On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Delirium <[email protected]> wrote: > Skyring wrote: >> There's very little debate on which date format should be used for >> articles on U.S. or UK subjects, but for articles on (say) France or >> Brazil, there is a push to use U.S. date format, despite both of those >> nations using International format. > There's no such push at all, and it's a bit disingenuous to claim so, as > the only people making a "push" to convert date formats from one to > another are those in favor of a day-month-year universal standard. The > long-respected status quo is that if an article is on a subject that > isn't strongly tied to a particular dialect of English, then it uses > whatever the original author used, including for spellings, date > formats, etc. Changing from one to another is discouraged, as it's a > noise edit, and rather impolite to change one correct English dialect to > another, especially as there are much more important things to work on.
With respect, you are pushing U.S. date format on nations that don't use it. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Brazil as an example. Finding the date formats for various nations and cultures is easy: http://www.obout.com/calendar/tutorial_dateformat2.aspx is one of many online tools. Just because six or seven years ago some nerdy American wrote the first stub of an article using formats he was used to, never imagining that Wikipedia would grow to become a respected international project, is no reason to carry over inappropriate formats. I can't see any reason to stick with whatever the original author used when there is a clear reason for change following our established practice of using local units of measurement and currency. You wouldn't want to use miles and pounds and U.S. dollars for an article on France, would you? Would you? -- Peter in Canberra _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
