Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:06:53 UTC
On English Wikipedia there's a discussion ongoing about the date-format in citation templates. Some people support changing these so anon users get spelled out dates instead of the standard YYYY-MM- DD format. This discussion could easily be resolved if anon users were given a standard date format other than that, preferably based on their IP location.
I believe it's possible to set a default preference easily enough. Different for different IPs (or different languages listed in HTTP request) would require some software changes, and doesn't look too practical right now. I'm repurposing to the latter, specifically based on the Accept-Language HTTP header (which is much simpler than IP magic, although neither is necessarily reliable). Possibly this should be merged into bug 3665, or depend on it or something. If it's decided on enwiki specifically that a consistent format for all IPs is fine, open a new bug report asking for that to be enabled on the English Wikipedia.
showing pages differently in any way based on Accept-Language headers or simmilar would completely break caching. Doing this for the english wikipedia would mean instant server meltdown. *If* the squids can vary on *specific* cookies (not just the Cookie header), it may be possible to use cookies to track the preference of anonymous users, after they have set it explicitely.
