Wikipedia talk:Date debate

message: The following was initially copied and pasted from the Village Pump archive. I do not know why it was archived. 
Desiegel has summarized the arguments below at Wikipedia:Date debate.
Please do not just share your thoughts here, but also at the associated Bugzilla bug# 4582 as some developers may look at this page too but some may not. --unforgettableid | talk to me 01:02, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: All pump discussiuon is automatically archived after a fixed time. Any that is of continuing interest gets copied as this thread has been. DES (talk) 20:01, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

message: (after edit conflict) I strongly support the addition of such a feature. The "simple" suggestion above is a start, but the vast majority of dates are NOT in ISO format, and that format is not the most helpful one for people without any prefernces (which is the majority of users) so i think it is unlikely to become the dominant format any time in the near future. The mechanics of the synmtax don't matter to me -- it could be pesudo-HTML as shown above or soem more wiki-like markup such as <<5 March 2003>>. Ideally, whatever methos is used, it would involve a single markup for each complete date. DES (talk) 22:13, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's intuitive to you because you've 'grown up' learning how to do it that way. If you had learned to enclose dates in #12/25/2005#, do you really think it would be all that much harder to figure out? Some of us have a problem with overdetermining the bracket syntax. -- nae'blis (talk) 09:35, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  after edit conflict 

message: This edit gives clear evidence why something really needs to be done on this issue.  Look at how ridiculous it is to create literally dozens of unnecessary links on a page just to get date preferences formatting working.  Some sort of syntax like <date> and </date>, discussed above, is absolutely essential.  --Cyde Weys votetalk 20:23, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Looking into this one now. :) Rob Church Talk 20:23, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

text: *Excellent!  I am very much looking forward to this one.  --Cyde Weys votetalk 21:51, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  clear evidence why something really needs to be done on this issue 

message: Someone said this same kind of proposal is somewhere on the Wikipedia Bugzilla but I have been unable to find it with relevant search terms.  Can anyone confirm?  Thanks.  --Cyde Weys votetalk 19:30, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Now enter3ed as bugzilla bug #4582. DES (talk) 21:21, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That bug was marked WONTFIX, although I am tempted to reopen it. I'll probably do so as I'm implementing it, which will be...whenever, I'm afraid. I've been distracted from development by a number of things; but should be back on track within a few days. Rob Church (talk) 19:02, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wikipedia Bugzilla 

message: I like this << >> syntax.  I'd like to comment that significant digits should not be difficult to handle; there are unambiguous ways to specify the number of digits that are significant.  Commonly, if there's no decimal point, trailing zeros are not significant, while all digits (except, of course, leading zeros) are significant if there is a decimal point.  Thus:
Wiki syntax  	Imperial units preference
<<1000 kg>>  	2000 lb
<<1000. kg>> 	2205 lb
<<1000.0 kg>>	2204.6 lb
<<1.0e3 kg>> 	2.2×103 lb
The last may be a little awkward, but it is a contrived example.  ‣ᓛᖁ[ ᑐ] 16:42, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Angle brackets won't be acceptable, because in some regions they are used in place of quotation marks to surround quotations. That usage should not be interfered with.--Srleffler 07:51, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What regions are you talking about?  Never have I ever seen anyone using angle brackets instead of quotation marks in English.  Do remember that this is the English Wikipedia; we're trying to find a solution that will work for us, not a solution that will work for everybody.  --Cyde Weys 08:01, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Wouldn't any change to the MediaWiki software necessarily impact the non-EN WikiPedias?  That said, I believe the French et al. quoters actually use quote-mark characters rather than doubled less-than and greater-than characters (i.e., « and »), just as English quoters use " (double-quote) instead of  (doubled apostrophes). RossPatterson 03:29, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

text: I'm in favor of this idea as it would be useful outside of Wikipedia (I stated my reasoning on Bugzilla ).  I like the <<value>> syntax, but if it is a problem I could be happy wity other another simple syntax.  And yes, this would be great for more than just dates.  —TheMuuj Talk 01:00, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Unit conversion

message: This could also implement user-preferences so that coordinates such as 33.924093° N -116.973734° E are displayed like "33°55'27" North, 116°58'25" West" or however the user wants. —Quarl (talk) 2006-04-13 03:34Z
:Honestly, I really don't think geographical coordinates are used often enough and that enough people care.  --Cyde Weys 04:11, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know, I'm seeing latitudes and longitudes popping up at the top right of a lot of the articles I read lately.  Over 9,500 articles use the  template alone, not to mention others that are cloned from it.  And as much as I love the metric system, I'll probably never have an intuitive understanding anything other than the degrees/minutes/seconds notation.  If there was such a preference, I'd use it.  But as I've said at least once above, I oppose any generalized solution that slows down resolution of the date-linking problem.  RossPatterson 01:36, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't see why something like <<June 9, 2006>> for dates couldn't be supported as soon as possible, with the intent that other types of values (numbers, units, coordinates, etc.) be supported later.  The text inside the angled brackets could be sent to a function that figures out if it's a date, a number, or a unit (but for now just checks for dates).  Also, if this means that we need to enter dates as <<2006-06-09>> to ease parsing, then I'm still all for it (as long as that's not the default rendering format).  I'm not sure why the link-date support was added without considering adding a new syntax.  That seems like a nasty hack that isn't going to work in every case.  —TheMuuj Talk 04:05, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Preferences for geographical coordinates 

message: There does not seem much to have been going on about this subject here. Recently however, the topic came up again on Template talk:Cite web#Unlink and on Wikipedia:Village_pump %28policy%29#Frivolous Links to Date / Year. Earlier, the Pump mentioned this Wikipedia:Date debate as where a discussion was supposed to go on, and a proposal at BugZilla bug# 4582. I would rather subscribe the "Comment #35 From Tony Souter" on 2006-12-16 there, but find no comments after 2007-01-09.At the Pump and on the Cite web talk pages (on both: the two should be read as they complement each other!), I suggested a specific naming convention for articles on full dates and articles on the days of the year. More importantly, I argumented why the (default or user defined) rendering of a date format should be differentiated from the hyperlink to a date-article (for which there appears a general consensus) and why a particular method is to be preferred and I proposed a new syntax and a practical way allowing an easy transition to what a considerable majority of contributors will appreciate.— SomeHuman 18 Aug2007 14:55 (UTC)
: Could someone tell me if there is anything happening with this issue? Reading Bug 4582 it looks like the <date> extension was implemented but it hasn't made it into Wikipedia. Thanks, PatLeahy (talk) 22:26, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There's been significant activity at Bugzilla 4582 recently. Tony (talk) 15:42, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  New syntax proposal for differentiating user preferences from hyperlinks