Manual:Date formatting

Each user can choose in his preferences the date and time format used by MediaWiki when generating date and/or time, in page history, recent changes, etc.

This date format does not work for links in wiki text. For this, see Manual:Dynamic dates.

The formats vary with the user's language. Options are made available for a language if listed in the $datePreferences array of its messages file. The ID used in the list needs to be named in the  array (whether the general one or the override in the   file in question) and defined there with the appropriate   format; otherwise it will be ignored.

The options are then listed in Special:Preferences accordingly to the definitions, in the same order. They use January 15, 2001 as example. For English they are:
 * default
 * mdy (16:12, January 15, 2001)
 * dmy (16:12, 15 January 2001)
 * ymd (16:12, 2001 January 15)
 * numerical yyyy-mm-dd (like ISO 8601, but without calendar conversions, and without implying that it is the date according to the Gregorian calendar)