Manual talk:Dynamic dates

From mediawiki.org
Latest comment: 10 years ago by 63.251.123.2 in topic Bugzilla comment Link fix
The following discussion has been transferred from Meta-Wiki.
Any user names refer to users of that site, who are not necessarily users of MediaWiki.org (even if they share the same username).

BC assumes quite a bit. Recommend BCE and CE. Following the DTD thread did I read Lunar Calendars are more accurate? That's not quite right. - Sparky

Why only linked dates?[edit]

Why does this only work on linked dates? Shouldn't it work on all dates, except for those inside <nowiki> tags? — Omegatron 04:26, 18 January 2006 (UTC)Reply

Parsing free-form text for dates is expensive and easy to get wrong (e.g. a title or phrase looks like a date, or the date is within a quotation and shouldn't be rewritten).
I was initially surprised that dynamic dates was implemented using links instead of a {{date}} template, but templates are harder to use, and the date pages like w:1942 are somewhat cool. - skierpage 23:49, 25 March 2006 (UTC)Reply
What phrases would look like dates but aren't actually dates? If any such special cases exist, why can't they just be put in nowiki tags, as I said? (Quotations would also get nowiki tags.) — Omegatron 20:22, 24 April 2006 (UTC)Reply
The feature requires linking of dates because that was the recommendation of the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style at the time it was written. See also w:Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/archive7. -- Tim Starling 07:37, 25 April 2006 (UTC)Reply
Can it be updated? Current style says "unless there is a special relevance of the date link, there is no need to link it". False positives can easily be handled with <nowiki> tags. — Omegatron 00:11, 4 May 2006 (UTC)Reply
And, notably, the feature pre-dates the existance of templates, IIRC.
James F. (talk) 12:38, 25 April 2006 (UTC)Reply
Yes, I think it does. — Omegatron 00:11, 4 May 2006 (UTC)Reply

Lists of dates can be corrupted[edit]

On w:Old Style and New Style dates, a list of dates was be corrupted by the Dynamic dates feature. The list that triggered the issue was:

 1 January 1873, 1 January 1896 and 1 January 1912

When I had my preferences set to the U.S. standard format (Month Day, Year), the list was rendered as:

 January 1, January 1, 1873, 1896 and January 1, 1912

It seems that the date finding logic prefers to match "1873, 1 January" rather than matching both "1 January 1873" and "1 January 1896".

The text above is all copied here without links, to prevent the Dynamic date code from corrupting the examples here. Each day of the year (1 January) and the year numbers (1873, 1896 and 1912) were links on the original page.

As a workaround (and to be generally cleaner), I am going to remove the redundant links to the day, but I suspect it occurs on other pages (or will at some future time). Should this be reported as a MediaWiki bug?

w:User:BlckKnght 11:55, 23 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

Dynamic Dates preferences corrupted[edit]

Currently, users cannot set their preferences to show the dynamic dates as they wish. They reset to "No preferences" and show the ISO formatting. There is a discussion on the en-wp's village pump about this error. Ryulong 05:51, 9 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

Bugzilla comment Link fix[edit]

The bug entry that removed this feature is: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/29472 . It links to a mailing list post, which doesn't work anymore because the archives got re-indexed. I think the correct link is: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-June/053988.html pointing to "[Wikitech-l] Bug Triage and mini-sprint for the weekend" by Chad <innocentkiller at gmail> on Mon Jun 20 13:46:16 UTC 2011. Since I can't edit the bugzilla entry without an account, I thought I'd dump the corrected link here. (Also, the original message in that thread links to a discussion at Commons, through a URL shortener, that no longer works. I think the correct link there is: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Archive/2011/06#wgUseDynamicDates ) Hope this helps! -- 63.251.123.2 23:02, 2 December 2013 (UTC)Reply