Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback

Tool for inserting and (re-)formatting dates

1
Summary by Elitre (WMF)

Filed as https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T142089 (mostly in case they want to provide it for third parties, though).

197.218.80.136 (talkcontribs)

Problem statement:

It is not currently possible to insert or format dates using VisualEditor without writing them manually or using a template. This is a common tool in most text-editors for the past decade, e.g. Notepad, MS-DOS Editor.

Use Case:

  1. As an editor, when writing a document about present, past or conceivably future events one needs to insert a date.
  2. As an editor, when writing a document one may need to reformat the inserted date (e.g. change from ISO 2010/01/01 to 01 January 2010)
  3. As an editor, when writing a reference, often the current date is entered as the retrieval date because websites sometimes go down, and it is useful to have a reference point.

Suggestions:

  • Datetime tool - This would be a standard dialog to choose a date, and its format, see Libreoffice
  • A simple button that inserts text containing the current client date using javascript (and ISO standard date), the user can later change this.
  • Tool that inserts and formats the <time> tag - see (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element/time).