Last modified: 2006-08-23 16:53:46 UTC
The special variables CURRENTTIME, CURRENTDAY, etc seem to report the time as UTC (resp. GMT). This leads to a lot of confusion, for example (in the german WP) the votes for deletion end up on "yestardays" page until 2am (because CEST is UTC +02:00). I wonder how this is done in the en:WP - is there a workaround? It would be extremely useful if one could specify a time zone or offset in a setup-file, so that those variables return the local time. Alternatively, it would be good (but probably more complexe) to have the variables behave as funtions, i.e. {{CURRENTTIME(CEST)}} would return the time as CEST. Dealing with daylight saving time is anotehr issue - maybe Olson-DB names should be used instead of time zones. But there is no support for that in PHP. (or is there?)
I second that we desperately need localised datetime variables. I believe they should bear a different name (maybe LOCALTIME, LOCALDAY, etc.) since UTC ones may be useful to have an universaly agreeing timestamp if anyone needs one. But this would be very good to get fixed either way. For me it doesn't seem to be complex to achieve, I'd guess at most 3-5 lines of code would do it.
I'm against that , because many wiki have contributors from several timezones... examples : en: has users from ''Great Britain (GMT+0)'' as well as in ''USA (GMT-5 to -9)'', Australia, New Zealand, Ireland... fr: has users from ''Belgium, France (GTM+1) -adding the "Département d'outre-mer" that have various GMT- , ''Switzerland (GMT+2)'', ''Quebec (GMT-5)''... es: has users from ''Spain (GMT+1)'' as well as in most central and south america, Philippines, Equatorial Guinea...
re #2: have you actually read #1? :-) still, majority of national wikis would use LOCALtime in MOST places I believe. en may be exception. but there is the user settable "user local time" you remember, what about USERLOCALTIME? As I told, it would be useful to have CURRENTTIME (utc) and LOCALTIME (userlocal) together. Having only utc is bad (apart from enwiki). IMO.. I wonder whether I should provide a patch for this very complex problem. :-P [even if I don't know php I could probably come up with one, as it is very possibly an oneliner] Please?
I also think that the last edit time should be displayed somewhere on the article page. I think that it would be helpful.
Pleasing the majority is ignoring the minority. For Wikimedia projects UTC should be used, as they are split by languages, not by countries. Other projects can use other time zones, and magic words should work accordingly already.
So you are saying that we should ignore the majority and please the minority? Both your local time and UTC should be used. For example, the comment above was written at 22:38 UTC. What time was that for me? Was that written two hours ago, 7 hours ago? I have no idea. So it would be nice if times like those could be put in local time, while vote closing times, for example, would be placed in UTC and local time. Also, I don't think that this issue is resolved yet.
*** Bug 4068 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
de.wikipedia, for example, is somehow set up to show everything in CE(S)T. The only thing in the whole software that does not behave like that is the CURRENTDAY etc. variables. This seems to me not a policy thing that has anything to do with minorities and majorities, but a simple bug. Please fix, or at least introduce some new variables for the time zones (or a possibility to add/deduct a specified number of hours to the variable).
MediaWiki uses $wgLocaltimezone (for signatures) and $wgLocalTZoffset (default for all other dates) to calculate the offset for date/time display. The values of CURRENTTIME and CURRENTDAY should be consistent with the times zones defined by those settings. Also, it may be a good idea to merge them, having two settings for the same thing, but requiering a different syntax, seems silly.
*** Bug 4499 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug ***
Could we please get {{CURRENTHOUR}} and {{CURRENTMINUTE}} like the French Wikipedia has? This would make time zone calculations easier in templates.
(In reply to comment #11) > Could we please get {{CURRENTHOUR}} and {{CURRENTMINUTE}} like the French > Wikipedia has? This would make time zone calculations easier in templates. It appears that those two templates are just workarounds - take a look at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:CURRENTHOUR?action=edit and http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:CURRENTMINUTE?action=edit
Well, that was sure quite not brilliant of the creator to volontary use a system-varaible-like name... (but it may be intended for an easier replacement by a real system variable)
*** Bug 5727 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Added local magic words in r16200.
