Off topic problem 

message: I've read about a few countries and can only laugh. Since when has it been a standard to round to the nearest 5 minutes? And if you look under Denmark you will see a lot of text with angle brackets. This article should be deleted and the category should be used instead! --Daniel-Dane (talk) 17:24, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It has been standard in the UK (and I expect in most other countries) to round to the nearest five minutes in everyday usage for the last two hundred years.  Prior to that, it was standard to round to the nearest quarter of an hour, and to the nearest hour before that.  Modern usage is beginning to round to the nearest minute.  Sometimes I round to the nearest second when asked the time, but my precision always raises either a smile or a strange look!  Dbfirs 08:07, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  It is only common NOT to round to the nearest five minutes since the introduction of digital clocks. If I am referring to an analogue clock I will round to the nearest five, but if I refer to a digital time I will say the time exactly i.e. "It is ten twenty eight P M.". The use of analogue clocks is probably in great decline though due to its inconvenience.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.89.162.154 (talk) 14:31, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article is a joke 

message: I would have thought there’d be a section here, but not finding much on the Web, I guess this was less of a big deal than I remember it being.
Also, does this article render this section obsolete? Should they be merged or should there be a see: main link? —Wiki Wikardo 17:05, 8 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Iran? 

message: Since formats roughly correlate with regions of the world, it would make sense to organize the article this way, noting that East Asia is a YMD region, etc., then noting exceptions. 
The alphabetical organization by country is useful only if you have a single country in mind and simply want to look up an answer for that country. On the other hand if you really have a business application you are not going to want to take Wikipedia as an authoritative source anyway. --JWB (talk) 20:27, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Organize by region, not just alpha? 

message: We are missing a huge Sprachraum that composes one of the six official UN languages. Can someone help with this? Warmest Regards, :)—thecurran Speak your mind my past 16:54, 11 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: But given that Arabic is written right-to-left, isn't the above example actually big endian? CodeCat (talk) 22:22, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Arab World]] 

message: The article says that "Australia has signed up to use the ISO 8601 notation through the national standard AS 3802:1997", but according to this web site AS 3802:1997 was withdrawn in 2007. Mitch Ames (talk) 03:36, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Australia now uses numbering that copies the ISO numbers and this is reflected on the same site in the current numbering which is AS ISO 8601-2007 (see http://infostore.saiglobal.com/store/Details.aspx?ProductID=343418).  Thus Australia still uses ISO 8601 but the national standard reflecting that is now updated and differently numbered.  It seems from info on the same site that Australia first signed up to ISO 8601 through AS 3802:1989. Therealsleepycat (talk) 15:18, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Australia - AS/NZS 3802:1997 withdrawn 

message: Everything is correct. I'm from Serbia and I have nothing to add. GoghBGD (talk) 13:15, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Serbia 

message: The map shows Sweden using either YYYY-MM-DD or DD-MM-YYYY. This contradicts the text that says that Sweden uses YYYY-MM-DD. I've never seen DD-MM-YYYY used at all in Sweden. YYYY-MM-DD and YY-MM-DD is the dominant forms.
I wouldn't know how to update the map, but somebody else should.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.225.222.10 (talk) 16:09, 2 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Map is wrong for Sweden 

message: It seems rather strange to me that the different sections are named and sorted by country. More often than not, notation and pronunciation of times is tied to the language, not to the country. Differences in customs between two countries speaking the same language are usually much smaller than those between two different languages (whether in the same country or not). Case in point would be the usage in East Africa, which is strongly language-dependent as is mentioned in the article. So I think the article should sort by language, and subsections should be created where norms differ in different countries speaking the same language (i.e. English in the UK versus English in the US). CodeCat (talk) 17:39, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: "More often than not, notation and pronunciation of times is tied to the language." Are you sure? What is your evidence for that? I would rather guess the opposite, since formats are often standardized by the STATE bureaucracy. For example, in the case of computer keyboards, in Switzerland, it is standardized over ALL Swiss languages, but different from the keyboard in use in France or Germany. Nahabedere (talk) 16:30, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text:  But this isn't about keyboards, it's about dates and times. And those do tend to be particular to each language, even if they are not always. CodeCat (talk) 07:37, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sorting by language rather than by country 

message: I've just changed the Canadian entry so that the example date (written here in ISO 8601 format) is 2009-12-31 instead of 2009-06-09. In text that illustrates the format – eg ... the European dd/MM/(yy)yy (e.g., 31/12/(20)09) date format ... The American MM/dd/(yy)yy (e.g., 12/31/(20)09) date format ... – I think it makes more sense to use values that are unambiguous so that we can clearly see the format in the numbers.
I suggest that it would be better if we used the same example date(s) throughout the entire article. Currently we have different dates in different sections.  However I don't have the time right now to go through and check the entire article.  Any volunteers? Mitch Ames (talk) 12:02, 12 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Example dates 

message: Why is "period" being used to describe the full stop for non-American countries? Only Americans have named a punctuation symbol after a female "time of the month"  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.89.162.154 (talk) 14:38, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary the word "period" has meant "full stop" since the 16th century - long before it was used to refer to menstruation (19th century). Mitch Ames (talk) 12:29, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Period" instead of "Full Stop" 

message: The article says: People are used to converting between the two notations without requiring mental arithmetic,[*] and most perceive "three o'clock" and "15:00" simply as synonyms.
My added asterisk marks the location of the following "clarification needed" added January 2011: WITHOUT mental arithmetic? Does this mean that they're used to converting with a calculator, or pen and paper?
I don't see the need for the clarification since the article writer goes on to explain why the arithmetic is no longer needed – most [people] perceive "three o'clock" and "15:00" simply as synonyms – but I don't know the policy on resolving requests for clarification. --Kitsunegami (talk) 03:34, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point. I've fixed it. (The preferred policy for such requests is WP:SOFIXIT, if you can. :-) )Mitch Ames (talk) 12:38, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarifying "Time" Under "Most common usage" 

message: As native Dutch speaking (Netherlands) I notice that the description makes 14.15 to be pronounced as "kwart over drie" (quarter past three), whereas it is pronounced as "kwart over twee" (quarter past two). Actually the use is similar to the most common German use, like:
 "viertel nach sieben" = "kwart over zeven" (quarter past seven)
 "halb acht" = "half acht" (half seven)
 "viertel vor acht" = "kwart voor acht" (quarter to eight).
I didn't want to change it directly, since I don't know about Czech and Hungarian?
I'm pretty sure (from tv) the Flemish Belgians have the same use, and I guestimate that through the virtue of the "Taalunie" other Dutch speaking nations will use it the same way!?
:I think the mention of the Czech language here is misleading, because quarters and halves always refer the upcoming hour. "14:15" is "čtvrt na tři" ("one quarter to three"; "14:45" is then "three quarters to three") I suggest removing the entry "Czech" Adamlibusa (talk) 12:36, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dutch mentioned next to Czech and Hungarian under Time  

message: "Many countries use the ISO YYYY-MM-DD date format generally, and they have the advantage of being unambiguous."
Quite clearly, *any* format that has 2 digits for the month and 2 digits for the day will definitely struggle with ambiguity at times. If anyone wants to change my mind, please let me know or I'll be back on 2015-05-06 to remove that tenuous claim ;-) Yb2 (talk) 00:04, 1 May 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: There do not seem to exist any countries yet that use YDM format and hyphens. According to Wikipedia the list of countries using YDM format at all is quite short to begin with: Kazakhstan, Latvia, Nepal, and Turkmenistan. So if one were to trust this list, then the claim would be true. Karland90 (talk) 13:15, 1 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ambiguity. Or not 

message: As a native Russian speaker I can observe that I never hear someone saying "четверть восьмого (quarter of eighth)", and if I did I wouldn't know what it means. Maybe we need to check the sources for this one, might be coming from an incorrect textbook or a colloquial use. Sindar (Синдар) (talk) 12:33, 29 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  четверть восьмого (quarter of eighth) 

message: Not sure how to recover it. ADNewsom (talk) 20:39, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reference #1 is a dead link 

message: * https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Abbreviations/faq0095.html
* https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ante%20meridiem
* https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/post%20meridiem  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Atnbueno (talk • contribs) 09:21, 14 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible citations for "Punctuation and spacing styles differ"?