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. They are defined in the $datePreferences array in the messages files which contains a list of IDs of date formatting options.

The options are 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)