Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (calendar dates)

Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (calendar dates)

Wikipedia seems, early in its history, to have standardised on US-style "Monthname NN, YYYY" for calendar dates. I believe this is a minority usage in the English language, and moreover is not befitting an encyclopedia with its generalisation and specialisation -- dates should go from specific to general, or general to specific, but not mixed up with months at the start.

Probably ISO 8601 date formats, YYYY-MM-DD, have already been proposed. They seem the least ambiguous, least prone to error, and require no translation into other languages. What reasons are there against using ISO 8601 dates as standard in Wikipedia?

-- Bignose

[moved from user talk]

I'm a supporter of your view on this matter, but concepts that would have them conforming with the rest of the world just don't sit well with the Yanks. I'll introduce a few of these dates on a list from time to time, e.g. List of British Columbia Premiers. If I put them on a biography page they almost immediately get changed to conform with the "American Way". Changing them all on a list page would be a lot more work.

When I enter these I use the format [[1949]]-[[12-23]]. I then immediately set up the article at 12-23 to be a redirect to December 23 unless it has been done already. Of course I get some complaints when I do this, but I just let the matter lie low for a few months until I'm ready to add another list. I don't think that a serious push can be made to make this an acceptable alternative for dates until all 366 redirect pages have been set up. Even then arguing that it should be the standard for all the pages may not get anywhere, but I would be prepared to argue for an optional approach where the person who starts an article gets the choice of which dating system to use. Eclecticology 19:49 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)

Bad idea. We need some sort of consistency. The problem with number-only date formats is ambiguity. If people write 4-5, we can never be sure which way they mean -- newbies might not have read guidelines. Personally, I prefer "4 December" to "December 4", but it would take so much work for vsuch a small change, so I don't think it's worth the hassle. -- Tarquin 20:09 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)

Agreed; full ISO dates e.g. 1949-12-10 are unambiguous, but month-day or day-month parts e.g. 12-10 are not (is that 12 October, or 10 December?) and these are not in the ISO 8601 standard. It seems the only solution for unambiguously representing dates with indeterminate years is spelling out the month or its abbreviation.

Perhaps Eclecticology's solution can be implemented without redirects: [[1949]]-[[December 23|12-23]]. This places the knowledge of "12-23 is December 23" where it belongs: in the specific instance of that date representation. "12-23" doesn't seem a usefully unambiguous article title, and shouldn't be created for this purpose. -- Bignose

Even I can easily agree that numbers alone are ambiguous unless the year precedes the numbers. The ambiguity problem has always been a big issue here in Canada where it is often at the whim of the individual to use D/M which used to be official or M/D in the American style. All federal government correspondance and forms here now use the ISO format. Your compromise solution will never please those who just don't like the look of the ISO format. Eclecticology

For the year in X entries, wouldn't it be better to do 1952 (television)[?] rather than 1952 in television ? That way an article on a TV show could write:

''Shooting Stars'' was commission in [[1952 (television)|]] by ...

Shooting Stars was commission in 1952[?] by ...

So the "pipe trick" would make it easy to link to the correct part of 1952...

Hm. 1952 (disambiguator)[?] is how you would disambiguate different things that share the name 1952. The YEAR in Y pages are daughter articles of the year pages - they are not different things by the same name. [[1952 (television)|1952]] is also very misleading since by convention, year pages are linked by their numbers and this is what readers expect when they click on them. They do not expect to go to a daughter page of a year page. This will only lead to confusion and doubt in readers when they click on years in Wikipedia. In short; it is a very bad idea to use the pipe trick to link to year in review daughter pages. Just spell it out and link direct. --mav