Re: [Wikitech-l] historical trivia: who first picked UTC as Wikimedia time, when and why?

[Daniel Friesen]

On 2016-05-10 1:23 AM, Jaime Crespo wrote:
> On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 6:15 PM, Brion Vibber  wrote:
>> In 2001 when Magnus was writing the initial attempt at a custom wiki engine
>> in PHP backed by MySQL, he chose to use the TIMESTAMP column type.
>>
>> TIMESTAMPs in MySQL 3 were automatically filled out by the server at INSERT
>> time, normalized to UTC, and exposed in the 14-digit MMDDHHMMSS format
>> we still know and love today.
> By the way, if we had to design this from the scratch, TIMESTAMPs now
> allow to not be auto set
> https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/timestamp-initialization.html
> This would save 15 - 4 = 11 bytes per row. However, both in code and
> migration effort + potential bugs + backwards compatibility, this is
> not worth it.
Plus TIMESTAMP suffers from the year 2038 problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

DATETIME only needs to worry about the Y10K problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_10,000_problem

~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]

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Re: [Wikitech-l] historical trivia: who first picked UTC as Wikimedia time, when and why?

[Jaime Crespo]

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 6:15 PM, Brion Vibber  wrote:
> In 2001 when Magnus was writing the initial attempt at a custom wiki engine
> in PHP backed by MySQL, he chose to use the TIMESTAMP column type.
>
> TIMESTAMPs in MySQL 3 were automatically filled out by the server at INSERT
> time, normalized to UTC, and exposed in the 14-digit MMDDHHMMSS format
> we still know and love today.

By the way, if we had to design this from the scratch, TIMESTAMPs now
allow to not be auto set
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/timestamp-initialization.html
This would save 15 - 4 = 11 bytes per row. However, both in code and
migration effort + potential bugs + backwards compatibility, this is
not worth it.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] historical trivia: who first picked UTC as Wikimedia time, when and why?

[MZMcBride]

David Gerard wrote:
>Question about obscure historical detail: Who picked UTC as Wikimedia
>time? When was this, and what was the thought process?
>
>(the answer is almost certainly "Brion or Jimbo, early 2001, it's the
>obvious choice", but I'm just curious as to details.)

Maybe Lee in 2002? Here's what I dug up.


https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rSVN633

This revision by Lee from July 10, 2002 added the ability for users to
specify a time zone offset in hours. It also added three messages:
timezonetext, localtime, and timezoneoffset.

Of particular note, the text for the timezonetext key reads:

Enter number of hours your local time differs from server (U.S.
Pacific) time. For example, for U.S. East coast, enter "3".



https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rSVN635

This revision (same author and day) reiterates that the server time is
"U.S. Pacific" when establishing the dellogpagetext and uploadlogpagetext
messages.



https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rSVN723

This revision by Brion from August 28, 2002 adds a first draft of
Esperanto translations. I believe (I don't read and write Esperanto) that
the uploadlogpagetext and dellogpagetext messages say that the server time
is UTC. However, the timezonetext message appears to say that the server
time is UTC-8 and that if you want to use Central European Time, you need
to specify an offset of 9 hours.



https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rSVN744

This revision by Lee from September 5, 2002 changes the timezonetext,
uploadlogpagetext, and dellogpagetext messages to read "UTC" instead of
"U.S. Pacific".



https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rSVN773

This revision by Brion from September 18, 2002 introduces the
$wgLocaltimezone configuration variable. I've updated
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgLocaltimezone to note this.


Looking at early English Wikipedia contributions,
 is the oldest edit I
can find of a signed comment that includes a time zone: "05:42 Jul 21,
2002 (PDT)". There are many older signatures, to be sure, and some of
them in early 2002 include a date, but without a time zone. This signature
seems to confirm that the time zone was U.S. Pacific time in 2002.

 
MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikitech-l] historical trivia: who first picked UTC as Wikimedia time, when and why?

[Tim Starling]

UseMod had a concept of "server time", and early versions of the main
page stated that server time was US Pacific Time. The date on the main
page was heroically updated manually by Malcolm Farmer, for example:



This archived RecentChanges gives you an idea of what the interface
looked like, the timezone is not specified ($ScriptTZ was not set) but
it is presumably all Pacific Time:



UseMod stored dates in UNIX time (integer since epoch), which is
implicitly UTC, but converted them to server time for display.

Magnus's Wikipedia script also stored dates in UTC format, and
defaulted to server time for display. It had a user preference called
"hourDiff" which was relative to server time. For example in
special_recentchangeslayout.php:

  $adjusted_time_sc = tsc ( $s->cur_timestamp ) + 3600 *
$user->options["hourDiff"];
  $day = date ( "l, F d, Y" , $adjusted_time_sc);
  $time = date ( "H:i" , $adjusted_time_sc ) ;

tsc() converts the database time to UNIX time.

There were actually no references to UTC or GMT in the code base, and
it never calls gmdate() . So it seems Magnus more or less carried on
the same UI time zone policy as UseMod. If it was installed on the
same server as UseMod, then it presumably would have displayed Pacific
Time.

On the other hand, the early version of phase3 I have here does make
references to UTC, for example:

"timezonetext"  => "Enter number of hours your local time differs
from server time (UTC).",

Instead of converting database dates to server time, phase3's
Language::date() and Language::time() just takes substrings of the
database date:

if( $wgAmericanDates ) {
  $d = $this->getMonthAbbreviation( substr( $ts, 4, 2 ) ) .
" " . (0 + substr( $ts, 6, 2 )) . ", " .
substr( $ts, 0, 4 );
} else {
  $d = (0 + substr( $ts, 6, 2 )) . " " .
$this->getMonthAbbreviation( substr( $ts, 4, 2 ) ) . " " .
substr( $ts, 0, 4 );
}

So for the elevation of UTC as a standard in the UI, I think we can
safely credit Lee Daniel Crocker.

-- Tim Starling

On 10/05/16 02:15, Brion Vibber wrote:
> In 2001 when Magnus was writing the initial attempt at a custom wiki engine
> in PHP backed by MySQL, he chose to use the TIMESTAMP column type.
> 
> TIMESTAMPs in MySQL 3 were automatically filled out by the server at INSERT
> time, normalized to UTC, and exposed in the 14-digit MMDDHHMMSS format
> we still know and love today.
> 
> The first TIMESTAMP column in a row also got automatically updated when you
> changed something in a row, so we ended up switching them from TIMESTAMP
> type to text strings and just filled out the initial values on the PHP
> side. We could have used DATETIME but that would have been a slightly
> harder transition at the time, and would have introduced the fun of the
> server settings trying to give you local time half the time...
> 
> -- brion
> 
> On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 1:39 AM, David Gerard  wrote:
> 
>> Question about obscure historical detail: Who picked UTC as Wikimedia
>> time? When was this, and what was the thought process?
>>
>> (the answer is almost certainly "Brion or Jimbo, early 2001, it's the
>> obvious choice", but I'm just curious as to details.)
>>
>>
>> - d.
>>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] historical trivia: who first picked UTC as Wikimedia time, when and why?

[Brion Vibber]

In 2001 when Magnus was writing the initial attempt at a custom wiki engine
in PHP backed by MySQL, he chose to use the TIMESTAMP column type.

TIMESTAMPs in MySQL 3 were automatically filled out by the server at INSERT
time, normalized to UTC, and exposed in the 14-digit MMDDHHMMSS format
we still know and love today.

The first TIMESTAMP column in a row also got automatically updated when you
changed something in a row, so we ended up switching them from TIMESTAMP
type to text strings and just filled out the initial values on the PHP
side. We could have used DATETIME but that would have been a slightly
harder transition at the time, and would have introduced the fun of the
server settings trying to give you local time half the time...

-- brion

On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 1:39 AM, David Gerard  wrote:

> Question about obscure historical detail: Who picked UTC as Wikimedia
> time? When was this, and what was the thought process?
>
> (the answer is almost certainly "Brion or Jimbo, early 2001, it's the
> obvious choice", but I'm just curious as to details.)
>
>
> - d.
>
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[Wikitech-l] historical trivia: who first picked UTC as Wikimedia time, when and why?

[David Gerard]

Question about obscure historical detail: Who picked UTC as Wikimedia
time? When was this, and what was the thought process?

(the answer is almost certainly "Brion or Jimbo, early 2001, it's the
obvious choice", but I'm just curious as to details.)


- d.

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