Last modified: 2011-04-14 15:11:53 UTC
With the depreciation of wikilinking full dates on Wikipedia to prevent overlinking etc, wouldn't it be useful to allow the following - <date>25 August 2005</date> <date>2005-08-25</date> etc to be displayed as previously without linking to articles?
Prefer {{#date:}}, due to being able to use wikitext in the contents (so we can pull from templates, parser functions, etc)
Yes, a new {{#date:}} parser function would be the best way to do this. Given the idiotic drama that the English Wikipedia is now making about date linking/delinking, is there any chance I can bump up the priority on this? Right now silly measures are being taken, like having parameters in templates that specify the date format and then people squabbling over which format gets used in "their" articles. It would be MUCH easier if these things just respected users' date preferences.
The {{#formatdate:}} parser function already exists and meets the request as far as single dates are concerned.
Several (perhaps most) opponents of date autoformatting are opposed to it at least in part because of the extra syntax. Although I'm strongly in support of date autoformatting, I do acknowledge that aspect of their argument as being entirely legitimate. "{{#formatdate:29 May 2009}}" is more complicated than "[[29 May]] [[2009]]" which is more complicated than "29 May 2009" although it's still up to debate whether that extra complication is worth the benefit of autoformatting or not. Another option here would be to keep the existing autoformatting syntax but to add a new user preference that would toggle linking on or off, and to have the default be "off" since that's what most people seem to want. I already have the user preferences portion written and would be glad to hand it off to Andrew (or whoever) to incorporate it into the date formatting code.
I don't see the need for any extra coding. There's only a handful of possible date formats which all can be predicted. Is it really that hard to take any date displayed in an article and treat it according to a user's set preferences?
MacGyverMagic, the format of dates in direct quotes and programming language examples should not be changed, and there are so many ways to indicate direct quotes that it would not be feasible to detect whether or not a date was within a direct quote. Also I beleive Brian Vibber (spelling?) has rejected this concept
