Topic on Talk:Talk pages project

Timestamping messages

4
Summary by Jdforrester (WMF)

Off-topic.

Ottawahitech (talkcontribs)

Why are posts timestamped with ambiguous timestamps such as "yesterday" and a "a month ago" and not with what wikipedians are accustomed to, for example "19:02, 11 May 2020" ?

(edit summary: I don't know if this is the correct place to ask such questions?)

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

You're talking about this interface (which is Flow)? They did some user research, and relative time stamps are less likely to be misunderstood. (It makes sense. I've replied to a "11 May" message on wiki, and only later noticed that it was from 11 May in a different year.) The Talk pages project itself won't change the format of the date stamp.

Thiemo Kreuz (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

Sorry, but I have to disagree. Look at older posts like this one. Almost everything is marked as being written "4 months ago", like it was all written the same second, by the same person, or a spam bot, or a database field was accidentally destroyed. I find this hilarious. Was a response written a minute later? A day? A week? I can't tell. Yes, I know I can hover to get a timestamp, but this is not helpful. It especially doesn't allow me to compare the timestamps of multiple posts, as I can only see 1 at a time.

Sorry for picking this up, as it is indeed unrelated to what your team currently does. But I feel it's worth mentioning to avoid repeating the same mistake.

Smile4ever (talkcontribs)

I agree with Thiemo Kreuz. The same day it might be helpful to see "2 minutes" ago, but the next day it already becomes troublesome to know the time difference between the replies because it says "yesterday" and not the actual date and time.