Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers: Difference between revisions

Archive at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/archive1

Archive at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/archive2

Vote here (approval voting - vote for as many options as you like). For discussion of how these votes should be taken in the future, see wikipedia:vote.

• Keep [[Month Day]], [[Year]] as MoS policy (status quo)

+ NB: the Manual of Style is not mandatory. However, copyeditors will change entries to match the manual of style

+ Doesn't require any changes of current articles

+ Standard in U.S, China (majority of current readership) really? see Talk

+ Chicago Manual of Style has announced that 15th edition will revert to Month Day, Year format recommendation

+ Common in English newspapers (see "Guardian", below)

+ used by encarta.com any other encyclopedias?

- Rare outside of the US (in the present century, although it was formerly standard in England.

- requires non-American editors to work in form not natural to them

- could make wikipedia appear US-focused, rather than international

- some regard this position as "micro-management"

Votes for:

11: Taku, Ortolan88, Stephen C. Carlson (date markup may be best long term), DanKeshet, The Cunctator, Zoe, Jazz77, Eloquence, Camembert, Arthur, Lorenzarius, PMelvilleAustin (Month Day is used in Chinese)

• Make [[Day Month]] [[Year]] MoS policy

+ NB: the Manual of Style is not mandatory. However, copyeditors will change entries to match the manual of style.

+ Standard in Europe, Australia, Canada, ... (majority of English-speaking world, particularly including english as a second language)

+ Preferred by various U.S. style guides (Chicago Manual of Style, Fowler's Modern English Usage, Elements of Style by Strunk & White) any other style guides

+ Datebot should make changeover easy.

- Requires change to thousands of articles (are any of the above benefits worth the trouble?)

- Far less common than Month Day, Year in US; Chicago Manual of Style has announced that 15th edition will revert to Month Day, Year format recommendation [1]

- some regard this position as "micro-management"

Votes for:

16: Tarquin, Martin, sannse, Bagpuss, Oliver P., mav, JTD , Arwel, Matthew Mayer (though proper date markup would be better), Catherine, DanKeshet, Patrick, cferrero, the Epopt (with date markup -- and I'm willing to write the code!), Dramatic, Chris Q

(if we do this we should go all the way - a bot would be needed to convert all current dates to this format and all day pages would have to be moved to that format too) This line was located after my name, but it isn't mine. Lest there is any confusion, I am placing it here so the real owner can reclaim it. [Jeez, I feel like an handing back a stray cat here! Lost line. Owner wanted. Please pick up. Needs a good home. (Meow!)] JtdIrL 07:30 Mar 4, 2003 (UTC)

• Encourage [[Day Month]] [[Year]] (change date articles to [[Day Month]])

+ Standard in Europe, Australia, Canada, ...

+ Preferred by various U.S. style guides (see above)

+ Less troublesome than using datebots

- Less common than Month Day, Year in US (see above)

- links to redirects will remain common

- Could lack of consistency appear unprofessional or hinder reading?

Votes for:

7: Stan Shebs, sannse, Zundark, Enchanter, Tannin, Chris Q, Taku

• Allow both [[Month Day]], [[Year]] and [[Day Month]] [[Year]], express no preference

+ Doesn't require any changes of current articles

+ Allows editors to work in form natural to them

+ Standard in Europe, Australia, Canada, ...

+ Standard in U.S.

+ Consistent with policy on tolerating U.S./British spelling differences

+ Respectful of world-wide indigenous cultural usages.

- not clear what date articles will be titled

- Many links to redirects

- One form will end up being "official" even though no preference claimed (since can't redirect to both dateforms)

- Less Eurocentric (a good point, perhaps, on this New Years Day, March 4, 2003, according to the Tibetan Lunar calendar).

- Less US-centric

- Could lack of consistency appear unprofessional or hinder reading?

Votes for:

8: Bagpuss, Tannin, Enchanter, Arthur, Derek Ross, The Cunctator, Toby Bartels, AxelBoldt

• Keep [[Month Day]] standard, allow both [[Month Day]], [[Year]] and [[Day Month]] [[Year]] in entries, preferring format appropriate to majority editor/readership

+ Doesn't require any changes of current articles

+ Allows editors to work in form natural to them

+ Standard in U.S.

+ Standard in Europe

+ Natural for readers, depending on how well majority of editors match the preferences of majority of readers

+/- Majority wins on popular entries

- Many links to redirects (~50%)

- U.S form may end up being "official" even though no preference claimed

- Could lack of consistency appear unprofessional or hinder reading?

Votes for:

3: The Cunctator, AxelBoldt, Camembert

• Use yyyy-MM-dd RFC 3339 format internally and allow logged in users to have it reprocessed to their preferred format

+ Standard in U.S.

+ Standard in Europe

+ Natural for readers

+ No arguments

+ Ability to link to articles like December 2002 where appropriate

+ Date articles can be titled according to preferences

+/- Editors have to think

- Requires extra processing on server

- Requires changes to current articles

- unclear what default settings would be

- what do we use where only day+month is given? (eg "Christmas is celebrated on 25 December")

- preferred formats won't apply to the average researcher who comes here through a search engine -- what do they see?

Votes for:

2: Dramatic, I am Jack's username (while I think the word "universal" in UTC is (ironically) parochial (think Luna, Mars, Barnard's star...), I still prefer this option with it's unambiguous yyyy-MM-dd format),

• Make year-month-day UTC MoS policy (ie, no-one is forced to use it, but copyeditors will be changing other formats to it). This is the ISO 8601 and Internet standard RFC 3339 format. One could add a static UTC clock too.

+ External standard

+ Standard in Portugal, Sweden, Japan, Korea

- not clear what date articles will be titled

- Unusual and numeric

- Not standard outside a few countries

- ambiguous when referring to dates between 10 and 99

- confusing and unintuitive when referring to BC dates

- what do we use where only day+month is given? (eg "Christmas is celebrated on 25 December")

- ISO standard is purely for numberical dates, not for spelt out months

Votes for:

1: Mac,

---

Standard in U.S. (majority of current audience)

If our audience is English speakers, which was my impression, then the US. is not the majority of the current audience. Am I misunderstanding something?

When they say "current audience", they presumably mean "current readership" rather than "intended audience". Understood that way, the argument is less strong. AxelBoldt 21:17 Mar 3, 2003 (UTC)

Ok, do we have stats on what proportion of the current readership is US? Martin

---

I'm chipping in late here, but here's my opinion: we should keep the current standard of Month Day, Year, and edit anything that is in some other form to match that form. In other words, we should continue as we are. Any change is not worth the hassle it will cause, and I honestly don't see what the benefits are. I'm not convinced that the Month Day, Year format is only standard in the US - I just looked at two very different UK newspapers (The Sun and The Guardian) and both give today's date as "March 3 2003". --Camembert

That's a good point. Guardian articles also use month/day, from a quick sample of a few of their pages, so it's not just their header. Well there you go, we started off this debate being surprised at US style guides supporting "international" usage, and now we find some UK newspapers supporting "American" usage. (I note that the daily telegraph is sticking to day/month, though... ;-) Martin

From the Guardian style guide:

January 1 2000 (no commas)
It is occasionally alleged that putting month before date in this way is an "Americanisation"; in which case it should be pointed out that this has been our style since the first issue of the Manchester Guardian on May 5 1821

...and similarly the Times style guide:

dates Monday, April 18, 1994 (never 18th April)

--rbrwr

Newspapers generally use the same standard date format, largely to do with their filing system for past editions, in which previously newspapers were bound together by month, not date. For the ease of staff engaged in filing large piles of newspapers in the days before papers were microfilmed and when the work was done in poor lighting in old buildings, it was long ago decided that most British and Irish newspapers would place the keyword first, which in the case of filing was the month. (A small number of newspapers, notably the Daily Telegraph refused to follow that rule, even if it caused more eyestrain for their unfortunate library staff, on the basis that it did not want to look like it was copying the US.) Newspaper dating of no relevance whatsoever to this debate. We don't use newspaper fonts, newspaper layout, newspaper graphics or anything. Their dating system is irrelevent and does not in any case mean that their readers followed that system, because they didn't.

It is an unambiguous fact that most of the world uses dd/mm/yy, not mm/dd/yy. Even computers change dating systems depending on where in the world the computer is used. On my computer only one country in the world is shown as mm/dd/yy, the US. (More show up as yy/mm/dd (2) than mm/dd/yy (1).) Dates are written as dd/mm/yy and spoken as the second of March, not March 2. JtdIrL 01:39 Mar 4, 2003 (UTC)

---

I'm looking at the "Encourage [[Day Month]] [[Year]]" option and the "Keep [[Month Day]] standard, allow both [[Month Day]], [[Year]] and [[Day Month]] [[Year]] in entries, preferring format appropriate to majority editor/readership" option. Are these supposed to be parallel? If so, should this be made more clear? If not, where are their parallel opposites? (I'm hoping so.) -- Toby 07:14 Mar 4, 2003 (UTC)

I originally created parallel "Encourage" options, but nobody (except, briefly, Tannin) voted for "Encourage Month Day", so I scrapped that option. The "Keep Month Day standard, allow..." was created by The Cunctator. I guess the options are pretty much parallel, though more by accident than design... Martin

---

In my quest for issues on which we actually agree, I'd like to add something along the following lines to the article:

• Avoid using multiple date formats in the same article - this can confuse readers.

I know that Tannin would disagree with this idea, idea, but would peoplewould support consistency within individual articles, even if consistency across the whole of wikipedia is more controversial? Thanks. Martin