thiemowmde added subscribers: Lydia_Pintscher, aude.
thiemowmde added a comment.
Discussed with @Lydia_Pintscher this morning.
- "1 February 2" is confusing. Is it the year 1 or 2?
- "February 2" is confusing. Is this February the 2nd?
- "1 February 99" can be confused with the year 1999.
- Extending the format to "1 February 2 AC" does not help much, in my opinion.
This adds confusion because now I need to know what "AC" means and why it is
there. It does not really solve the confusion which number is the year. You
need to know that "2 AC" is meant to be the year, but is this really always the
case, in all languages?
- English Wikipedia sometimes tries to solve this problem with "1 February AC
2".
- The problem is less prominent in German, because we already format this as
"1. Februar 2".
- In tables this is usually not a problem, because you compare rows and
understand where the year is in "28 March 1700" and "1 February 2" and so on.
- In text this is usually solved by writing "year 2".
- `{{#time:Y|0002-02-01}}` both **requires** the input to be padded with zeros
(otherwise it will wrongly interpret the years 0 to 69 as 2000 to 2069 and 70
to 99 as 1970 to 1999) and pads the output with zeros. We could argue that we
want to be consistent with that.
- When a user combines `{{#time:Y|{{#property:…}}}}` this will just work fine
in most cases, even if it's not intended to be used like this. If the property
parser function outputs "1 February 1999", `{{#time:Y|1 February 1999}}`
outputs "1999". But `{{#time:Y|1 February 99}}` outputs "1999" and `{{#time:Y|1
February 2}}`outputs "2002". All this confusion can totally be avoided by
adding leading zeros.
- A year alone should never be padded with zeros. We think that "0002" will
cause more confusion and friction than it is helpful.
- A possible way forward is to start working on the possibility to specify a
date format along with the `{{#property:…}}` parser function. Or make it
possible to combine `{{#time:…|{{#property:…}}}}` without the issue described
above. This allows for individual case-by-case solutions when they are needed.
- Note that our current way of formatting years as straight numbers with no
leading zeros is not backed by an existing `{{#time:…}}` format string. Only
"y" and "Y" exist, both always output the year with a fixed length of 2 or 4
characters. So the year 2 becomes "02" or "0002", but there is no way to output
"2". This may need a new format string.
TASK DETAIL
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T104750
EMAIL PREFERENCES
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/
To: thiemowmde
Cc: aude, Lydia_Pintscher, Addshore, daniel, gerritbot, thiemowmde, Nikki,
Aklapper, Wikidata-bugs, Mbch331
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