Jump to content

Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
< Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Miss Puffskein (talk | contribs) at 23:48, 10 August 2004 (→Dashes (again)). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Archives at:

See also: Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (calendar dates)
See also: Wikipedia talk:Timeline standards

Names for the era: BCE/CE versus BC/AD

Christian ethnocentrism?

Forgive me if this topic has been broached before; I scanned the archived discussion pages briefly and saw no mention of it. Shouldn't the standard nomenclature for designating the era of a year be updated to make it non-specific about religion? BC -> BCE & AD -> CE? I see that this might be considered revisionism by some since the numbers would, in fact, still be based around the same event, but of course it's really just a matter of convenience to keep them. It's important for the western world, if it's going to enforce its dating system on everyone else anyway, not to enforce its religious trapments as well. Most serious scholars, particularly those who completed their formative years recently relative to the grayer-haired ones who might (or might not) be stubborn about keeping things the old way, have adapted to the secular style. I'm surprised Wikipedia hasn't done so as well, given the general standard of objectivity and compromise between all points of view (even non-christian ones!) found here. Aratuk 10:43, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I disagree; rebadging the Christian-derived basis for a calender to the PC joke that is CE/BCE is, to put it mildly, pointless. The problem is not the set of letters, nor what they stand for, but the event that they refer to, and given that we, as members of a multi-cultural world society, are unlikely to all, or even in majority, agree to a common point means that CE/BCE is meaningless. Indeed, I find the 'C' somewhat offensive - it's meant to stand for 'Common', but the switch-over from 31.xii.1 BC to 1.i.AD 1 is of absolutely no significance to me, personally, and so is certianly not a 'common' feature of my culture. Sticking with reality is, IMO, far more pointful.
James F. (talk) 11:41, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I agree to the use of CE and BCE to replace the traditional BC and AD. Being a multilingual, multinational, and a multicultural encyclopedia, it would do Wikipedia well to drop these archaic terms in favour of something that everybody can use. Christianity is not the only religion represented in Wikipedia, indeed, there are many non-religious Wikipedians working on the project. In the spirit of NPOV, that's the way to go. TimothyPilgrim 13:16, Feb 26, 2004 (UTC)
I was also surprised to find BC/AD as the dominant form in Wikipedia, and support BCE/CE. -- Zigger 20:07, 2004 Mar 23 (UTC)
The simple thing is to allow the person who starts an article to use whatever system he wants. The ISO 8601 system avoids the problem entirely by using negative numbers for BC(E) dates. I'm a non-believer in any religion, but I still see the attempt to enforce the BCE/CE usage as an attempt to impose political correctness, and that alone is a reason to oppose it. Eclecticology 01:04, 2004 Mar 24 (UTC)
I agree with Eclecticology in that there should be no imposing or enforcing, and that contributors are relatively free to do what they want (regardless of whether they start the article). It's just that:
  • The siglia? BCE/CE are regarded as more religiously neutral than BC/AD.
  • They are not some new fad to bait the right-thinking. They may have been used in the 1700s by Jewish scholars, then by theological scholars, then by wider academic communities particularly in the last twenty years.
  • Political correctness was used as a weasel phrase, and no reason to preserve Christian dominance in a reference work at the expense of neutrality.
  • The Manual of Style has value. It offers a concept of correctness. We deal with that by discussing it.
  • Personally I prefer BCE/CE to ISO 8601 to BC/AD, but I am not always offended by BC/AD. I'm still trying to get my head around mya ^H^H^H MYA. There are some Christian organisations that are offended by BCE/CE. Mileage varies...
  • I hope that Wikipedia's software will format dates in users' preferred format in the near future - as well as converting the units of measure that have less religious assertion.
-- Zigger 13:46, 2004 Mar 27 (UTC)

I changed the section on years to allow dates BCE. AD and CE are allowed but only recommended for ranges of dates that span the epoch. Gdr 16:17, 2004 Jul 5 (UTC)

Rename BC → BCE?

This debate was moved here from Wikipedia:Village pump.

There's a debate over on Talk:Centuries about the use of BCE/CE in place of BC/AD. While not as well known among the general public (especially outside the USA), the "Common Era" nomenclature has basically become the international standard in academic circles. Detractors argue that it's simply Political Correctness, an annoying Americanism, or a fad. I think it's arguable that the connections to Christianity implied by BC/AD are inappropriate (if not offensive) when applied to historic events from other cultures.

The debate is also mentioned in the article for Anno Domini as well, in the section entitled "Alternative nomenclature for the same era".

I suggest that we rename all the BC date pages so that they're at their BCE equivalents, and create redirects. Authors of individual articles can decide for themselves how they want to label the dates, but I think the "official" versions should use the more generic term.--Wclark 21:55, 2004 Jul 10 (UTC)

It's absurd. As a non-Christian, I find it vaguely annoying that years are in BC and AD, but using exactly the same system but using different abbreviations is totally pointless and changes nothing. The French Revolution had the right idea: they reckoned years from a new point, changed the names of the months... If there was a serious proposal to do that now, it would be kind o' cool, but just changing the abbreviations is utterly silly. Calling Anno Domini the Common Era is just plain denial about what our era is based on.
Now that I mention names of months, how about January, March, etc., named after Janus, Mars and other Roman gods I don't believe in. How about Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...? Maybe I find it offensive to worship the Moon, Tiw and Woden. Should we go hyper-politically correct and call them Firstday, Secondday, etc. as in Portuguese and Chinese? — Chameleon My page/My talk 22:47, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I completely agree. As a "radical atheist" (with thanks to Douglas Adams), I find it deeply offensive to suggest that I'm so stupid as to (a) be annoyed by the reality that most of the development of modern culture, and especially that of the last millennium or so, has been driven by a Christian-dominated world, and (b) not recognise this for the hollow, vile, ridiculous joke of re-branding what is still a Christian-dominated calender, rendered no different by some lame attempt at hiding this.
James F. (talk) 23:12, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The point isn't whether "BCE" accomplishes the task of white-washing history (I tend to think it's a bit misguided too) but whether it should be accepted as the standard or not. It makes no difference why BCE is being used, just that it's being used. The academic/scientific community seem to be gradually adopting BCE as the standard, and I'm just suggesting Wikipedia honor that convention (whether we agree with the motivation behind it or not).--Wclark 01:22, 2004 Jul 11 (UTC)
If you think you have the stamina to make at least 3000 moves and redirects, you have my admiration. I rather have BC, because i do think ACE its an annoying political correctness. And flawed: common era? common to who? i blieve the jews, muslims, chineses, and Ancient Romans, for what matters, have a different opinion of what is common. Muriel G 01:17, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The People's Republic of China uses the Western AD/BC calendar almost exclusively, and they call it gongyuan which translates as "common era". I suspect the western calendar is common to all sorts of people when they are speaking in English and want other people to know what year they are talking about. - Nat Krause 02:50, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Perl scripts have the stamina to do whatever I tell them to do. Your (or my) POV on the BC vs. BCE debate is irrelevant. CE is sometimes taken to stand for "Christian Era" (which is probably better than either "Year of our Lord" or "Common Era"). In any event, it's certainly common in the sense that it's used as the international standard (yes, even by Jews, Muslims, Chinese, etc.).--Wclark 01:26, 2004 Jul 11 (UTC)

Could we make it a user preference, like month day vs day month? We should be already doing [[404 BC]] — couldn't we have an option to render it as 404 BCE? Myself. I prefer BCE/CE,as not religion/culture specific, but arguably we should go with the most common option as the default. m.e. 01:51, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I like the idea of having the date display as a preference -- but that doesn't solve the problem of what names to use for the date pages themselves. Also, I don't agree that we should always go with the most common option in situations like this. If there is a scientific or academic standard involved, I'd argue that that takes priority.--Wclark 02:30, 2004 Jul 11 (UTC)
There are lots of terms that academics use that most people wouldn't have a clue what it meant. BCE/CE are like that. I'll bet that your original statment is correct, most people know what BC/AD means. Why on earth go to something obscure, when we're trying to provide accessible information, not obfuscate it? Elf | Talk 03:55, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
BCE/CE are hardly obscure. Anyone who has taken a university history class in the past decade (or two) is almost certainly familiar with this usage. I don't see how obfuscation is really an issue here, since redirects would be put in place to make sure that 300 BC still took you to the same page it always did (even though that page would now be named "300 BCE"). Article authors would still be able to present the date however they deem most appopriate. Display preferences could even be added so that the user sees whichever usage they prefer. All we're talking about is whether the BCE pages redirect to the BC versions, or vice versa. Since BCE is the more generic term, and an academic/scholarly standard, I still think it should be the main page and the BC versions should be redirects.--Wclark 04:40, 2004 Jul 11 (UTC)

If I were the type of person who would use the phrase "political correctness", this would be an example of it gone amok. Leave the damn dates where they are. People who know what BCE means, will also understand BC, but people who don't know what it means will be completely confused. RickK 05:59, Jul 11, 2004 (UTC)

That's not a good reason to choose BC over BCE for the Wikipedia. All we should care about are what the standards are, not why the standards are what they are, or whether people are aware of the standards (isn't part of our jobs to make them aware?). Most people have no idea what AD stands for, yet that doesn't prevent us from making AD a redirect to Anno Domini rather than After Death. The only good argument I've seen so far for why the Wikipedia should stick with BC as the de facto standard is that it's the more common usage among laypeople. BCE is the standard among academics, so the issue is really whether we go with the more popular usage, or the scholarly one.--Wclark 06:10, 2004 Jul 11 (UTC)

isn't part of our jobs to make them aware? - no, it's to make sure they don't leave in frustration. Hey, we could write it all in Spanish too, so that they'd have to learn how to read Spanish, but our job isn't to drive them away. Wikipedia policy is to use the most common naming convention. Are we writing an encyclopedia for academics, or for a general reader? RickK 06:14, Jul 11, 2004 (UTC)

I said part of our jobs. There's a balance. Like I said, we don't treat AD as if it stood for "After Death", even though the majority of people probably think that's what it stands for (it's a pet peeve of mine, and I correct people on it more frequently than you'd probably believe). More importantly, it's not Wikipedia policy to adopt popular naming conventions over scholarly ones -- at least not consistent policy (and if I'm mistaken here, please point me at the appropriate policy page). Maybe it should be. That's the real problem here: do we use the popular convention (BC) or the academic one (BCE)? Should there be a general policy for making these kinds of determinations in the future?--Wclark 06:24, 2004 Jul 11 (UTC)

I think that BC and BCE can coexist in Wikipedia. We can live with different formats for displaying dates; we can live with different systems of measurement. So we can certainly live with two names for the BC/BCE era. (For dates in the AD/CE era, we can avoid the whole question of what to call the era by writing the date as a plain number, as recommended in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers).) It seems to me that in some articles it is more appropriate to use BC (for example, Dionysius Exiguus) and in others it is more appropriate to use BCE (for example, Buddhism). For now, we can live with both names, and eventually the software will give us an option to display our preferred name for the era. Gdr 15:04, 2004 Jul 11 (UTC)

The issue isn't (entirely) how the dates are displayed so much as which pages are actual articles vs. which are redirects. Since this topic never seems to get anywhere (I found at least five different places where the BCE/BC dispute has been discussed on Wikipedia over the years) I propose the following:
  • My "Wclarkbot" bot (pending approval on the Bot talk page) will create redirects from all BCE dates to their BC equivalents. For example, 300 BCE will be made into a redirect to 300 BC.
  • I will find articles which use the BCE convention (Google returns over 500 of them) and edit them to point directly to the BCE redirects.
  • Once 300 BCE and 300 BC are on more equal footing in terms of ease-of-use, we can begin to monitor how frequently each is used by Wikipedia contributors.
As things currently stand, authors wishing to use the BCE convention must go out of their way to do so, using their own labels for the links (for instance, [[300 BC|300 BCE]] to get 300 BCE). This is an obvious bias in favor of the BC convention, and should be eliminated -- although by keeping the BC pages and creating the BCE versions as redirects, we can still keep BC as the Wikipedia standard for the time being and not upset the status quo. --Wclark 15:26, 2004 Jul 11 (UTC)
Your bot proposal looks sensible to me. When you've created all the redirects, please update Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) to reflect the new recommended use ([[300 BC]] or [[300 BCE]], not [[300 BC|300 BCE]]).
Personally, I think it's a shame that Wikipedia has the idea of an article living at a particular name, with other names being redirections of second-class status... Gdr 17:59, 2004 Jul 11 (UTC)

Since too many people currently object to using BCE as the Wikipedia standard, and since I was too impatient to wait a week to have my bot approved (though I'm still waiting for that to use for other tasks) I just went ahead and created all the missing BCE → BC redirects by hand. I've also started compiling a list of pages that have the old style [[300 BC|300 BCE]] date links, so that I can convert them to the new style [[300 BCE]] links to the redirects. That page is at User:Wclark/BCE fix if anyone wants to help out. Note: I am not touching links that display the BC convention. Once the BCE links are updated, it should be easier to determine how much they're being used vs. the BC links. I'm still an advocate of switching the Wikipedia standard to BCE, but I concede that we need more data on how popular it is among contributors. I plan on revisiting this topic in a few months with more data. --Wclark 05:53, 2004 Jul 12 (UTC)

"Common Era" is by no means standard, and it is undesirable as a standard. — Chameleon My page/My talk 12:53, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)
"Common Era" very much is the standard among academics. Take a look at any (American, Canadian, British) undergraduate textbook published in the last decade. You'll be hard-pressed to find one that still uses the AD/BC convention. --Wclark 14:29, 2004 Jul 13 (UTC)
I agree with Wclark. BCE and CE are very common terms, especially in scientific textbooks. I cringe everytime I see the term BC or AD. I took a first-year (Christian) religion course for kicks and the prof actually had the audacity to suggest that it meant "Before Christian Era". As an atheist, professional scientist, and amateur astronomer, I'd like to see the Julian date system used, but I have to recognize that much of the world uses an archaic system. BCE is an entirely appropriate and inclusive term and I fully support its use as a standard in Wikipedia. TimothyPilgrim 17:59, Jul 13, 2004 (UTC)
I appreciate the support, but in the interest of remaining objective (or at least trying to) I should point out that the issue for Wikipedia probably shouldn't be whether BCE is less offensive than BC, but whether we should adopt an academic standard (BCE) over the more popular convention (BC). I'd thought the policy was to use academic/scholarly/scientific standards whenever possible, even if they were less common than the alternatives -- but apparently there isn't any consensus on this. --Wclark 18:31, 2004 Jul 13 (UTC)
Apparently there isn't a consensus, when there are questions like "Are we writing an encyclopedia for academics, or for a general reader?" I was not aware that it was necessary to make a choice on that matter, expecting that Wikipedia ought to (and does) both contain material accessible to even a second-grader (we have one as an editor) and also material only useful and understandable by specialists, but with material mostly in between those extremes. And what has that issue or questions about people being driven away if it were written in Spanish (which it isn't and won't be) have to do with the use of what is a normal and widely used convention that many, including myself, have used for decades and which is also used by many in writing Wikipedia articles? Southern Baptists officially condemn the convention, so I suppose they might object. Jehovah's Witnesses fully support it. It was actually popularized in the 1960s by Christian theologians (having been previously adopted by some Jewish theologians and historians) and from there moved into Biblical archeaology, into other archaeology, and into general historical writing and scientific writing.
But this issue is a devisive one. See Religious Tolerance.org: The use of "CE" and "BCE" to identify dates which claims:

We probably get more critical E-mails about the use of CE & BCE than about any other single topic, other than homosexuality, abortion in the Bible, and whether Roman Catholics, Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses are actually Christians.

Jallan 00:26, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I think we should go with BCE and CE. That's the academic standard, and rightly so, in my opinion. Josh Cherry 14:44, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It's an academic standard, certainly, but is it really the academic standard? Gdr 15:46, 2004 Jul 25 (UTC)
In the English-speaking world, yes it is the academic standard. It's difficult to find any textbooks that still use the AD/BC convention, and most journals require BCE/CE usage as part of their style guidelines. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that the Wikipedia should use those same conventions. The fact is that the AD/BC usage is significantly more common among laypeople, especially outside the USA. Many articles still use miles/inches/etc. rather than the academic/scientific standard of metric units, so there is some precedent for going with what's popular and well-known rather than what's academic. I've created all the appropriate redirects from the BCE dates to their BC counterparts, and am in the process of directly linking all actual usage of BCE dates in articles to those redirects (so as to make tracking simpler). This debate springs back up every couple months, and never seems to get anywhere because there is so little in the way of hard data. Once I'm through converting all 600 or so articles that reference BCE dates, I plan on re-visiting this issue in a few months with more data comparing frequency of usage for BC vs. BCE in actual Wikipedia articles. Until then, I'd suggest we shelve the debate (unless somebody has some hard data on usage they'd like to share, rather than just opinions). --Wclark 19:00, 2004 Jul 26 (UTC)

AD before or after the date?

While we are at it... In Armenian (people), "301 AD" was recently "corrected" to "AD 301". I realize that would be correct word order in Latin, but I believe it is minority usage in English. I'm not getting into this sort of petty editing on either side, but just thought it worth noting here, hoping that those who are working on this can sort this out. -- Jmabel 05:42, Jul 12, 2004 (UTC)

Well... since you're posting to the talk page for the Manual of Style (dates and numbers) I suppose it's apropos to quote what it has to say on the matter:
    • To specify a period of years spanning the start of the Common Era, use AD or CE for the date at the end of the range (note that AD precedes the date and CE follows it). For example, [[1 BC]]–[[1|AD 1]] or [[1 BCE]]–[[1|1 CE]].
So there you have it. Minority usage or not, it's Wikipedia style to put the AD first. --Wclark 05:58, 2004 Jul 12 (UTC)
Is it right to do so though? Pcb21| Pete 08:24, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)
See Anno Domini. The Chicago Manual of Style confirms that AD goes before the year. So does the Guardian's house style guide. Gdr 09:26, 2004 Jul 12 (UTC)
However, I see that 1 (number), 2 (number), etc. do not follow this style. Lots of work needed to make things consistent... Gdr 14:27, 2004 Jul 12 (UTC)
  • "AD" is from the Latin Anno Domini 2004 literally meaning "In the year of our Lord 2004". The "in" is because "anno" is in the ablative case. "AH" meaning "Anno Hegira" fo Islamic years should also appear before the number. The question may be between a "minority usage" or a majority mis-usage. Eclecticology 17:50, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Well, it's literally "in the year of the lord". The "our", which is often objected to, is traditionally stuck in the translation, but that would be a translation of "anno nostri domini" - Nunh-huh 00:37, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
AD before the date is more academic and we should prefer that. But the layman puts it after and that is also acceptable. — Chameleon My page/My talk 12:51, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Multiple references to years and dates?

Is it considered redundant to have multiple links to the same year or date in an article--for instance, linking to 2004 or to July 10th more than once? This question comes up because the TechTV article has a number of dates in it, and I don't know if I should feel guilty for removing the redundant date links. My question wasn't answered in the dates and numbers manual, but I have not checked the archives yet. If there's another place where this question is answered, maybe we should link to there from here. --Ardonik 23:27, Jul 12, 2004 (UTC)

All month-day or month-only dates should be linked, otherwise they won't be formatted according to the user's date formatting preference. It currently doesn't matter for years -- HOWEVER, I'm in the processing of adding functionality to allow users to set preferences for BCE vs. BC conventions (and maybe to optionally display AD or CE as well). So to be on the safe side, I'd suggest linking all dates. --Wclark 00:15, 2004 Jul 13 (UTC)
Thanks for your prompt reply. I'll correct the TechTV article accordingly. --Ardonik 00:48, Jul 13, 2004 (UTC)

Dates in Tables

I just got through editing the tables of Prime_Minister_of_India and President_of_India I intended to only switchover to the wiki-pipe-markup, but after a little experimentation I found that by following the mon dd, yyyy format considerable screen space was gained (small monitor perhaps?), also it stacked more neatly than dates with the fully-spelled-out month names. I then found out that there was already a dispute over date-formats on the Pres. page, and followed a link here. According to the guidleines in this manual, months must be expressed in full to avoid any ambiguity. Would it's use in a table like the ones I've linked to above, qualify as ambiguous? If so, I'll gladly revert the dates to the normal format, though I really do think it's use in such a table is quite a bit neater. -- Phil R 14:43, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The problem is that dates with short form months do not reformat according to user's preferences. With my preferences set to "dd month yyyy", on Prime Minister of India I see all the May dates resolved according to my preference, and all other dates in the table in the 'incorrect' "mon dd, yyyy" format -- most disconcerting! -- Arwel 18:23, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback. Hadn't thought about (or ever used) the dynamic date formatting. The May dates hadn't been masked (3 letter mon). Sorry about that. It's now corrected. (now if only I could figure out how to get back the anonymous default user preferences that got changed just to test this :-) I also managed to find some vague references in the talk archives (see top of page links) about similar formats: namely 'archive1' (lookfor: simian), 'archive7' and "naming conventions (calendar dates)" (lookfor: abbreviation). The format may possibly be ambiguous, used anywhere else on a page, but in a table-column of only dates it is neater to use. -- Phil R 21:42, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Dashes (again)

Hi, Chameleon.

Chocolateboy, i don't get why you're changing good punctuation into sloppy punctuation.

See Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Dashes.

chocolateboy 20:39, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Here is a quote from Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes)#Dash guidelines for Wikipedia editors
In the interests of Wikipedia:Wikilove and pending the planned update of the Wikimedia software that will automatically convert strings of hyphens into the appropriate correct en- and em dashes, editors are encouraged to be accepting of others' dash preferences and not to modify a chosen style arbitrarily, in the same way as they would refrain from arbitrarily changing "artefact" to "artifact" (or vice-versa). The following five dash styles are currently in use on Wikipedia: of these, three formats are endorsed and two are deprecated. Please do not change them to reflect your preference, except as indicated below.
As far as I can tell, the usage that you changed is included in the list, so I do not think you are justified in making the change.older≠wiser 20:47, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I think that we should recommend and illustrate the best practice while accepting (and quietly correcting) the common practice. Gdr 20:53, 2004 Jul 22 (UTC)

Hi, older≠wiser.

I hadn't spotted the movement away from hyphen and towards &mdash; and &ndash; on the talk page. FWIW, I dislike the HTML entities (particularly without surrounding whitespace), and hyphens are certainly the de facto standard for date ranges. Nevertheless, there clearly is some momentum behind the use of the traditional forms, though I think Gdr's compromise is more consistent with Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Dashes and current (if not necessarily "best") practice.

chocolateboy 21:19, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Dashes have already been discussed ad nauseam. You need to revert the article back to proper punctuation. Not liking HTML is not an excuse. — Chameleon My page/My talk 00:35, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I don't need to do anything. The policy is still under construction and hyphens are still the default.

chocolateboy 00:49, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Articles with bad grammar and factual inaccuracies are also the default, but not necessarily therefore desirable. — Chameleon My page/My talk 02:10, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Fascinating. But what has that to do with this discussion?

... the necessity of using HTML entities makes the wiki markup more difficult to read, and these do not display consistently in all browsers. (Please see the talk page.) Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes)

chocolateboy 02:52, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Don't be childishly sarcastic. You see what it has to do with it.
Dashes display correctly in all modern browsers. Hyphens display incorrectly in all browsers. — Chameleon My page/My talk 04:27, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I've cited three authorities: Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Dashes, Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes), and the status quo. You've pontificated ("you need to...", "don't be...", "you see what...").

Dashes display correctly in all modern browsers. Hyphens display incorrectly in all browsers.
---
... the necessity of using HTML entities makes the wiki markup more difficult to read, and these do not display consistently in all browsers. (Please see the talk page.) Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes)

Wikipedia is not paper.

chocolateboy 11:47, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Chocolateboy, you have cited three authorities which do not unambiguously support the changes that you made earlier (although you seem to be under the impression that hyphens are some sort of de facto standard or the status quo, this is most definitely not the case--there are countless articles with many varieities of dashes). The opinion you quote: "the necessity of using HTML entities makes the wiki markup more difficult to read" is just one side of the guideline and discussion--there is no consensus one way or the other and both html entities and hyphens are supported. older≠wiser 13:55, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Hi, older≠wiser.
They are the de facto standard for date ranges (i.e. the subject of this article). Otherwise, I agree with everything you say, in particular "there is no consensus". I modified the article a) to reflect this fact and b) to ensure consistency with the other guidelines cited above.
chocolateboy 07:23, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
The content at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes) represents the current consensus on dashes after long debate. It is still open to tweaking, but the core of it is clear. To summarise: there are various hacks involving hyphens ( - ), (--) etc., which are products of the fact there is no dash key on most keyboards. Contributors are welcome to write articles with such hacks, but should expect them to be changed to proper punctuation by Wikipedians carrying out clean-up. Three types of acceptable punctuation were agreed upon, old-fashioned unspaced em-dashes, new-fangled spaced en-dashes, and (my personal favourite) spaced em-dashes. It was agreed to change hyphen hacks to proper dashes, but not to change from one type of dash to another, in the interest of Wikilove.
Dashes display correctly in all modern browsers (NS4 may have problems, for example, but then the entire site is unreadable in NS4, so it's not really an issue), whereas hyphen hacks do not display correctly in any browser. Numerical HTML entities are tricky to understand, but word-based ones are highly intuitive. Once the concept of starting with an ampersand and ending with a semi-colon is mastered, they couldn't be simpler, e.g.: &rho; for the letter Rho (ρ), &euro; for the euro sign (€), &mdash; for the em-dash (—). Since nobody is being told to use such entities, but merely to leave them alone when coming across them, one has to question the oft-used complaint that they are difficult. They are no more difficult, and disrupt the flow of the source code no more, than other methods we use for marking up text or inserting content, such as the image code ([[Image:Name of the image.png|left|thumb|110px|Comment]]) or the numerous colons, asterisks, square brackets, curly braces and apostophes that litter the source code for various purposes and are a necessary evil.
It will soon no doubt be possible to enter such correct punctuation without the need for entities. All it would take is the adoption of UTF-8, and we could replace all entities by directly-entered characters — the important thing is that proper punctuation should appear in the article. On the same topic, it has long been planned to implement automatic conversion of hyphen hacks into proper dashes. Indeed, it was once implemented, but had to removed due to problems with table syntax (which uses "--"). Until that time, the tiny inconvenience of seeing the occasional entity in the source will remain.
As for the concept of a "status quo", the current situation is that there are in excess of half a dozen different ways of attempting to represent various dashes. It has been decided that three of these are acceptable. It is our duty to change the bad ones to the good ones. Changing good ones to bad ones is rather unhelpful.
A "default" is something that happens "because of a lack of opposition or positive action" according the OED. The proliferation of hyphen hacks is indeed because until now people haven't been strict and positive enough about proper punctuation; this is not an argument for such hacks. — Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 10:49, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Hi.

While hyphens may not display "correctly" as dashes, they clearly do display "correctly" as far as the vast majority of editors and readers are concerned. Changing those hyphens to HTML entities serves only to alienate and annoy those contributors who take their lead from web standards of punctuation adopted by such sites as the BBC and H2G2.

Until consensus is genuinely reached (the other cited policy documents show that it has not been, and opinion is more or less evenly divided on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dashes)), and, more importantly, the MediaWiki software is upgraded so that dashers and hyphenators can coexist peacefully, there is no reason to suppress recognition of the customary and official policy for dates on this site.

Wikipedia policy emerges bottom-up, taking its cue from what is done; it is not imposed top-down by the appeal of a handful of editors to standards of "propriety" that obtain in different media. That argument is explicitly addressed and rejected in Wikipedia is not paper and Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines.

The pending MediaWiki update (assuming it renders " - " as " &ndash; " and "--" as "&mdash;") actually argues strongly against the current deprecation (albeit incoherent) of hyphens, as they will, in future, become the de jure standard, while the currently obsolescent HTML entities will finally be rendered obsolete.

chocolateboy 15:24, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Use of "-" in date ranges, for example, will almost certainly not become standard in any future upgrade. It may be that "--" will become standard for n-dash and "---" for m-dash. If so, then at that time one might expect to see &ndash; no longer used in new edits. But it would mostly left in old edits because it works, just as things like &eacute; appear in many articles. They are not "obsolete", especially if a particular editor is used to those entities and doesn't know any other easy way to get such a character directly from the keyboard.
You will find much use of &ndash on Main Page and Wikipedia:Community Portal. Use of "&ndash;" in date ranges and other ranges and use of either "&ndash;" or "&mdash;" or "--" for other dashes is the current standard in Wikipedia, arrived at after much discussion, when those like yourself who honestly don't like &mdash; and &ndash; were outvoted. Actually I don't think anyone likes the entities much, but a majority preferred the results that use of those entities produces over ASCII work-arounds. Similarly I don't think anyone likes three apostrophes to indicate bold emphasis. They use it because they like the result.
But the current standards on dashes (and on other matters) were not imposed top-down. They were decided by discussion. In the case of dashes it became an issue when some users, notably one called Wik, started unilaterally changing other people's use of "&mdash;" and "&ndash;' to " - ". There were bottom-up protests against this. There was no top-down suppression. More people who cared about the issue one way or the other opted for use of HTML entities as the norm. This was recently modified to allow "--" also, after notice on the pump and discussion on a talk page. Please abide by consensus in this matter. Otherwise it is Chocolateboy who is alienating and annoying others, who is suppressing others who are following what is here the preferred style and often the individual preferred style of the users whose work he is changing.
Not all points of Wikipedia style are my own preferred style. But I try to follow Wikipedia style when editing here.
As to standards being under construction ... all standards here are always under construction and subject to modification at any time, if there is consensus among those who care about any standard usage to modify a particular standard or to extend it. That's how the current policy on dashes emerged. Unilaterally changing someone else's standard usage to non-standard usage without discussion is normally not acceptable on any site or in any publishing entity, regardless of what standards that site or publishing entity has chosen.
Even three years ago it was very reasonable in English web publishing to keep within the cage of the subset of characters defined by the intersection of Latin-1, MacRoman, and Latin-9. It even made sense to stick to ASCII as character set conversions were sometimes buggy. So of course web sites continued to use the normal ASCII/typewriter kludges to represent dashes despite the spread of Unicode because of difficulties with older systems and older browsers. Many large sites still follow those standards even after the reason for them has gone. Changes take time and the hand of convention rules. But the cage door is open now. HTML Unicode entities and UTF-8 are supported on free browsers available on almost every system and there is longer need to restrict oneself to old-fashioned limitations inherited from typewriter technology. If you won't get out of the prison yourself, don't expect others to stay there with you or agree with you holding them back.
Jallan 00:54, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Hi, Jallan. Thanks for your comments. I agree with some of them, and, for the record, would be quite happy to see &ndash; and &mdash; in the rendered HTML.

If so, then at that time one might expect to see &ndash; no longer used in new edits. But it would mostly left in old edits because it works, just as things like é appear in many articles. They are not "obsolete"

They are obsolete. They would be removed by conscientious Wikipedians just as the jejune and redundant use of HTML to achieve formating that is directly catered for in wikitext is removed (usually with a gloss of "wikified").

They still appear at [[1]] which is the help page accessed from an edit page. Presumably they are there to help editors not clear on how to get the characters from their keyboards. A gloss of "Wikified" does surely not necessarily mean that such characters are removed or that, for example HTML tables are removed, but rather that titles mainly that titles are now in standard Wiki format, the introductary paragraph follows Wiki standards, links have been made to other articles and other stated standards of the style sheets have been followed—encluding use of the proper dash characters. Jallan 03:30, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Use of "–" in date ranges and other ranges and use of either "&ndash;" or "&mdash;" or "--" for other dashes is the current standard in Wikipedia

That is incorrect. See below.

arrived at after much discussion

That ("arrived at") is also incorrect. There is no consensus. Or rather, the consensus (the solution that displeases no-one) is that hyphens should be used in wikitext and that they should be convereted to &ndash; and &mdash; in the resulting HTML. See below.

More people who cared about the issue one way or the other opted for use of HTML entities as the norm.

This is incorrect. The majority of Wikipedians are unaware of the attempts of a vocal minority to overthrow standard web usage (it doesn't help that the discussion is spread over several talk pages and articles). Those who do care enough to contribute to the discussion are almost unanimously in favour of the hyphens-in-wikitext/dashes-in-HTML solution referred to above.

How do you know what the majority of Wikipedians are aware of? The discussion is spread over many talk pages and articles, but the guidelines are not. A further change to the standard (allowing "--") was advertised on the pump for about a month. No-one has tried to keep anything secret. As to "standard web usage", that is changing also. Jallan 03:30, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Here are some sites that I found quite quickly. The link is to a sample subpage when the main page does have a dash example:
Some of this is probably quite old. One site was even using a graphic kludge to emulate a dash. But a lot is new. Do you really think any of these pages and sites will revert back to hyphens? Do you really think that many other sites are not going to change in the next couple of years.
You might try telling the following that they don't know anything about using the web:
It is quite possible that some of these sites, like Wikipedia, also have hyphens for dashes in the majority of pages. But not in the new pages. Though I did find sites I did not list which were mixing "--" and "—" even on the same pages. New technology means new standards are possible. And people are beginning to take advantage of the possiblities, moving away from a standard forced by necessity rather than by consideration of was really wanted. Jallan 03:30, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Please abide by consensus in this matter.

I would advise you to do the same. I have gone to some trouble to support my argument with statistics rather than dismissive references to individual Wikipedians ("Chocolateboy", "Wik"), which, IMHO, are offtopic.

That thousands of old articles (and many new ones) do not follow Wikipedia standards in many different ways is a fact. So standardize them. Jallan 03:30, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Not all points of Wikipedia style are my own preferred style. But I try to follow Wikipedia style when editing here.

I prefer title case headings to sentence case, as do many other websites (and, for that matter, print style guides). I don't go through Wikipedia systematically changing headings to title case. Nor do I complain or revert when an editor (or bot) tweaks my headings to conform to the de facto Wikipedia standard. Given the large number of witting and unwitting Wikipedians who favour title case headings (see Lady Lysine Ikinsile's list for example), I doubt it would be difficult to corral a troupe of contributors to vote for a title-case overthrow of the relevant policy page. I choose not to do that because I prefer not to fly in the face of the de facto standard both here and on other websites. If there is an argument for a minority-backed imposition of a dash policy that flouts customary Wikipedia usage, then there is an equally strong case for the overthrow of all de facto Wikipedia standards.

Ah! customary usage. ASCII only was at one time customary on the web if you wanted to be safe. "Customary usage" was exactly the excuse Wik claimed when he began arbitrarly changing other people's ussage. But of course it was customary. Use of special characters outside of Latin-1, and even outside of ASCII, used to be somewhat chancy, and still is for many of the newer Unicode characters. Not for dashes though. No reason any more not to use them. The world has moved on. Try changing the main page in Wikipedia to get rid of the dashes and see what happens. Jallan 03:30, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Unilaterally changing someone else's standard usage to non-standard usage without discussion is normally not acceptable on any site or in any publishing entity, regardless of what standards that site or publishing entity has chosen.

There is no unilaterism here. There are ample arguments on both sides, as your previous paragraph backhandedly acknowledges. The position with the broadest support advocates the use of hyphens in wikitext, and dashes in the rendered HTML.

Of course. And until then ... it advocates use of entities, or "--". Read the discussion carefully. There is no way that a hyphen in a range will be automatically changed by software from a single hyphen to an en-dash. That's why use of &ndash; in ranges is particularly urged. How does the software know whether "150-355" is a range or an identification code of some kind? Of course linked date ranges could probably be identified, leaving the entities to other cases. But current suggestion seems to be that en-dash in a range should be represented by "--" and em-dash by "---" following TeX standard. Who knows? It's all pie in the sky. Meanwhile, the entities work, and they will continue to work regardless of what might be done, just as do HTML tables. Or perhaps a convention to UTF-8 will happen first, in which case people can simply enter the proper dashes if they want without messing around with either HTML entities or silliness like "--" and "---". Jallan 03:30, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Contrary to the repeated appeal to a "vote", there is no consensus on the Dashes talk page. There are around fifty different contributors to that page. A handful of recurrent print-oriented pundits (most of whom have tried to railroad this and that page into supporting their position) have repeatedly lobbied for entities in the wikitext. A similar number have objected to this on the grounds that it obfuscates the source. The rest have either made peripheral observations, or have simply endorsed the status quo, which is that hyphens should be used in the source and rendered (in the resulting HTML) as &ndash; and &mdash;. Most contributors to Wikipedia are manifestly unaware of any of the dash policy pages; they contribute to this discussion by example. In contrast, the &ndash; and &mdash; advocates project a seriously skewed impression of Wikipedian policy by systematically organizing their putsch here and on other policy pages. The hyphen advocates are the silent majority. The entity advocates are the vocal minority.

The "silent minority" fallacy. All the people out there who agree with you but somehow don't speak up. Not credible. True, a lot don't know (and a lot don't care.) And there is a group who don't like the idea of having to mess around with dashes, just as there is a group who don't like mixed spellings from one article to another, and a group who loaths tables, and a group who would ban almost all lists, and a group who would ban most articles about fictional characters, and a group who sees no reason why "how to" articles shouldn't be included and so forth. Jallan 03:30, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hyphens are the de facto standard on Wikipedia, not only for dates, but for "dashes".

Yes, they are standard for old articles, except when changed, in a sense. There is a lot of changing to do, and seemingly no-one feels strongly enough to start doing this as a project. So the changes happen gradually, along with other edits. HTML tables are probably the de facto standard on Wikipedia also. Jallan 03:30, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

(The file normalized.txt referenced below is a version of the 20040727 cur table dump with talk pages removed (script available on request). Due to stack overflow issues in Perl's recursive regular expression engine, a few longer articles are also excluded from these statistics.)

Globally, hyphens are at least 15 times more common than ndashes or mdashes combined:

I am not surprised. Maybe about six months ago they were 40 or 50 times more common. Who knows? Jallan 03:30, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
grep '&ndash;' normalized.txt | perl -pe '$_ = join ($/, /&ndash;/g) . $/' | wc -l
> 14663
grep '&mdash;' normalized.txt | perl -pe '$_ = join ($/, /&mdash;/g) . $/' | wc -l
> 16526
grep ' - ' normalized.txt | perl -pe '$_ = join ($/, / - /g) . $/' | wc -l
> 494155

Likewise, hyphens are approximately 40' times more popular than dashes for date ranges:

grep '\]\] &ndash; \[\[' normalized.txt | perl -pe '$_ = join ($/, /\]\] &ndash; \[\[/g) . $/' | wc -l
> 2698
grep '\]\]&ndash;\[\[' normalized.txt | perl -pe '$_ = join ($/, /\]\]&ndash;\[\[/g) . $/' | wc -l
> 2599
grep '\]\]-\[\[' normalized.txt | perl -pe '$_ = join ($/, /\]\]-\[\[/g) . $/' | wc -l
> 59366
grep '\]\] - \[\[' normalized.txt | perl -pe '$_ = join ($/, /\]\] - \[\[/g) . $/' | wc -l
> 160911

As you can also see from those stats (which exclude some date ranges and include some non-date-ranges: patches welcome!), spaced hyphens are used approximately 3 times more often than unspaced hyphens.

So ... there's a lot of work to do to get Wikipedia (and the web) out of the ASCII kludges once necessary for technical reasons, kludges based on old typewriter technology (which is a paper print technology as much as professional typography, but a cheap kludge technology). But that HTML tables are more common in Wikipedia than pipe tables doesn't mean that one shouldn't use pipe tables does it? Of course it really doesn't matter with tables. HTML or pipe, they look the same when viewed. Not so with dashes. But you are playing with the word standard, using it to mean what happens to exist, as though to say that Internet Explorer HTML is "standard" HTML. In that sense, it is standard HTML. It is very standard. In another sense it is not. So get the dashes off the main Wikipedia page and the Community portal page if they aren't what you think should be standard and you can get people to agree with you. Otherwise, leave other people's dashes alone. Jallan 03:30, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

chocolateboy 16:05, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I hope this is the right place to bump in with my opinion, too. :) Personally, I'd support any system-wide conversion away from hyphens to dashes. Dashes are certainly a part of proper typography, which is (nearly) as important as proper grammar. I gather that one of the aims of Wikipedia is to be as professional as possible, yes? I'm sure we have plenty of badly-constructed sentences, but that doesn't make them the right thing to keep, either. While we can't plausibly include every correct typographic convention (oh, beautiful curved quotes, how I miss you) IMHO we should include them when possible. Miss Puffskein 23:48, Aug 10, 2004 (UTC)

Spaces in date ranges

It is obvious that unspaced en-dashes need to be used in unspaced date ranges such as "1978–2004". However, what about spaced dates like "1 September 1978–1 August 2004"? Doesn't the dash look like it is joining the "1978" and the "1" rather than the first whole date and the second whole date? I think "1 September 1978 – 1 August 2004" is better and should at the very least be permitted. — Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 21:44, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

This seems sensible to me, certainly.
James F. (talk) 23:36, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Spaced en-dashes are certainly permitted. Perhaps the word "to" would be better then either? Gdr 14:58, 2004 Aug 3 (UTC)
The thing is that I think they should only be permitted in this case for clarity. I don't see why they should be allowed in other cases. As you said, usage guides say no to spaces. — Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 15:41, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I have edited the article to reflect the de facto Wikipedia standard. See stats and comments above. chocolateboy 16:05, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Why? The style guide is about how Wikipedia should be, not how it is. It's like being on an examination board and disagreeing with the other professors because you think students should get higher marks not for putting the de jure correct answers, but the de facto ones, i.e. the answers most frequently given by other students... on the grounds it is more democratic or something.
Any research such as that carried out by you above is flawed because it does not take into account one thing: it is harder to insert dashes than hyphens because they do not feature on keyboards. That will always skew results. The same thing occurs with the correct use of special characters in foreign words. Most English speakers will enter them incorrectly, and the rest of use have to come along afterwards and tidy up, as we do with punctuation. The de facto standard on Wikipedia is also stubs, lists, semi-correct info, badly-written prose and huge US bias. Should we also encourage this so as not to be nasty, pedantic, ivory-tower prescriptivists? Does anyone agree with you? — Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 18:01, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hola.

Please don't reformat my comments.

Why?

For the reasons given above. Please answer facts with facts rather than op ed.

Any research such as that carried out by you above is flawed

I usually find that's the case when someone disagrees with me.

because it does not take into account one thing: it is harder to insert dashes than hyphens because they do not feature on keyboards.

It's "harder" to enter <em>foo</em> than ''foo''. That's why the latter is preferred. The flaw is in your contention that "difficult to enter" should be the preferred solution in wikitext.

The de facto standard on Wikipedia is also stubs, lists, semi-correct info, badly-written prose and huge US bias.

I took considerable pains to support my position. I hope you will corroborate your indictment of Wikipedia by citing your sources or providing evidence rather than impugning the competence and cluefulness of the majority of Wikipedians.

Does anyone agree with you?

The vast majority of Wikipedians agreee with me as the statistics cited above amply demonstrate.

chocolateboy 19:06, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

You assume that your opinions are statements of facts and that mine are mere opinions. All individuals are probably guilty of this, but you don't have to be so open about it. You have not supported your position at all; you have merely shown that there is much poor punctuation on Wikipedia. Only in your opinion does that support your position. In my opinion that supports a drive to improve punctuation in Wikipedia.
There is a huge logical leap between seeing that there are a great deal of hyphen hacks on Wikipedia and concluding that everyone actually agrees with you. The vast majority of people have never thought about it, don't care either way or have no idea how to enter a character not on their keyboard. — Chameleon Main/Talk/Images 20:07, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)
You assume that your opinions are statements of facts and that mine are mere opinions.

I have repeatedly cited Wikipedia policy and expounded an argument supported by verifiable statistics. You've done neither. If your opinion has the weight of consensus behind it, it should be easy to demonstrate. It merely requires a complete rewrite of a raft of policy documents, and a rigorous demonstration that the statistics I provided are inaccurate.

All individuals are probably guilty of this, but you don't have to be so open about it.

Why? Are we all required to dissemble ("don't have to be so open") and argue from opinions rather than facts?

You have not supported your position at all; you have merely shown that there is much poor punctuation on Wikipedia.

Please answer the points made in my comments above before wading further into the realm of patronising anti-Wikipedia invective.

The vast majority of people have never thought about it, don't care either way or have no idea how to enter a character not on their keyboard.

Unfortunately for your argument, the vast majority of Wikipedians decide Wikipedia policy. It is not decided by a militant minority hell-bent on propagating the illusion that Wikipedia is paper.

chocolateboy 22:46, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Who is this militant minority propagating an illusion that Wikipedia is paper?
Wikipedia has been printed on paper and the plan is that it will be printed on paper again, many times. After all, anyone can print it. But I don't think about that when I edit. I think about the screen display that I see. And I think dashes look better on the screen, that they give an article a more professional air. That did seem to be consensus, though of course people do not especially like the entities necessary to accomplish this. But, one works with the tools at hand. I would also like to simply press CTRL-B or something similar and have bolding turned on in my editing display without any visible coding.
I have background in editing and writing and doing layout on paper. I am a programmer by profession. There are desireable differences between print on paper and screen display. Most of those differences can be accomplished by twiddling a CSS while using the same text. I don't see that use of dashes falls into differences that are for some reason desireable on screen but not on paper or vice versa. Hyphens for dashes were never really asethetically desireable on typewriters. It was simply that for reasons of cost and mechanical practicality that the number of characters had to be kept down and using "--" or " - " for dashes and hyphen for both en-dash in ranges and for minus was a reasonable way to do it, especially when characters were, for the first time, all of a single width. People got used to the typewriter set of characters, and it made sense at the time to mostly transfer it to computers as it existed. But new technology throws away its limitations. To turn your strange accusation back at you, are you propagating the illusion that Wikipedia and the web should continue to accept old typewriter limitations when the reaon behind them is gone? You don't ask that Wikipedia articles be displayed in a fixed-width font at 80 characters to a line, which also used to be computer "standard". You accept italics rather than underscores and bolding rather than asterisks. I presume you accept superscript and subscript and so forth. Why are you so set on something which has been "standard" mostly because people could do no better?
Jallan 04:37, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Unified date feature proposal

I propose a more general approach to the Date/Time handling, which I filed as a Wikimedia feature request [2]

Please comment (at sourceforge). If you feel that it's better to continue the discussion here than there (I'm pretty new in Wikipedia so I'm sorry if it goes without saying that date/time issues are only discussed here and not there), then please put a comment at the sourceforge pointing here and continue the discussion here. BACbKA 22:12, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

There are a lot of difficult issues in your proposal that need to be thought about (and argued over), so I think it would be a better idea to work out the details here before presenting a more worked-out proposal. I can't add comments to the SourceForge feature request, so I hope someone else will add a note pointing here. Gdr 15:45, 2004 Aug 3 (UTC)

BACbKA's proposal

At the present moment, whenever a date/time period/epoch is referenced within a Wikipedia article, various notations are used, and they are also unportable with respect to language and calendar systems.

It would be nice to have a special tag for a date specified to a given degree of accuracy (i.e., referring either to a particular date or even date+time, or to a particular week/month/century/millenium/epoch or some interval, like XIV-XVII AD).

(I am purposefully omitting any concrete implementation details and markup details at this stage, preferring to reach full agreement on the desired functionality first. If you want it in XML, I can easily prototype a DTD encompassing all the features once the agreement is reached).

The markup should allow specifying the date according multiple calendar notations (such as Julian/Gregorian/Russian Orthodox, or Arabic, Jewish, Mayan or whatever else - the system should be designed in such a way that adding another notation should not affect the existing dates specified in the notations already supported).

Aside of the way the date is *specified*, there should be a possibility to attach an attribute to the date that would signify the native calendar system for the date (rationale: a national/religious recurring holiday is celebrated according to the given calendar).

Now when a Wikipedia article is rendered, depending on the language it is in, a given date is translated as follows: 1) it is coerced from the originally specified notation to the native notation for the article language (as long as the attribute forcing a particular notation is not set) 2) the current language/locale is used to express the particular notation (also maybe as per the current user's preferences environment) 3) in case of the mismatch about the native notation for the article context and the native notation for the specified event/period, the date might be represented twice (this behavior might also be affected by the current user preferences). E.g., in an English Wikipedia article about an event native to the Hebrew calendar: 26/Jul/2004 (9th of Av, 5764)

This would simplify trans-article date formatting decisions within a language-specific Wikipedia greatly, and would also facilitate easier translation of Wikipedia article portions.

Discussion

My initial thoughts are:

  • It looks like a good idea and something like this will work for many cases, especially modern dates.
  • But there are lots of reasons why a date should not be translated, or should be translated with care:
  1. Sometimes it is wrong to translate: for example, an article discussing dating systems themselves.
  2. Date conversions between systems that have different starts to the day might be tricky. For example, days in the Hebrew calendar begin at sunset, so 2004-07-26 isn't necessarily 9th of Av, 5764.
  3. Calendars like the Islamic calendar rely on an actual sighting of the new moon, so when translating to the Gregorian calendar there are a couple of days of uncertainty.
  4. When translating between the Julian calendar and the (proleptic) Gregorian calendar you can't be accurate to the day because of the doubt over which years between 44 BC and AD 8 were leap years.
  5. With some calendars there is disagreement over how they relate; for example there are still multiple opinions on how to translate Mayan dates, or how to date events in ancient Egypt.

The attribute forcing a date not to be translated will solve, or at least help, problem 1. Problems 2 and 3 are not very severe, but could in any case be solved by a system allowing you to specify a date in multiple systems if you needed to. I don't know what to say about problems 4 and 5.

It would be nice to see a detailed proposal. Gdr 15:45, 2004 Aug 3 (UTC)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Dates_and_numbers&oldid=5154862"