Manual:Timestamp

The format of timestamps used in MediaWiki URLs and in some of the MediaWiki database fields is yyyymmddhhmmss. For example, the timestamp for August 9th, 2010 00:30:06 UTC is 20100809003006. The timezone for these timestamps is UTC.

MediaWiki's  function provides a convenient way to convert from timestamps in common formats to the MediaWiki timestamp format and vice versa. Read Manual:wfTimestamp for more details.

is a convenience function that returns a MediaWiki timestamp for the present time.