Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers/Date autoformatting: Difference between revisions
Pmanderson (talk | contribs) rephrase. Deprecation is further than there is consensus for; but many editors object. |
No. Go take a look at the wording that was given "Support" by an awful lot of people. If you want to propose another wording, start it over again at talk. |
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The autoformatting of dates |
The autoformatting of dates should not be used unless there is a good reason to do so. Autoformatting dates has two disadvantages: |
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Autoformatting dates has two disadvantages: |
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* Its benefits can only be seen by registered editors, who are a small minority of Wikipedia's readership, and even then only if they change their date preferences ('''My preferences → Date and time → Date format''') from the default "No preference". Therefore, most of the very individuals who are largely responsible for the correctness and good style of articles will not see what the vast majority of readers see. |
* Its benefits can only be seen by registered editors, who are a small minority of Wikipedia's readership, and even then only if they change their date preferences ('''My preferences → Date and time → Date format''') from the default "No preference". Therefore, most of the very individuals who are largely responsible for the correctness and good style of articles will not see what the vast majority of readers see. |
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* The resulting links point to articles on notable events that happened on that particular date or year. Since these lists of historical trivia typically have little or nothing to do with the subject of the article linked from, the links are superfluous, and only serve to clutter articles unnecessarily. All links from articles should be of ''high value to the reader'', that is, following them should genuinely help the reader understand the topic more fully. (See [[WP:CONTEXT]].) |
* The resulting links point to articles on notable events that happened on that particular date or year. Since these lists of historical trivia typically have little or nothing to do with the subject of the article linked from, the links are superfluous, and only serve to clutter articles unnecessarily. All links from articles should be of ''high value to the reader'', that is, following them should genuinely help the reader understand the topic more fully. (See [[WP:CONTEXT]].) |
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Revision as of 15:20, 25 August 2008
The autoformatting of dates should not be used unless there is a good reason to do so. Autoformatting dates has two disadvantages:
- Its benefits can only be seen by registered editors, who are a small minority of Wikipedia's readership, and even then only if they change their date preferences (My preferences → Date and time → Date format) from the default "No preference". Therefore, most of the very individuals who are largely responsible for the correctness and good style of articles will not see what the vast majority of readers see.
- The resulting links point to articles on notable events that happened on that particular date or year. Since these lists of historical trivia typically have little or nothing to do with the subject of the article linked from, the links are superfluous, and only serve to clutter articles unnecessarily. All links from articles should be of high value to the reader, that is, following them should genuinely help the reader understand the topic more fully. (See WP:CONTEXT.)
The following information is provided to document how date autoformatting works and how it should be used.
A combination of a day and a month, plus optionally a year, can be autoformatted by adding square brackets, such as in these examples:
[[5 November]] [[November 5]] [[5 November]] [[1989]] [[November 5]], [[1989]]
The square brackets instruct the MediaWiki software to format the item according to the date preferences for registered users who have chosen a setting and are logged in.
The following table shows how the autoformatting mechanism behaves. The preference settings that a logged-in, registered user can choose are displayed in the second row. The year and the day-month combination should be wikilinked separately, except for dates in the ISO 8601 format. Full date formats not found in the first column will not be autoformatted when wikilinked, and are likely to produce a redlink; for instance, "[[2005 May 15]]" produces 2005 May 15.
| What you type | What logged-in registered users see (settings on first row) |
What others will see [A] | |||||
| January 15, 2001 | 15 January 2001 | 2001 January 15 | 2001-01-15 | No preference | |||
| [[May 15]] | May 15 | 15 May | May 15 | May 15 | May 15 | May 15 | |
| [[15 May]] | May 15 | 15 May | 15 May | 15 May | 15 May | 15 May | |
| [[May 15]], [[2005]] | May 15, 2005 | 15 May 2005 | 2005 May 15 | 2005-05-15 | May 15, 2005 | May 15, 2005 | |
| [[15 May]] [[2005]] | May 15, 2005 | 15 May 2005 | 2005 May 15 | 2005-05-15 | 15 May 2005 | 15 May 2005 | |
| [[2005-05-15]] [B] | May 15, 2005 | 15 May 2005 | 2005 May 15 | 2005-05-15 | 2005-05-15 | 2005-05-15 | |
The full date formatting section of the parent page requires consistency in the raw date format within one article. If using autoformatting, check all instances in the article to avoid combinations such as "[[July 4, 1776]]" and "[[1776-07-04]]". In the main text of an article, autoformatting should generally be used on either all or none of the day-month and day-month-year dates.
Consider inserting a non-breaking space between month and day where autoformatting is not used, such as in these examples:
August 20 20 August August 20, 2003 20 August 2003
Even when surrounded by square brackets, those dates that do not contain both a day and a month — such as solitary months, solitary days of the week, solitary years, decades, centuries, and month-year combinations — are not autoformatted. One could make them links by using the standard piped-link notation, but the same advice applies here: such links should not be created unless they are of high value to the reader. (See WP:CONTEXT.)
Autoformatting also fails to work in the following situations:
- Piped links to date elements, such as "
[[20 June|the 20th of June]]" or "[[1997|1997 in South African sport]]". (Several forms of piped links break the date-formatting function.) - Links to date ranges in the same calendar month, such as "
[[December 13-17]]" or "the night of [[30/31 May]]". The autoformatting mechanism will output such dates in a damaged form: 30/May 31, etc.
Dates in section headings are not guaranteed to respond consistently to autoformatting if they contain both the month and the day. Furthermore, if they do not contain both, autoformatting will have no effect. Therefore, linking dates in section headings is discouraged in all cases.
Date elements on disambiguation pages and in quotations should never be linked, unless the original quote is.