User:Jc3s5h/Proposal on YYYY-MM-DD numerical dates

A campaign exists to remove "Wikipedia talk:Mosnum/proposal on YYYY-MM-DD numerical dates" and I am preserving it here because it indicates the quantity of debate that exist around this topic. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:00, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

This is a failed proposal.

Consensus for its implementation was not established within a reasonable period of time. If you want to revive discussion, please use the talk page or initiate a thread at the village pump.

Proposal: to amend WP:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) as follows:

Present text: YYYY-MM-DD style dates (1976-05-31) are uncommon in English prose, and should not be used within sentences.

Proposed text: YYYY-MM-DD style dates (1976-05-31) are uncommon in English prose, and should not be used in sentences or footnotes.

-- Alarics (talk) 18:44, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Support[edit]

Support (as proposer). YYYY-MM-DD has become prevalent in citation footnotes largely as an accidental by-product of the former date autoformatting policy, now abandoned. The assumption was that readers would not actually see the date in that form. YYYY-MM-DD numerical dates were designed for computers to read; we are writing for humans, not machines. It looks jarring, and some people find it ambiguous. Along with other wording in MOSNUM which already deprecates other kinds of numerical dates as ambiguous, the intention of this change is to make clear that months should be written out as a word, giving the date in whichever order has been adopted as the norm for the article in question. -- Alarics (talk) 18:54, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Support per nom; Alarics mentions all the points that I had myself stated elsewhere --Redrose64 (talk) 19:07, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Support - I started seeing this in footnotes when I disabled my autoformatting prior to its deprecation. It has always looked odd, and ambigious, and I always assumed it was a by-product of autoformatting as Alarics has said. This accidental use is now being cited by some editors as precedence, but I believe this is accidental, and not with consensus.—MDCollins (talk) 19:40, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Support: YYYY-MM-DD is unfamiliar and ambiguous to most non-technical readers, and makes it hard for them to style their own footnotes in a way that's reasonably compatible with the format of existing footnotes. (Not everyone uses citation templates.) A written-out or abbreviated month is also much more apparent to most eyes, when judging the proximity of an account to the event, or the freshness of a link. —— Shakescene (talk) 20:15, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Support. I am one of those who finds YYYY-MM-DD ambiguous. My natural reaction is to assume that dates come before months, so if the DD is 12 or less I will generally read it as a month. My first reading of 2009-05-04 is 5 April, not 4 May. So when Eubulides says it's unambiguous in practice, I must dispute this. It may be unambiguous in theory, but this is irrelevant to most of our readers, who are unlikely to know the theory by which it is unambiguous. This is a systematic bias issue: a relatively large proportion of Wikipedians are technophiles and YYYY-MM-DD is, in most of the English-speaking world, a technophile's format. Better, surely to use an unambiguous and unmistakeable format such as 4 May 2009 (abbreviating other months as appropriate). Pfainuk talk 20:19, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Support. Dates in the YYYY-MM-DD format are not commonly used in good writing generally. I also agree with the points made by the editors who have commented above. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 20:32, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Support — per all above reasons & all reasons for eliminating YYYY-MM-DD per this discussion. 「ɠu¹ɖяy」¤ • ¢ 20:47, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Support There is tremendous confusion about whether ISO 8601 applies to the YYYY-MM-DD format. Many editors who espouse this format say that is IS0 8601 but have never read that standard. The format should be totally expunged from Wikipedia except in articles that discuss that format unless a Wikipedia POLICY is adopted which formally applies the standard to the format.
Anyone who thinks it does not matter if the standard applies should go read the standard before commenting. --Jc3s5h (talk) 21:29, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
- Much of that confusion is blather and nonsense. I have a copy of ISO 8601:1988 right in front of me as I write this, and CCYY-MM-DD is explicitly documented in §5.2.1.1 of the standard. Uncle G (talk) 03:09, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
  - Of course ISO 8601:2004 (the current version) uses the YYYY-MM-DD format. The question is, when you find a date written in the YYYY-MM-DD format, was the author governing himself/herself by ISO 8601. That is where the confusion lies. --Jc3s5h (talk) 03:20, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
    - No. That's just blather and nonsense, as I said. There's no actual confusion. Whether one writes 2009-09-30 because one knows ISO 8601 or because one was told to by little green mice from Venus, there is no actual confusion as to what the date is. It's CCYY-MM-DD either way, per the international standard or per the mice. Uncle G (talk) 03:37, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
      - No one learned about the format from little green mice from Venus; most learned about it by imitating dates they saw in that format. The problem is, they don't know what to do if they try to extend the format to dates they've never seen before in that format. And on Wikipedia, there is no one to tell them how to extend the format, because we have not adopted ISO 8601. --Jc3s5h (talk) 03:58, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
        As I said, that's just blather and nonsense, and invention of confusion where none in fact exists. If one is writing CCYY-MM-DD, then there's nothing to know about "extending the format to dates they've never seen before". One knows what digit of the date to put where, irrespective of what date one is writing. Uncle G (talk) 04:16, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
        So just how is someone who learned the format through imitation, and never saw a date outside the 19th and 20th century in that format, supposed to write February 24, 1582 in the YYYY-MM-DD format? --Jc3s5h (talk) 04:21, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
        So just how often is a footnote going to cite a newspaper article before 1583, or an accessdate after 9999? Rich Farmbrough, 04:02, 1 October 2009 (UTC).
Support, per Alarics. I cringe when I see YYYY-MM-DD. Anathema to clear communication in my book, because the reader has to virtually stop and think about it to decipher it. Doesn't naturally flow. Kaiwhakahaere (talk) 21:37, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Strong support. YYYY-MM-DD is ugly and brings no benefits that cannot be met by "29 September 2009" or "September 29, 2009", as appropriate for the article. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 21:42, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Or even just "29 Sept 2009"/"Sept 29 2009"... 「ɠu¹ɖяy」¤ • ¢ 22:31, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Strong support. Because: (a) it is not reader-friendly (i.e., it is not how readers speak the date); (b) it is ambiguous to most readers and most inputters (most people I submit are unaware of ISO; and are also unaware that while some countries opt for DD-MM in certain numerical formats, they don't follow that order in this format); (c) there is evidence that I have referenced below of computers, data processing programs, and programmers using the YYYY-DD-MM format (futher evidence of ambiguity); (d) we have an alternative (writing out or abbreviating months) that avoids the ambiguity completely with little or no loss of space; (e) "popularity" of the format on wikipedia has been exaggerated by highly active bots (including SmackBot and YoBot) changing editors' inputs from non-YYYY-MM-DD formats to the YYYY-MM-DD format, despite that not being overtly allowed by MOS; (f) it is a distinctly minority format on the web (as evidenced by a google search of over 100 million formats of the same date--and even that search likely overstated the degree to which editors chose the format, as that search likely included Wikipedia articles that had been revised by bots) and almost never (well under 1% of the time) in news articles searchable on google news; and (g) using the same standard for text and footnotes results in standardization, which makes the article more readable and appealing and is an overarching general goal of MOS.--Epeefleche (talk) 01:05, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
That section is now archived, here. Olaf Davis (talk) 18:07, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
Support. Writing out the month removes all possible ambiguity. Yes, YYYY-MM-DD is an ISO standard, but I'm willing to bet most readers have never heard of it so there's still all sorts of potential for confusion. There's no reason not to use a completely unambiguous format when one is so easily available to us. BryanG (talk) 03:57, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
The thing is that these potentials for confusion do not, upon examination, turn out to actually exist. There's a fear of confusion, but no actual confusion to be fearful of. And as I said above, a lot of this is based upon blather and nonsense — stuff that is just pure invention and not actually true in fact. Like the nonsense claims that CCYY-MM-DD isn't an ISO 8601 date format (It is. The precise section of ISO 8601:1988 that specifies it is given above.) or that if one is writing CCYY-MM-DD there's some mysterious bogeyman that stops one from being able to, for example, work out how to write the year "1985" if one has only ever seen the year "2009" written in that format. Uncle G (talk) 04:16, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
You say "these potentials for confusion do not, upon examination, turn out to actually exist", but we have had a number of WP editors saying that they have, personally, actually been confused. Are you saying they are lying? And in any case, even some of us who do know what it means find that we have to stop and mentally "flip over" the date to work out what it is in terms the brain can understand, thus interrupting the thought process. It is therefore an obstacle to understanding. -- Alarics (talk) 06:55, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Support. Tired to unpack YYYY-MM-DD to Month Day, Year or Day Month Year inside my brain. I know, i'm stupider than the average human being. --KrebMarkt 09:46, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Strong supprt The sooner we get rid of that ambiguous row of numbers that is YYYY-MM-DD, the better. Debresser (talk) 10:02, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Support ISO is not a standard used by any common reference system. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 11:28, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Support YYYY-MM-DD is not familiar & there is no good reason to use it anywhere on Wikipedia (except hidden). JIMp_talk·cont 13:32, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Support - regardless of how "technical" refs are in comparison to article prose, the simple fact is that we are here to write an encyclopedia, one that is intended primarily for (this is pretty clearly implied by our charter) and used primarily by laypersons. The average layperson is not going to know that we use ISO 8601 (or even know what that is), nor are they going to be able to see "2004-07-28" and just know that we mean "July 28, 2004"/"28 July 2004" without stopping and thinking about it (and woe to the average nontechie whose first ISO date encounter is with a date like "1999-04-06"). 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000} 16:40, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Weak support. Abbreviated months would do the job quite fine, and we wouldn't have the strange inconsistency that dates without the day of the months are "September 2009" but those with it are "2009-09-30". (Another way to fix that would be using "2009-09" for the latter, but the hyphen in it looks dangerously similar to the dash in "2008–09", which is twenty-four months, not one.) ___A. di M. 17:45, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Support All-numeric dates are not used by professional publications because they are inherently ambiguous because—nothwithstanding *international standards*—the real world has its own practices and those practices vary from English-speaking country to English-speaking country. Also, written-out months are easier to understand than counting on one’s finger as to what month “5” equals. That’s why in Encyclopedia Britannica (found internationally throughout the world), Scientific American, and pretty much any English-language newspaper distributed throughout the international community, you will never find the ugly abomination “2009-11-09” in body text; the expressions “November 9, 2009” and “9 November 2009” are much more natural and fluid to read and don’t distract as one tries to parse through the all-numeric expression. Greg L (talk) 21:15, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Support. Why would anyone want to read "1976-12-31" when they can read "31 Dec 1976" or "Dec 31, 1976"? (I am of course supporting the use of abbreviated month names only when space restrictions apply—e.g. in footnotes as per the wording of the RfC) The YYYY-MM-DD format is very useful behind the scenes (e.g. for imposing a sort order in tables), but shouldn't be part of the text of a professional publication. HWV258 22:01, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
There's an endless battle of which to use. 2009-09-30 is geographically neutral and everyone can understand it, unlike the other two. However, you can currently use whichever you choose. There's no need to say that people can't write them a certain way that's absolutely fine. If you prefer another format, you can still use that format. hmwith☮ 22:39, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
We are after professionalism, consistency and ease-of-use. Main body text copes easily with DD MMM versus MMM DD issues (trust me, I know something about that now). In terms of ease-of-use, "Aug" and "August" are much easier to understand than "08". You will not convince me that "2009-09-30" is easier to understand than "30 September 2009" or "30 Sep 2009" (especially when read at speed). HWV258 23:15, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Support. It has been consensus for years that each article should pick one date style and stick with it. Obviously that applies to footnotes as well, for the same reason we would not use American spelling in prose and British spelling in footnotes, or use en dashes in prose and em dashes in footnotes. Footnotes are part of the article, the MOS applies to them too, and there is no argument below for why footnotes should use a different date style.
Most of the oppose arguments below are invalid because they are defending the use of YYYY-MM-DD in general, which is not what we are debating! It is already near-unanimous consensus that we do not use YYYY-MM-DD, and if someone wants that to change, they can start up a separate discussion for why it should be allowed. That discussion would get plenty of attention, but this isn't it. This discussion is whether footnotes should expressly use a different style than the rest of the article. Any argument that doesn't address that point is irrelevant. The point of this discussion is whether the MOS should be internally consistent (use one date format throughout the article, don't use YYYY-MM-DD in one part of the article, therefore don't use YYYY-MM-DD in the rest of the article).
Since we're debating the format anyway, let me add: Yes, YYYY-MM-DD is unambiguous. So are normal dates! What, dare I ask, is "ambiguous" about "September 30, 2009" or "30 September 2009"? They are completely unambiguous. If normal dates were ambiguous, if there was any problem with normal dates, they would've been supplanted in normal writing. They have not been. Furthermore, YYYY-MM-DD is not unambiguous to people who have never seen it before. Yes, it's straightforward once you know what it is, but most of our readers are not familiar with it because it's extremely uncommon in literature. This is the same problem we had with binary units — yes, it's a nice format, and it's unambiguous once you know what it is, but we should use the language that our readers are familiar with because we're writing this for them. Our mission is not to spread new ideas! Our mission is to reflect the ideas of all published academics, and they use normal, English-language dates. So that's what we do. We use American English and international English where appropriate, because that's what other writers do, but we format our articles consistently, because that's what other writers do.
The idea that we might someday have automatic date formatting is irrelevant as well. Right now, we don't. So that's the situation we need to deal with. The fact that some writers use YYYY-MM-DD doesn't particularly matter since most don't. The fact that some authors fight over American vs. British style is irrelevant because passing this proposal won't increase it and denying this proposal won't stop it. The idea that footnotes are "technical" is just meaningless; footnotes are for our readers and therefore accessibility to our readers is equally important. The idea that YYYY-MM-DD is an "international standard" is moot because the English language is an international standard with a far, far greater footprint. The idea that we should use YYYY-MM-DD for the benefit of non-English speakers is ridiculous; our entire encyclopedia is next to useless to non-English speakers without a translator which would have no problem with dates. The idea that it's commonly used is moot; normal dates are just as commonly used, and most of the existing cases are artifacts of the date-delinking event. The idea that this is "cruft" or "creep" doesn't really fly since this makes things less complicated (right now editors are getting the false impression that YYYY-MM-DD is somehow encouraged or required, which of course it's not). Obviously there's always IAR, we don't have to specify it every time.
Again, I don't see any argument for using a different style guide for footnotes. If YYYY-MM-DD is better, we should use that everywhere. If it's worse, we shouldn't use it anywhere. There is no logical reason why they would be better than normal dates when used in footnotes and worse than normal dates when used in prose. So this proposal should, of course, be passed. —Noisalt (talk) 00:15, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Noisalt makes some very good points here, for those who read the whole thing. I might even think about changing my vote, but I need to think about it some more first. #dateformat is probably the closest thing we're goijng to get to automatic date formatting. UncleDouggie (talk) 13:19, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Programmers like yyyy-mm-dd because it's easy to work with and they get the logic behind it. Americans can at least tolerate it because the month comes before the day as in mm/dd/yyyy. For the rest of the world, it's a mind bending contortion just as Americans can't mentally handle dd/mm/yyyy. I get it and we should be sensitive to the whole world. I'm still a bit torn because I personally like seeing the year first in footnotes as I explained in my oppose argument. A good compromise would be to use the magic word #dateformat with a default format according to the topic of the article just as we already do for explicit dates in prose. In addition, I'd like to see two date preferences. One would convert #dateformat dates to a user specified format for prose and the other would support a different format for footnotes. In this way, I can have my preferred yyyy-mm-dd for footnotes without impacting what I see for prose or what anyone else sees for footnotes. UncleDouggie (talk) 00:58, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Conditional support: okay, Noisalt's convinced me to get off the fence here. but if the point of the proposed change is to make the date format used in footnotes consistent with the date format used in the body of the article, that needs to be stated way more explicity than the currently proposed wording. Sssoul (talk) 06:27, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Fair point. Would a re-work of the proposal along the following lines be an improvement? It builds on your thought, as well as those of Richard F in the comments below, and various other commentators who call for uniformity.
"All-numerical dates (e.g., 2003-02-01) should not be used in text or footnotes. Instead, the month should be spelled out or abbreviated. That will result in date formats that are less ambiguous, with little or no loss of space. A consistent date format should be used in an article’s text and footnotes.”--Epeefleche (talk) 07:42, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
well ... that's somewhat more explicit, but i don't support abbreviating month names in the body of articles. thanks to Noisalt's sound reasoning, i'd support spelling out month names in full in footnotes/references (which are not a limited-space situation), to maintain consistency with the dates in the articles they accompany. so what i'd support would be more like "All-numeric dates (e.g., 2003-02-01 or 04/05/2006) should not be used in text or footnotes; month names should be spelled out in full, and a consistent date format should be used in an article's text and footnotes." Sssoul (talk) 08:05, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Support. For normal human beings, the month should be spelt out. It is unacceptable when month and day can be confused. Tony (talk) 16:10, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Support. I don't see how the ISO standards really matter here... yes, it is a "technically" unambigous format, but really, a lot of people have and will get the day and month confused. Most people don't know about that ISO standard. Heck, I think that a lot of people don't really even know about the ISO, even if they may have heard of it. So, I think that this is a good proposal because: It is clearer to the less technically-inclined, it is more readable even to the more technically-inclined, and Wikipedia can be stricter than other standard and laws (just look at WP:NFCC). I think that this discussion should focus more on the format itself rather than whether or not it is "standard". It's confusing. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 21:45, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Support - an easily mis-interpreted international standard is worse than useless. And if every use of the format is accompanied by an explanation thereof (how likely?), what's the point? Just write out the month name, long form or abbreviated. Month names are one of the first thing English learners are taught, and the abbreviations are a lot easier to interpret (and obviously require interpretation - not giving false sense of lack of ambiguity) than YYYY-MM-DD. Rd232 ^talk 18:01, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Support per Noisalt. ~Itzjustdrama ^{? C} 00:53, 5 October 2009 (UTC)
Support - Numerical dates are ambiguous and I know that I avoid them when editing. -- Atama頭 00:25, 8 October 2009 (UTC)
Support Harder to read in footnotes, too. Diderot's dreams (talk) 02:10, 8 October 2009 (UTC)
Support switch from neutral. The 'uniformisation' and maintenance job is important, but it is too big to be done manually to 3 million articles; bots cannot distinguish when/whether to change a date format in cases where they are not all uniform. Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 12:38, 16 October 2009 (UTC)
Actually that is an excellent point. When Oct or October is hit, the bot will know for sure that it is a month. I'll strike out my oppose and move here with support. --HappyInGeneral (talk) 17:35, 16 October 2009 (UTC)
Weak support switch from oppose, per my comment above. --HappyInGeneral (talk) 17:40, 16 October 2009 (UTC)
Strong support. Many people opposing are saying that it's unambiguous: I have repeatedly confused YYYY-MM-DD for YYYY-DD-MM since my dialect uses DD/MM and not MM/DD. Knowing now YYYY-MM-DD is a recognised standard and YYYY-DD-MM is not lessens the problem, but even now I make mistakes based on years of conditioning that the day comes before the month. Before I realised this and had to work things out by first principles, it was even more confusing. Olaf Davis (talk) 18:00, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
Additionally, I personally find 2009-10-18 rather ugly compared to 18 October 2009, but that's less of a concern. And I accidentally typed that as 2009-18-10 the first time around, damn it! Olaf Davis (talk) 18:05, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
Support, because YYYY-MM-DD is 1. ugly and 2. opaque. Ericoides (talk) 07:01, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
Support The minor advantages of YYYY-MM-DD being slightly more compact and more easily sorted are not relevant to footnotes. I can read and comprehend 31 October 2009 with far less effort than 2009-10-31, and I would prefer to see a consistent format applied throughout any article. The English language has given us beautiful names for months and I'd rather not see those reduced to soulless digits without good cause. --RexxS (talk) 18:38, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Oppose[edit]

Oppose. The style guidelines should not prohibit what is probably the most-commonly style used in Wikipedia footnotes.
The use of yyyy-mm-dd dates is standard in some citation styles off-Wikipedia as well, e.g., the ISO 690-2 standard for citation format specifies it.

The yyyy-mm-dd style is in common use off Wikipedia; for some recent examples, please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) #Real world often uses yyyy-mm-dd in citations.

The style is not ambiguous in practice (unlike mm/dd/yyyy for which there is agreement that there is ambiguity).

The main reason given for banning the style is that it is "jarring", which is another way to say WP:IDONTLIKEIT. This is not at all sufficient to prohibit a widely used, clear, and concise format.
Eubulides (talk) 19:50, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Ambiguity. Actually, the style is most emphatically ambiguous in practice -- if the inputting editor or the reader has never heard of ISO, is aware that some places use a DD/MM format in dates, and is unaware that there is no YYYY-DD-MM style.
As examples of Wikipedia editors confused by the ambiguity of the YYYY-MM-DD style, who have input what appear to be dates in the YYYY-DD-MM style (I am assuming of course that they were not dyslexic), we have [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], and [6]. N.B.: Since I pointed out these errors, users have deleted or corrected the errors, so you will have to look back in the history to see my point.

Note: these are examples where our fix-it bots have not yet gotten around to "fixing" the entry. While our bots will no doubt eventually fix the above references where the inputter was confused, that won’t resolve the ambiguity problem that plagues the YYYY-MM-DD format. Because: (a) the bot will not know that there is an error unless the month is greater than 12; and (b) readers will of course be faced with the same ambiguity that plagued the inputter of those dates--and that is something that bots can’t fix.
This ambiguity does not, of course, affect date formats that spell out or abbreviate the month.--Epeefleche (talk) 04:05, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
The previous comment is based on faulty reasoning. It argues that, because 6 pages contain typos in the yyyy-mm-dd format, the format should be banned. By the same reasoning, because (according to Google) there are currently about 1030 pages on English Wikipedia that contain the typo "29 February 2009", the "dd Month yyyy" format should be banned as well. Such an argument is silly, of course. The mere existence of typographical errors in the use of a format does not mean that the format is significantly more ambiguous than its alternatives. Eubulides (talk) 07:22, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

Sorry if I was misleading. The six were just a handful of examples I grabbed; they are clearly not the extent of the problem. I'm happy to supply more if you like. As to your example, Google must be looking at old cached pages, because our bots seem to have the "29 February 2009" problem down to 15 instances at the moment. More to the point, the issue her IHMO, however, is that we have two methods -- one (spelling out the month) rids us of the problem of ambiguity; the other (representing the months numerically) introduces the ambiguity problem needlessly. If there were a way to without cost avoid the "29 February 2009" error as well, I would of course back that also.

I note with great interest btw that in the short time since I pointed to the above example User:Rjwilmsi has already made a fix to the first date, a sign at how efficient our fixer-uppers are, and how even searcing out all such instances that exist today don't reflect the true level of confusion of the inputting editors, as fixer bots have already "fixed" unknown numbers of such errors. Similarly, in my second example above, User Eubulides' solution where the date made no sense has been to delete the entire citation (and he has done us the service of putting the other dates into YYYY-MM-DD format).--Epeefleche (talk) 08:46, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Here's a question, Eubulides: which is better for blind users, 2009-06-08 or 8 June 2009? —Noisalt (talk) 18:01, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. Eub mentions a few good points, but there's another benefit, in that it prevents an outcropping of "how do we format the dates" (Day Month, Month Day) crap that affects the article body. No reason I can see for changing besides arbitrariness. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs^(talk) 21:08, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. Footnotes are not prose, and to lump them together is misleading. Footnotes are a technical part of an article, and a technical date format such as YYYY-MM-DD is entirely appropriate for such a purpose (especially in the accessdate field of citation templates). It also has the advantage of being unambiguous and language independent. Any attempt to legislate against the use of a widely used international standard format is bizarre in the least and, as with much of what goes on at MOSNUM, this seems very much a case of "I don't like it, so everyone else should be banned from doing it". _wjemather ^bigissue 21:20, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose I don't personally like this format, but telling editors that they're not allowed to use it is dramatically WP:CREEPier than I'm willing to accept, especially since it is currently used in literally thousands of articles. (Quick demonstration: Search on "2009-08-", which will give you results for any reference to any day last month using this format. There are 25,000 articles in that list. The reverse ("-08-2009"), which finds anything using date-first, all-numeric format last month plus anything using a month-first date that involved the 8th of the month anytime this year, gives you just 254 hits. That's two orders of magnitude in difference, folks, and the only possible interpreation is "in practice, editors have a strong consensus to use this format".
Furthermore, it has significant advantages over the xx/xx/yyyy formats, which may be either middle-endian or little-endian without warning: this big-endian date format never swaps the month and date around. Personally, my choice is to spell out the month, even when the date makes it perfectly clear, but I see no reason to impose my personal preference on anyone else. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:23, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
[Neutral comment on the above: Just to be clear, the other numerical date formats (xx-xx-YYYY) are, indeed, even more ambiguous, but they are already deprecated, so not relevant to the present proposal.] -- Alarics (talk) 21:54, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. Any alternative uses a format that is not used by some number of countries and therefore does not read correctly for many readers. So while not ambiguous, it is not natural for many readers. Using the number form of the ISO standard is clear and does not favor one form of English over another. The fact that this form is in fact neutral is one of its strongest points. This form also allows us to use one form in footnotes across all articles, while the text can vary based on other issues. The footnote would follow a common neutral form and why is that wrong? One could argue that any ambitiousness that exists in the ISO form is based on preconceived notions of how a date should be formatted and are not in fact truly indicative of an ambiguous form. Vegaswikian (talk) 21:32, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia has not adopted the ISO 8601 standard. THAT is the chief ambiguity, in my view. There is no standard, nor any English language convention, about the meaning of the YYYY-MM-DD format for old dates. --Jc3s5h (talk) 21:36, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. There is no need for a ban on an internationally recognised unambiguous format. −Woodstone (talk) 21:51, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
But it IS ambiguous. A less ambiguous format would be 29 Sept 2009. 「ɠu¹ɖяy」¤ • ¢ 02:35, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
... and it's not "internationally recognised" in that many are unfamiliar with it at all. JIMp_talk·cont 13:48, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose I think that Alarics and Vegas make good points. Avoids favoritism and is clear and widely used. Martin Raybourne (talk) 22:38, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose As long as we limit this format to references and limited instances in tables, I don't think we need to ban this outright. Dabomb87 (talk) 23:04, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. YYYY-MM-DD is clearly not ambiguous, since putting the year first only makes sense if you're putting the date components in major-to-minor order. I've seen YYYY-MM-DD used in international business correspondence for over 20 years, and everybody always knew how to interpret it. At some point in the hopefully not too distant future, WP software will come to its senses and autoformat dates automatically (i.e. without the bogus link syntax of the now-deprecated previous autoformatting) according to the locale that the browser is operating in. At that point, readers will not see the date in YYYY-MM-DD format unless they want to. But, YYYY-MM-DD will remain the most reliable and least error-prone format to have the dates in from which that autoformatting will take place. Wasted Time R (talk) 23:21, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
We do already have the {{#dateformat}} parser function, but certain extremely vocal parties loudly oppose any sort of user preference for date formatting. See WP:VPP#accessdate format for more. Anomie ⚔ 23:28, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the pointer, but that discussion like every other WP date style/formatting discussion gets too tangled to be worth wading through. I've done work in I18N/L10N software and the approach is pretty straightforward: dates along with many other locale/language-dependent entities are represented in an internationalized form, which is then be localized many different ways, and the user's configuration settings determine which localization they see. Why this is so difficult here in WP is a bit beyond me. Wasted Time R (talk) 23:57, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Computer software is rarely designed to deal with the date range covered by Wikipedia articles. Furthermore, while this or that piece of software might have some ability to tailor date presentation to the reader's locale, on the whole, no provision is made for one computer user to present a date to another computer user and have the date automatically presented in the reader's favorite format; only computer high priests can do that. --Jc3s5h (talk) 00:32, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Well, WP software is antiquated in many respects. There's no way to indicate the amount of text a given cite covers, there's no decent way to centralize text so that one instance may be used in many places (outside of limited cases like nav templates), there's no good way to conditionally factor text between a main article and a subarticle, there's no semantic tagging of content, there's no indexing within or across articles like real books have. All there is is raw text and raw text search. From the software perspective of building an enormous database representing human knowledge, it's a disaster. Wasted Time R (talk) 00:58, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Apparently I'm a high priest. Thanks! See my essay below for how I achieved such exalted status. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:35, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose Yet another attempt by the MOSNUM crowd to force their preferences on the whole encyclopedia. I for one cannot understand how anyone could honestly think it was "YYYY-DD-MM", and in general I find any longer date format in references to be a needless waste of space. Anomie ⚔ 23:28, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
So you don't find "29 Sept 2009" easier to recognized & still just as compact, while being less ambiguous than 2009-09-29? 「ɠu¹ɖяy」¤ • ¢ 23:33, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
No. Anomie ⚔ 00:43, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
"Needless waste of space"? Do you realise that "10 September 2009" (the longest possible date) is only 7 characters longer than "2009-09-10"? When are we ever that short of space in a footnote? -- Alarics (talk) 06:37, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes. That's 7 unnecessary characters (or 8 if you use US date order with the comma), an increase of 70% over the more compact format. Anomie ⚔ 11:55, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
How about "10 Sep 2009"? That's only one extra character. JIMp_talk·cont 13:48, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Nope, I still prefer 2009-09-10 for references. Also, BTW, that should probably be "10 Sep 2009" to prevent odd linebreaking. Anomie ⚔ 16:37, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Yep, I still prefer "10 Sep 2009" for references. Also, BTW, use &nbsp; to write out the non-breaking space. JIMp_talk·cont 20:58, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Was that supposed to be helpful? Anomie ⚔ 12:13, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Yes, especially the second bit; the first bit could only be called "helpful" in that it was supposed to show that arguments from what you or I prefer don't get far. JIMp_talk·cont 21:03, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
The difference here is that I stated my preference and various people asked questions to clarify it. Then you jumped in with your own personal preference as a non sequitur. As for your comment regarding use of HTML entities versus nowiki, I can only assume you trying to be annoying. So, I will leave you to your word games, have a nice day. Anomie ⚔ 22:36, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

I am not "the MOSNUM crowd". My first-ever visit there was on 10 August. -- Alarics (talk) 15:28, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
And yet your viewpoint and style of argument fits with theirs so well. I guess you're just precocious. Anomie ⚔ 16:37, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
What exactly would this MOSNUM crowd viewpoint and style of argument be? JIMp_talk·cont 21:00, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
I would like to know this also, especially since I didn't come to MOSNUM till about a 10 days ago. 「ɠu¹ɖяy」¤ • ¢ 00:09, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Go read the archives. You could also review Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Date delinking. Anomie ⚔ 12:13, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
I've read some of the stuff in the archives and I'm at a loss to define any sort of MOSNUM crowd viewpoint and style of argument so enlighten us. JIMp_talk·cont 21:03, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Fortunately, it is not my responsibility to cure your lack of critical reading skills and/or your willful ignorance. Anomie ⚔ 22:38, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Fortunate indeed ... well, this is going nowhere ... JIMp_talk·cont 01:56, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose I see no problem with using this internationally recognized format in article references. In fact, I think it makes dates most unambiguously clear to international readers. I will note that I have seen these sorts of date formats begin to appear in some citations in the social science literature; I would guess that this too is partially related to international ease of comprehension, even for non-English-language souces which, in the old days, would have often showed the date in the non-En-lang also. N2e (talk) 23:49, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. Ridiculous. We should be moving towards this format, not away from it. — RockMFR 01:45, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose - This should be the preferred format for use in footnotes! I use it all the time, and it looks good. --Blargh29 (talk) 02:09, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
It looks terrible but that's my point of view. JIMp_talk·cont 13:48, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose It should be avoided in prose, obviously, but footnotes are another issue entirely; footnotes deserve much more flexibility across the project. And it's not ambiguous at all—certainly less ambiguous than the other ISO styles, MM-DD-YYYY (U.S.) and DD-MM-YYYY (Europe). rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 02:51, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
What do you mean, "other ISO styles"? Wikipedia has not adopted any ISO standards for date formats. --Jc3s5h (talk) 03:06, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
I mean MM-DD-YYYY and DD-MM-YYYY, just like I said. Maybe those aren't called ISO, whatever, you still know what I was referring to. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 03:10, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
I don't think anyone disputes that MM-DD-YYYY and DD-MM-YYYY are even more ambiguous than YYYY-MM-DD, but that is neither here nor there, since nobody is recommending using those formats, and they are already explicitly deprecated in the guideline. -- Alarics (talk) 06:42, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose - This format is concise, unambiguous, language independent, and internationally recognized. It is an international standard (ISO 8601 international standard date and time, ISO 890 bibliographic references). For an electronic medium, it has the additional advantages that it is easy to sort, search, and parse. I've worked for international companies where it has been the corporate standard for decades because of its unambiguity and cultural neutrality. In Canada, where I live, it is a commonly used date format. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 03:09, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
No, it is wrong to say "It [YYYY-MM-DD] is an international standard", because that implies that the international standard and the format are interchangeable. But the YYYY-MM-DD format is also an informal usage that people just started using through imitation. The imitation-derived YYYY-MM-DD format has no formal rules, and there is no consensus on how to use it when the year has fewer than three digits, or for years BC. --Jc3s5h (talk) 03:26, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose - It is pointless to favour US or UK English versions when, as in citations, there is a perfectly good neutral alternative. Should we have to cite the same source with different format dates depending on the subject of the citing article? The idea that a significant portion of Wikipedia users will long be puzzled by a form they see regularly on other websites is almost insulting to them. Consider http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser/1909/09/29/ as one of many archives that routinely use yyyy/mm/dd in the URL for an article described as being for September 29, 1909. Readers are more mentally agile than we habitually give them credit for. So long as the information is available to them, they will work out the format details without thinking twice about it. LeadSongDog come howl 04:27, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Its use in URLs is quite beside the point. URLs are for computers to read, not humans. -- Alarics (talk) 15:30, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. I don't see any problem with the use of YYYY-MM-DD. If people don't like seeing it, then somebody should find a way to automatically display dates in a way that a user does like by setting their preferences accordingly. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 05:09, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. Often in footnotes I'm most interested in the year to see how recent the refs are. Allowing YYYY-MM-DD makes this nice as the year comes first. This isn't such a huge problem anyway. Just look at how many refs have only a year, or only a month and year. As for the potential ambiguity, there usually is at least one date in a ref list with a day > 12 that will give readers a real fast clue as to how to parse the numbers. Personally, I don't care for abbreviated months. Numeric or spelled out is best. I would like to see us endorse use of {{#dateformat}} for dates since 1583 since it seems to solve most of the problems of the old style auto formatting. UncleDouggie (talk) 05:58, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
While everyone has his or her preferences, I don't think that most supporters of this proposal would have any problem at all with 2009 Sep 30, 2009 Sept. 30, or 2009 September 30, which are not forbidden by the proposed rule. Even if they're unfamiliar forms, they're not ambiguous after the year 99. Personally speaking I'm not keen on a rule (sorry: guideline) that's too specific, pervasive or intrusive, and like to fit the citation to the matter or need, while trying to keep some consistency with an article's other citations. —— Shakescene (talk) 06:29, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. It's about footnotes, right? So the prose argument is void. Footnotes are merely a reference mechanism, and (unlike prose) some simplification of presentation is welcome for the sake of regularity; if not, reference sections will be flooded by different date formats. As if we don't have enough problems with prose, now we have to track changes to date styles, enforce their regularity, clash in moswars etc... NVO (talk) 06:41, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
It is already the case that there is supposed to be consistency of presentation within the footnotes of any given article. Allowing YYYY-MM-DD adds one more format to those available, making inconsistency more likely, not less. Reference sections are already "flooded by different formats". Simplification means having fewer available formats, not more (unless you are proposing to make YYYY-MM-DD compulsory in footnotes, which I don't think even its most ardent admirers have yet suggested). -- Alarics (talk) 07:07, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
That is not a valid argument for ditching by far the most commonly used format in citations. Obviously YYYY-MM-DD is already "allowed", so no-one is "adding" any inconsistency. _wjemather ^bigissue 07:58, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Whether it is "already allowed" is moot. Certainly it is not explicitly allowed. Its prevalence in footnotes has come about by accident, as already explained, not because most people liked the look of it or thought it was per se a good thing. Under the previous date-formatting regime, now abandoned, it was never the intention that YYYY-MM-DD would appear in that form to the reader. -- Alarics (talk) 08:15, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. YYYY-MM-DD is most unambiguous way of formatting a date. I'd be OK with not using it in prose, but footnotes is another story altogether. As many have mentioned, it's often the best way to format a date in a citation. Good Olfactory (talk) 07:00, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
~~Weak Oppose~~. per YYYY-MM-DD is unambiguous, and because there is no alternative presented. A standard is necessary, even if it would be YYYY-MMM-DD, that is 2009-September-30. Still 2009-09-30 is compact and unambiguous, so why change it? --HappyInGeneral (talk) 11:13, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
"A standard is necessary"? How are you going to impose a single standard on everybody? There is a big difference between not deprecating YYYY-MM-DD in footnotes and positively requiring it, which nobody has proposed. -- Alarics (talk) 11:26, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Also, it is a misunderstanding to say "there is no alternative presented". Taken together with the existing guidelines in that section of MOSNUM, the proposal means "write the month as a word, either in full or abbreviated". -- Alarics (talk) 15:39, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification, I see here that an alternative is proposed. So that is good, I think that is a good standard to have 23 April 1938 or something like that. Still that does not mean that for numerical representation, out of all other alternatives, like MM.DD.YYYY or DD.MM.YYYY or... I still think that YYYY-MM-DD is the most unambiguous. Do you agree? --HappyInGeneral (talk) 13:15, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
I still maintain a weak oppose stance because YYYY-MM-DD is the most compact of all unambiguous date formats. --HappyInGeneral (talk) 13:20, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
I too am a big fan of going with the most compact format. (For example, I would favor us mandating, as do many style books, that for year ranges the format "2008-09" be used, rather allow the format "2008-2009".) But I feel that way only when the most compact format is not any more ambiguous than the slightly longer format. Here, often (where the months are abbreviated) the proposed non-numeric format will be as compact (or close to as compact). And (as discussed elsewhere on this page) it is clear that people, computers, and software can and do in the real world find themselves uncertain as to whether the format is YYYY-DD-MM (or actually believe that to be the format). This is an ambiguity that we can avoid completely by adopting the proposal; I believe that the benefit of avoiding ambiguity outweighs the minor cost.

Many if not most opposers here have asserted that there is no greater ambiguity in the all-numerical approach. I believe that the various references I've made on this page demonstrate that ambiguity does attend the all-numerical approach. And it matches reason -- I believe it is reasonable to expect that the majority of wikipedia readers not only have never heard of ISO, but more importantly are unaware (as I was until this month) that the YYYY-DD-MM format is not used by any nation or international convention.--Epeefleche (talk) 23:20, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Yes, it makes sense, also you might have seen this. --HappyInGeneral (talk) 00:41, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Interesting. But since that template is not required (and no one is suggesting it be), I would assume its use will be non-existant (I don't run into it today, certainly). Were it mandated, you would have a fine point. But since its not, and since it is not prevalent, its as though it doesn't exist. (tell me if you disagree).--Epeefleche (talk) 00:53, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Epeefleche, if ISO 8601 is in force (which many of the participants in this RfC seem to think, even though they're wrong) then your example of 2008-09 is ambiguous. It could mean 2008-2009, or it could mean September 2008. See ISO 8601 Section 4.1.2.3 paragraph a. --Jc3s5h (talk) 01:40, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Jc3s5h--Absolutely brilliant. You are correct. (Now, the purists might say that the date range should be separated by an en dash, not a hyphen or slash (but I expect a survey would find few articles on Wikipedia are written that way out of those that should be); and also, to make matters even more confusing, this guidance tells us that "2005/06 is a period of twelve months or less such as a sports season or a financial year".--Epeefleche (talk) 02:06, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
That's is not correct. ISO 8601 uses the hyphen "-" for punctuating dates and the solidus "/" for indicating date ranges. Thus, "2008-09" unequivocally means "September 2008", while the date range "2008-2009" could be abbreviated "2008/09". However, I don't see any reason for abbreviating date ranges. ISO 690 (Guidelines for bibliographic references and citations) would use "2008-2009". However, this is off topic (a red herring). RockyMtnGuy (talk) 06:01, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. I use it for my own work elsewhere and the the other format I use is a private one where I leave out the hyphens as in for instance ad20090325whitbury.pdf. It is my preferred format and makes it easy for me to search and sort. It seems obvious to me it should especially be used in footnotes for things like last accessed. It would solve a lot of this bother if one had a special marker so dates could be automatically formatted as users desired. Just because some people anagram it into an illogical order which conflicts with an international standard is not a very strong case for deprecating it thast I can see. Dmcq (talk) 13:04, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. I prefer YYYY-MM-DD in footnotes; it's logical, concise, readable, and fits the citation aesthetic. Powers ^T 13:06, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
It is logical (for those who get it) but so is "12 Sep 2009", it is concise but only one character shorter than "12 Sep 2009", readable? well, you can convert it into something sensible (like "12 Sep 2009") in your head (if you get it), it's æsthetically displaesing but that's my take. JIMp_talk·cont 13:39, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose as per my 100% agreement with what Anomie said above, as well as WP:CREEP. — Kralizec! (talk) 13:10, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose Looks just fine, and is a lot more clear than many people are willing to admit. I don't think it should be mandatory, but its status as the preferred style indicates that it's not the huge problem people make it out to be. Other things to consider: there are much, much more important things to focus on, and the vast majority of readers don't care about dates in footnotes, regardless of their format. As long as it's not used in prose, I see absolutely no problem. GaryColemanFan (talk) 16:15, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
This "status as the preferred style" is an illusion created by the mistaken principles on which the citation templates were based. JIMp_talk·cont 19:15, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose vehemently. We don't need even more stylecruft to get in the way of writing articles. WP:MOSNUM has been nothing but trouble for years and it should have been deleted. *** Crotalus *** 20:55, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose I am sorry dear friend who made me aware of this discussion. I am in this camp. I attended a wonderful talk today, in which the speaker shared the following: "Literacy in the 21st century is not about the knowledge of letters, but the ability to unlearn and learn and unlearn and learn..." I think we should have a standard numerical way to represent date and time, and ISO has one (was not sure what it was but now I do a little, I looked it up). It is actually not as abstract as it looks like in the first place, and very easy to remember once you understand the rule, it is, in my words, descending order, left to right, year, month, day, hour, minute, seconds, and smaller fractions, in other words YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS and so on, perfectly simple. I am sorry for coming across as ambivalent and vacillating, I was just thinking aloud then. We unconsciously use the same format for time, without trouble, don't we? I know that I have made a mistake once (which has been referred here, which happened because I was not aware of the format's principle and in life we here use the dd - mm - yyyy format. Yogesh Khandke (talk) 18:57, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose per Anomie. It's unambiguous, scientific, and geographically nuetral. See also: WP:CREEP. hmwith☮ 21:47, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. Too much instruction creeep, and I just cannot vote for banning the style that is widely used in my country, and that I prefer. Actually, my first choice is YYYY-MMM-DD (which gives 3 chars of monthname) rather than YYYY-MM-DD. Incidentally, two of the chief proponents of this ban have already started removing YYYY-MM-DD from accessdate entries. I probably would never have even voted if that was not already happening --JimWae (talk) 23:17, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Too much instruction creep. What problem exists, with the current wording? ISO 8601 is a perfectly fine, internationally recognized standard, very widely used on the internet, and -- more to the point -- is currently used in countless citations across countless Wikipedia articles. In specific cases where this particular format is not ideal, the obvious solution is to avoid using it in those cases; to ban the format outright solves nothing and creates an instant maintenance backlog for no apparent gain. Far from being any widespread problem, I find this format quite useful: it is compact and clear, which is more than I can say for most other formats. – Luna Santin (talk) 23:41, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
- No, Wikipedia has not adopted ISO 8601. There are no rules governing the use or interpretation of the YYYY-MM-DD format on Wikipedia. --Jc3s5h (talk) 23:47, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
  - And? If WP doesn't officially adopt a standard, it no longer exists and in fact we're banned from even considering it for use, or something? I don't follow your point. – Luna Santin (talk) 23:50, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
    - Writers are not responsible for obeying the rules of a standard unless (1) the standard is imposed by law—ISO 8601 isn't a law—or the publication has adopted the standard and requires its writers to follow it. Since Wikipedia has not adopted the standard, there is no criterion to decide whether a specific instance of the YYYY-MM-DD format is correct or incorrect. People are free to argue about it, just like people argued about whether the new millennium began January 1, 2000, or January 1, 2001. --Jc3s5h (talk) 00:02, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
      - With respect, I don't see how anything you've just said has to do with the proposal under discussion. If you're going to claim that YYYY-MM-DD dates are problematic because they cause widespread arguments and confusion, please provide some examples of such. Wikipedia hasn't adopted a standard for the color red, either, but we seem to get by alright without one. – Luna Santin (talk) 00:14, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
        Consider our article Charles I of England. Presently it has inconsistent date formats in its footnotes. Suppose the proposal under discussion fails, and someone changes all the dates in the Charles I article footnotes to YYYY-MM-DD. Someone notices the citation to the journal for the House of Lords for 18 November 1647 has been changed to read "1647-11-18". A complaint is made, but the editor who changed the format claims that the "Manual of Style (dates and numbers)" is just a guideline and he is going to ignore it. So, is the date 1647-11-18 the same as the date 18 November 1647? Well, if ISO 8601 were in force, the answer would be no, but since it is not in force, there is no way to decide the question. --Jc3s5h (talk) 00:50, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
        An editor that changes a perfectly good style to some other style has violated WP:RETAIN and can be reverted on those grounds. Are you perhaps unfamiliar with this widely accepted standard of not merely style, but also behavior? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:12, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
        Most articles, including the Charles I article, have inconsistent dates in the footnotes, so there is no established style to be retained. --Jc3s5h (talk) 01:19, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
        You've provided a grand total of: 1 example. As I said above, "In specific cases where this particular format is not ideal, the obvious solution is to avoid using it in those cases" -- I understand that this format is less than ideal for some historic purposes, but that doesn't strike me as a compelling reason to outright ban it in all articles -- as you've said yourself several times, Wikipedia has not adopted a uniform dating standard. Some degree of sanity is a must before applying blanket rules to all situations, most of which will have nothing to do with the problems you describe. – Luna Santin (talk) 02:18, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
        You made a false statement, that Wikipedia uses ISO 8601. You finally seem to understand that Wikipedia does not use that standard. --Jc3s5h (talk) 02:29, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
        When did I make such a statement? You seem to be putting words in my mouth. – Luna Santin (talk) 04:34, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
        "ISO 8601 is a perfectly fine, internationally recognized standard, very widely used on the internet, and -- more to the point -- is currently used in countless citations across countless Wikipedia articles." --Jc3s5h (talk) 05:10, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
        This gets awfully tedious after a while. You are using trivial objections (hair-splitting, nothing but objections, barrage of objections and banal objections). It's a logical fallacy and does nothing to invalidate his argument.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 19:12, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose imposing humanities date numbering on fields which use computer science date numbering is as perverse as the inverse. Let each field date number according to its style guides, the humanists with prose numbers, the technists with machine-readable formats. Fifelfoo (talk) 01:11, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
What a strange argument. I could see it argued that certain topics where the format is common will want to use it and should be permitted to do so, but where is it written that footnotes aren't to be read by people?? Rd232 ^talk 18:05, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose per Eubulides, Wjemather, etc. Wildhartlivie (talk) 04:09, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Strong Oppose: Footnotes are technical, not prose. Also, keep with YYYY-MM-DD as it is consistent with ISO 8601; note that I would support WP adopting ISO 8601. -M.Nelson (talk) 05:27, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Expand a bit: I support the use of YYYY-MM-DD for its benefits outlined at the ISO 8601 page, that resulted in that standard being created (especially that "The lexicographical order of the representation thus corresponds to chronological order", making it easier at first glance to sort out a chronology). -M.Nelson (talk) 05:34, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose The format is an international standard and is useful in offering a neutral solution to arguments over date formatting (often before they ever start). Also, this would make a significant portion (majority or more?) of our articles suddenly non-compliant. Finally, let's avoid instruction creep. --Cybercobra (talk) 18:15, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
But this proposal only applies to one section of the article — those arguments will still happen in exactly the same number whether this passes or not. —Noisalt (talk) 15:56, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
There is no panancea; nothing will stop all arguments. This will at least stop some. --Cybercobra (talk) 06:59, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. This is just CREEPy. older ≠ wiser 03:10, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Pointless busywork and instruction creep. Stifle (talk) 08:21, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Strong Oppose. I work in translating over 20 languages for the Commons and other-language Wikipedias, and I also say: "YYYY-MM-DD is the most unambiguous way of formatting a date" (agree). When I see that format, then it is just one less thing to translate between languages. Please spend some more time working with Arabic, Finnish, Polish, Greek and Hebrew to help focus your priorities on what to standardize. -Wikid77 (talk) 09:25, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
What is ambiguous about "29 September 2009"? Can you list several different ways it can be interpreted? —Noisalt (talk) 11:10, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
If a multilanguage argument is to be considered 2009-09-29 is much more compact and even less unambiguous then 29 Σεπτέμβριος 2009. --HappyInGeneral (talk) 11:28, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
I don't think you understand what that word (unambiguous) means. 2009-09-29 and 29 September 2009 and 29 Σεπτέμβριος 2009 are all unambiguous because they can each be interpreted only one way. There is no alternate interpretation of any of them. So saying 2009-09-29 is unambiguous is not a valid argument for using it. —Noisalt (talk) 11:54, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Sorry if I was not explicit enough, what I meant in unambiguous was that numbers are readily translated in more languages then month names. Of course if somebody does not understand English, having the date as September will be one of his lesser concerns. Still there is the argument that this form is more compact, which gives the numeric notation some advantage. However the question is "to disapprove all-numeric dates (like 2009-09-30) in footnotes". And I don't see any good reason for that just yet. --HappyInGeneral (talk) 12:42, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
? What's the point in using an unambiguous date (day > 12) as an example? Does 2009-09-10 look unambiguous to you? To someone who's never come across YYYY-MM-DD before (like me before this RFC) and knows not which format it is (could be YYYY-DD-MM)? Rd232 ^talk 17:54, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
This is the English Wikipedia. On projects like Commons, WikiSpecies, etc., using the ISO format is probably a good standard. But, by definition, this Wikipedia shouldn't need to be worrying about its compatibility with other languages too much... if someone can't read "September" then they shouldn't probably be on the English Wikipedia, and if they can't read Σεπτέμβριος then they shouldn't be reading the Wikipedia in whatever language that is, either. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 18:07, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Agree. If the reader doesn't understand "September", then using the YYYY-MM-DD format in the English Wikipedia article article would result in the reader likely only understanding one thing in the entire article -- the date. And, as discussed above, quite possibly misunderstanding it.--Epeefleche (talk) 19:56, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Note that User:Wikid77 is not specifically referring to users not understanding "September"; he is saying that YYYY-MM-DD eases translation from one language Wikipedia to another. YYYY-MM-DD is undoubtedly more useful than expanded dates in that situation. -M.Nelson (talk) 20:53, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Agree with Rd232, when 2009-09-10 is displayed it might not be very clear for the reader that it is the ISO format of the date, simply because not is familiar with this convention. In that case however the date could perhaps be wiki-linked for clarity, or it could be displayed using a template like {{date-ymd|2009-09-10}}, adding the template could be done AutoWikiBrowser, and once in a template it could be formatted in whatever way for clarity. --HappyInGeneral (talk) 22:52, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Strong Oppose - Besides the fact that this is an international standard, we're in a position on WP to push this as a strong, unambiguous date format. It's very straight-forward, we're a high profile site, and using this format will embed it more strongly in English usage. - Denimadept (talk) 22:09, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
What is ambiguous about "29 September 2009"? Can you list several different ways it can be interpreted? —Noisalt (talk) 23:15, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
Your question is irrelevant. - Denimadept (talk) 15:57, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
No. YYYY-MM-DD being "unambiguous" doesn't matter if normal dates are even more unambiguous. YYYY-MM-DD being "straight-forward" doesn't matter if normal dates are even more straightforward. And we're not here to "push" your agenda or anyone else's. —Noisalt (talk) 16:22, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
The question being asked here doesn't ask about other formats, so your question is irrelevant. - Denimadept (talk) 22:26, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
I think that what Nosalt was trying to say in shorthand is that: (a) YYYY-MM-DD does in fact introduce ambiguities (as reflected in a number of examples on this page); (b) that such ambiguities impact inputting editors, readers, and software; and (c) that that the ambiguity and the problems that follow in its wake can be avoided completely with the alternative formats we will be left with if we accept this proposal. At least that is what I think he is saying (and is what I am thinking).--Epeefleche (talk) 00:07, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
And I disagree. Anything else? - Denimadept (talk) 00:49, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
I was just seeking to help the two of you out. Assuming that you're not disagreeing that that is what our colleague meant, and that you're not disagreeing that the examples on this page reflect amgibuity in the format impacting editors, readers, and software, I imagine that you are just disagreeing with the proposal. Which, of course, is fine, and no--nothing else.--Epeefleche (talk) 00:56, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
Yes, that's what I'm doing. - Denimadept (talk) 04:04, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose As a programmer, I use this date format almost daily. While it's not suitable for article text, footnotes are not article text.--SarekOfVulcan (talk) 04:20, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Nor are they computer code. Even programmers use normal dates when they're not writing code — and what commercial software programs use technical abbreviations instead of user-friendly words when there's no space limitation? If you actually believe that they are unsuitable for body text, they are unsuitable for footnotes for exactly the same reasons. There's no reason they would be unsuitable for body text and preferable for footnotes. Footnotes don't do anything, they don't have technical functionality. They're text, just as the rest of the article is. They are written for our readers to use, and anything that makes it easier for readers to use is preferable. —Noisalt (talk) 15:56, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. YYYY-MM-DD is the shortest and most unambigous date format available, and it is standard international communications. The most people having problems with this format are the Americans, but there's no reason to give them special treatment, as this not their Wikipedia, but an international one. Writing out month names is much more inefficient compared to this. YYYY-MM-DD also helps international and interwiki understanding (such as interwiki translation), since it doesn't require the knowledge of month names or their abbreviations. Offliner (talk) 09:15, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
That is the second time that you have said "the only ones having problems with this format are the Americans" (the first being with this edit); please desist, unless you have examined all our user pages and observed us all to be Americans. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:29, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Changed the wording to "most people..." Offliner (talk) 10:38, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose Strange proposal; footnotes are not prose. Widely used and strongly encouraged in FA's. This is just creepy.--Wehwalt (talk) 10:53, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
"footnotes are not prose" — So? It doesn't follow that they're not prose; therefore they should use this format. There's a step missing.

"Widely used" — Yeah, and normal dates are more widely used. There are an abundance of articles using YYYY-MM-DD in footnotes but those are mostly due to the old date-linking practice, citation tools that use that format by default, and a widespread misperception that the format is required. It is not because the format has any advantage in this context — it does not.

"strongly encouraged in FA's" — No, it is not. There are 58 FACs right now and not a single one says to use YYYY-MM-DD. There is only one that even mentions date formats and the only suggestion is to use normal dates. Do you have examples of YYYY-MM-DD being "strongly encouraged"? —Noisalt (talk) 15:56, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose It is the most readable date format. Possibly not as smooth in prose, but the best everywhere else. —Darxus (talk) 16:23, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
Strong Oppose - I am dismayed as an American that we generally think our way is best when it makes the least sense to put dates in M/D/Y order as we usually do. Either YMD or DMY is sensible, as they go from either least to most significant or vice-versa. MDY makes no sense. Having said all that, YYYYMMDD is unambiguous and an international standard; there's really no reason not to use it. (Don't ask me about the metric system.) Frank  |  talk 20:54, 3 October 2009 (UTC)
No one here is proposing we mandate MDY. And it's already been shown above that YYYY-MM-DD is ambiguous when all you have is a month (2008-09; 2000-01). Normal dates, on the other hand (September 2008; January 2000) are never ambiguous. That alone is a reason not to use YYYY-MM-DD. More importantly, normal dates are the standard used in the vast majority of (English-language) published works. YYYY-MM-DD is almost never used in published works; "standard" or not, it is not the format used by professional English writers. It is not Wikipedia's job to push fringe movements, especially when they have no advantage and are demonstrably problematic; it is our job to live up to an encyclopedic standard and be accessible for the maximum number of readers. —Noisalt (talk) 02:13, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
This proposal does not cover YYYY-xx, so any potential ambiguity with such a format does not apply. It covers YYYY-MM-DD, which, unless I'm missing something, cannot be ambiguous. As for "normal" dates, I haven't seen a study that shows what the "standard used in the vast majority of (English-language) published works", but I'd be surprised if it were anything other than MM/DD/YY up until the late 1980's or early 1990's, and then we had that little Y2K kerfuffle...so the "just because we've always done it that way" argument doesn't hold much sway with me. (Metric system, anyone?) The mebibit and its kin were created to clear up ambiguity in that space; it may take a decade or more to align people's expectations with the reality of it, but does that mean it shouldn't have been done? How about earthquakes, which are measured as magnitude rather than Richter scale now? And how many of us learned to put two spaces after a period when we learned to type...only now we use proportional fonts, so that is no longer the standard. If you look at the "vast majority of (English-language) published works", you will surely find that was standard; shall we rewrite style sheets around the web accordingly? The list goes on. Frank  |  talk 02:31, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
Frank: "This proposal does not cover YYYY-xx"; While I don't think Wikipedia articles are governed by ISO 8601, other either disagree or bitch at me for being tedious for mentioning it. Therefore, there is uncertainty about whether this proposal allows YYYY-xx. Professional English-language publications usually do not (and did not) use all-numeric dates such as MM/DD/YY no matter when they were published. While manuscripts may have had two spaces after a full stop in the era of typewriters, the professional typesetters created a pleasing-to-the-eye space that was not necessarily two word spaces, however many spaces the manuscript typist may have used. --Jc3s5h (talk) 02:57, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
Frank -- you put your finger on what I feel is the biggest gap in communication/understanding here. While many who object to the proposal have indicated that they believe it lacks ambiguity, many of us have said repeatedly that the opposite is true. And given real-world examples. I discuss the ambiguity that attends use of the YYYY-xx-yy format in my comment of Support (# 11), my responses to Opposers (#1 & 21), and my entries under “Comments and Questions).--Epeefleche (talk) 03:05, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
Sorry, I thought it was implied that proscribing YYYY-MM-DD would do the same for YYYY-MM. I guess that's up for interpretation. But what's the alternative – you'd include "August 2008" and "2008-08-21" in the same list? That is worse than anything else that's been proposed.

Now, my position isn't we've always done it that way; it's everyone else does it that way, and will continue to do it that way in the foreseeable future, and so should we. If two periods after a space were the standard, then the answer to your question is yes, we should do the same! But it's not the standard, that was a brief fad for fixed-width typewriting that never saw its way into professional typesetting (and is certainly not relevant now). The difference is that this YYYY-MM-DD system is still quite obscure. However easy it may be, it's not normal English, and it's less accessible to our readers.

The mebibit argument is highly relevant to this discussion. The consensus to that debate was that Wikipedia should not be pushing an agenda to use new systems that have little real-world usage. The difference is that binary units are actually better, which this date system has no practical advantages whatsoever. —Noisalt (talk) 03:50, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
We clearly disagree on these points; YYYY-MM-DD is unambiguous and compact. I do see assertions to the contrary above (they've been helpfully pointed out to me), but I am not the only one who is unconvinced by them. See searches for 29 Feb 09, use of / or em-dash as opposed to hyphens to differentiate 2008-09 from 2008/09, etc. Frank  |  talk 04:20, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
In other words, it's unambiguous if we can rely on every editor to always use en dashes and hyphens correctly. That's a pretty weak assumption. Many (most?) editors do not use dashes correctly, and never will. As long as there's a possibility that 2008-09 means 2008–09, it's ambiguous. The solution is to avoid using 2008-09 so we don't have to worry about it.

I don't know who said YYYY-MM-DD isn't compact, but it wasn't me. It has fewer characters and therefore it is obviously more compact. —Noisalt (talk) 05:09, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
The visual difference between hyphen and n-dash is not suffecient to expect our readers to consistently tell the difference, no matter what hardware or font they are using. --Jc3s5h (talk) 05:59, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

←I say again: this proposal is about YYYY-MM-DD and does not cover the exception cases such as 2008-09. Because something doesn't cover all cases does not mean it is unworkable. There's no reason in the world we couldn't use the ISO standard, but if that is too unreliable to be workable, there's nothing wrong with 2008-2009 or September 2009. Frank  |  talk 13:16, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose A solution to a problem that doesn't exist in the first place. Lugnuts (talk) 08:13, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose per Anomie. -- Jeandré (talk), 2009-10-04t12:35z
Oppose The YYYY-MM-DD format is perfectly unambiguous-- I do not think YYYY-DD-MM or YYYY-MM has every been used deliberately, and here it represented only in a very few identified errors -- This is a widely used international standard in many fields, and how I expect to see dates in technical subjects and many databases. I do not see how the possible use of hyphens or dashes makes it ambiguous--there is no other possible meaning, and a computer can be programmed to accept either, and to convert between this and other standards in both directions. The failure to cover all historical dates is irrelevant--the system is only used in modern contexts. All systems fail for some dates. Agreed, humanities oriented people are not used to it, nor those who read only newspapers--but they don't have to use it. DGG ( talk ) 15:39, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose The YYYY-MM-DD format is both unambiguous and neutral (i.e. it is neither American or European style). For have a long standing practice against mandating any particular format, and there is no compelling reason to override that general practice here. --ThaddeusB (talk) 16:12, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose because YYYY-MM-DD is neutral and unambiguous. Furthermore, this proposal would be far to hard to correct and change. Why change what works? Gosox5555 (talk) 18:26, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose YYYY-MM-DD is a widely-accepted technical specification (including in citation standards), ideal for technical uses such as accessdate. Looking at articles, it is clear that the consensus is to use this format. Claims that "most people" are unfamiliar with it are unfounded - firstly by the fact that almost all the supporters voting here are familiar with it, and secondly because it doesn't matter if readers are familiar with it or not, the accessdate parameter is for technical use, not generating article prose. OrangeDog (talk • edits) 19:08, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
OrangeDog's statement "it doesn't matter if readers are familiar with it or not, the accessdate parameter is for technical use, not generating article prose" is nonsense. There is no technical use for the accessdate parameter. It is used to inform the reader when the source was last looked at by a Wikipedia editor. It serves as a substitute for a publication date in the case of web pages that lack any date, and it helps the reader evaluate how current the information in the article is in the case of rapidly changing information. --Jc3s5h (talk) 20:37, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
"the accessdate parameter is for technical use, not generating article prose" – that is not nonsense, it is entirely true. "It serves as a substitute for a publication date in the case of web pages that lack any date" – that is the sum argument of those who would have it removed from the citation templates, but it is obviously and absolutely not the only purpose of the parameter, but in any case it is irrelevant here. _wjemather ^bigissue 20:48, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
Actually, as pointed out elsewhere on this page, a number of highly active bots (and at least one active editor) have created a mistaken impression that many individual editors have chosen the YYYY-MM-DD format. They have done this by energetically revising date formats other than the YYYY-MM-DD format to that format. Doing so destroys the evidence that many individual editors prefer a different format, and creates incorrectly the impression that many editors have chosen the YYYY-MM-DD format. And then, of course, editors such as OrangeDog (and some others in the oppose camp on this page) understandably but mistakenly take the work of the bots as evidence of widespread acceptance of the YYYY-MM-DD format.--Epeefleche (talk) 06:11, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose too creepy. Some flexibility in footnote dates will not kill us. Nor do I really see any reason to change from the prevaling format. --Bfigura ^(talk) 05:29, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. YYYY-MM-DD is the only unambiguous numbers-only way of representing a date. It shouldn't be used in running prose, of course, but in a naturally abbreviatory environment like footnotes and persondata boxes it makes perfect sense. +An gr 06:29, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose—agree with most editors who opposed; this is the only unambiguous way to write dates with numbers only, which is helpful for access dates and other metadata. For the date of the actual work, a full format (such as October 5, 2009) should be used (IMO). —Ynhockey ^(Talk) 06:45, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
So, does that mean that you agree with the proposal for the date of the work in the reference/footnote (though not the access date)? Tx.--Epeefleche (talk) 06:51, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose – from where I'm standing, YYYY-MM-DD is the ideal way to represent dates in footnotes. —Anonymous Dissident^Talk 10:13, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose — if anything, we should be moving in the other direction re prose usages. Sincerely, Jack Merridew 11:31, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose for all the reasons listed abovefilceolaire (talk) 18:02, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose This is the ISO standard for dates. We should be encouraging it wherever possible. Gigs (talk) 13:33, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
Gigs is wrong, but if he/she were right, 2009-10 would mean October 2009, not 2009-2010. --Jc3s5h (talk) 15:55, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
Gigs is not "wrong"; I also agree with his/her opinion that we should be encouraging ISO standards (particularly those that are already in common use on WP). However, this discussion is not for universal enactment of this ISO-- only for maintaining YYYY-MM-DD where it is currently used (not YYYY-MM). By opposing the removal of YYYY-MM-DD and quoting ISO as the reason, this is not supporting YYYY-MM; that is a different discussion entirely. However, if that discussion happened, perhaps this user would support YYYY-MM (not that it pertains to this discussion in any way).

Furthermore, the use of "2009-10" as "2009-2010", which all the supporters seem to be quoting, is entirely ambiguous, due to the fact that at least some users will assume ISO YYYY-MM. That (2009-10) is a date system that should be removed, without question. -M.Nelson (talk) 16:51, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose For footnotes, compactness is more important than readability. Especially so the access date that nobody really reads. I wouldn't mind using a full date format for publication date. For dates so old that the ISo standard doesn't work, full dates should definitely be used. --Apoc2400 (talk) 18:22, 8 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose repeat of Bfigura -- PBS (talk) 11:40, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose per Apoc2400. Running text that nobody cares about distracts the eye from text people actually care about. ISO style dates are compact, efficient, and easily distinguished from the text cite. If anything I'd advocate the reverse proposal, that while English dates are preferred in the main article prose (ISO dates would be odd there), ISO dates are preferred for footnotes for reasons of succinctness. SnowFire (talk) 16:41, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose per above, this isn't a sensible idea, as YYYY-MM-DD is the ISO standard. --Coffee // have a cup // ark // 09:20, 10 October 2009 (UTC)
"YYYY-MM-DD is the ISO standard" - yes, but in certain circumstances, not all the time. The actual title on the ISO 8601 standard is "Data elements and interchange formats -- Information interchange -- Representation of dates and times"; please note the word "interchange". That is, it is for the passing of data between systems, and is not necessarily applicable to dates intended to be read by humans. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:46, 10 October 2009 (UTC)
This is a solution in search of a problem. @harej 17:17, 10 October 2009 (UTC)
I agree with many already in the opposition that compactness is more important than readability in footnotes and references, and YYYY-MM-DD is the most unambiguous numerical date format. I also agree that numerical dates in sentences within the article body are problematic and such dates are more likely to be read so readability is more of an issue. However, I think for footnotes it is reasonable to leave editors a bit of leeway to decide which style to use when creating articles. Camaron · Christopher · talk 11:50, 11 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. Per ISO standard and all the above comments. We should be free to use whatever date format we like within footnotes as long as it's consistent within the article. -- œ ^™ 23:58, 11 October 2009 (UTC)
Just to be clear, the YYYY-MM-DD format is forbidden in the body of the article. If we introduce it in footnotes, the use of that format in footnotes will be inconsistent with whatever date format is used in the body/text of the article.--Epeefleche (talk) 20:18, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. Actually, YYYY-MM-DD is the best format for dates intended to be read by humans: unambiguous, easily sorted, compact, extensible to datetime, etc. If the only issue is that some people aren't used to it yet, we'd better change the Willis Tower back to Sears, too. - Pointillist (talk) 00:09, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
What's so unambiguous about it? You don't to know any conventions at all to understand 3 September 2009 or Sept. 3, 2001. You may never have seen these forms before in your life, but they're still clear, as is 2007 Sep 3. I just had to clean up a table with dates like "1889, 20 January", but bad as those dates were, and novel as that format was to me, I still had no difficulty understanding it. No all-numeric format is unambiguous if you don't already know what convention's being used. (And I've never heard of the Willis Tower. Should I want to look up tall buildings in Chicago, I'd look for Sears Tower, just as an out-of=state hockey or basketball fan would look up Boston Garden rather than whatever name the current sponsor wants to give it.)—— Shakescene (talk) 18:59, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for replying. I meant that YYYY-MM-DD is the only compact numeric format that is unambiguous, though of course your 3 September 2009 example is unambiguous too at least in most Western European languages where the month names can be translated using guesswork). My wider point was that we only find YYYY-MM-DD uncomfortable because of our habits of expecting certain conventions. If we could easily break these habits—which apparently we can't—we would in fact find that this is probably the best compact format. It is already popular in Japan and appparently Canada too. Since Wikipedia already replaces habitual names (e.g. Sears Tower) with current names (e.g. Willis Tower) we should not be surprised to see the similar evolution apply to format conventions. - Pointillist (talk) 22:47, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
Actually, though, the YYYY-MM-DD format is ambiguous. I discuss the ambiguity that attends use of the YYYY-xx-yy format in my comment of Support (# 11), my responses to Opposers (#1 & 21), and my entries under “Comments and Questions). (In addition, an editor just did a check, and found "shedloads" of YYYY-xx-yy formats where the xx exceeds the number 12).--Epeefleche (talk) 23:28, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose Per Eubulides etc Nil Einne (talk) 03:21, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. Unnecessary. If this is adopted as policy we will see people trawling around with AWB replacing the dates, and achieving bugger-all. There are much better things to be doing. • Anakin ^(talk) 13:46, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
As mentioned herein, we already have people and bots trawling around replaced other date formats with the YYYY-MM-DD format. Adoption of the proposal would end that.--Epeefleche (talk) 20:18, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
Is that part of the actual goal here? - Denimadept (talk) 22:52, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
I don't know that its been discussed. But I've seen bots making many such changes already. I think its fair to assume that where there is a policy, botmakers will seek to apply it if they can easily do so in a systemic fashion.--Epeefleche (talk) 23:28, 12 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. This format is commonly used in footnotes (especially for accessdates), and is not nearly as ambiguous as suggested by some. The MM-DD-YYYY and DD-MM-YYYY formats definitely are ambiguous, because both are widely used. But when it comes to year-first formats, YYYY-MM-DD is vastly more common than YYYY-DD-MM. I also think this proposal reeks of instruction creep. --RL0919 (talk) 02:55, 16 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose. Footnotes should not considered part of the article, only proof of claim per WP:PROVEIT. Sanguis Sanies (talk) 11:20, 16 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose: This is an international standard ((see ISO 8601). While I fully support it being discouraged in the content of an article (along with all numeric-based dates), it's fine in footnotes etc. If anything, it should be encouraged ahead of US vs. European confusion (e.g what is 06-09-2009? Is that Sept. or June?). --rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid (coṁrá) 22:55, 21 October 2009 (UTC)
Definitely, the supporters of this proposal dislike xx-zz-YYYY or xx-zz-YY formats far more intensely than YYYY-MM-DD because the former are extremely ambiguous. If anything, 9/11 made them more so rather than less. We just can't see any unambiguous formats that don't spell out at least part of the month. —— Shakescene (talk) 05:17, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

FYI--we're now past the issue of other numerical date formats. Inasmuch as (just recently) they've all been deprecated (because as you point out they are more ambiguous than formats that write out the name of the month; which a number of us feel is also the case with this numerical format).--Epeefleche (talk) 21:32, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
Oppose, YYYY-MM-DD should be used more, not less. It is the most logical, least region-specific format and is unambiguous. MTC (talk) 20:29, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Goodness me, what a lot of head-in-the-sand nonsense has been written here. Have you actually read any of the arguments put forward against it? Region-specificity is not the issue here. Nobody suggests Brits can't understand November 14, or that Americans can't understand 14 November. The point is that YYYY-MM-DD is not readily comprehensible to non-geeks, and (like any other purely numerical date format) it looks nasty in a formal context such as an encyclopaedia. --Alarics (talk) 22:17, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Neutral[edit]

~~Neutral~~ I've come across many articles, where the prose/body is WP:MOSNUM-compliant, which have more than one date format. In close to 50% of cases of articles where there is a ref section, there is a mixture of dd mmm yyyy and yyyy-mm-dd formats (or mmm dd yyyy and yyyy-mm-dd formats) in that reference section. I can see the need to use yyyy-mm-dd in sortable tables, as an exception. If there is no consensus to deprecate the use of yyyy-mm-dd formats in toto, editors should still at least ensure that all dates in the reference section are uniform. Hotchpotch date formats are an open invitation for some editor to come along and unify them all, to dd mmm yyyy or mmm dd yyyy. Ohconfucius (talk) 08:35, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
I've seen that as well. One of the causes may well be the bots I mentioned. In fact, in the instances I looked at, the bots revised some (but not all) of the footnote dates from another format that was consistent throughout the footnotes to the YYYY-MM-DD format. I would hope that after this conversation is finished, a bot could take care of updating date formats in articles to make them MOS-compliant and uniform. (I would also vote for the date format in the footnotes (which may contain text, I might point out) being uniform with the date format in the text--which of course means not having YYYY-MM-DD in footnotes).--Epeefleche (talk) 08:52, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
As much as I prefer to write out the dates in full, I am not supportive of the "should not be used" wording. I used to write dates in YYYY-MM-DD mainly because of the date linking feature that existed before. Some of my Good Articles still have it. I don't think it's something to forcibly banish; I'd rather have wording that says that writing dates out in full is the better practice. Current proposal makes me wary that people will use it to go on a re-formatting blitz. I'd rather let it be a natural changeover. Erik (talk | contribs | wt:film) 12:21, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
But there won't be a "natural changeover" unless people are given some guidance as to what is preferred. The proposal, taken together with the rest of that section of MOSNUM, does indeed mean "write out the date in full", or (if abbreviated) at least write the month as a word. So actually I think do you support the proposal. -- Alarics (talk) 15:47, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Given the history of MOSNUM, give certain parties any excuse and you'll see a re-formatting blitz anyway. Anomie ⚔ 16:40, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
It does not sound like guidance to me; it sounds like an ultimatum. That's why I prefer "better practice" type of wording. If YYYY-MM-DD is the preferred formatting of the primary contributors of an article, I won't contest it. Erik (talk | contribs | wt:film) 19:51, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
That may be difficult to divine, however, as bots that have made millions of changes have inter alia changed footnotes from non-YYYY-MM-DD format to that format. That of course severely skews what otherwise looks like the preferred formatting of the primary contributors of the article. If you, however, check a specific date by a search in Google News, looking for it under the various competing formats, you will see just how little the YYYY-MM-DD format is used in real life when people write for the layperson.--Epeefleche (talk) 21:57, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Which is why it's a discouraged format in prose... but we're not talking about prose, here. How often do laypeople muck around with citation templates? Is a layperson interested in and capable of doing so honestly going to be even remotely confused by such a format? – Luna Santin (talk) 23:45, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Absolutely. I've given a number of examples on this page of both editors and machines being confused -- for the very reason that we eradicated the dd/mm and mm/dd formats. Without ever having heard of ISO, and having heard that in some countries the dd/mm format is used, some people and computers read it as YYYY-DD-MM. This ambiguity, the very reason we deleted the indicated numerical formats, can be avoided by spelling out the month.--Epeefleche (talk) 02:55, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
~~I don't have a preference so long as the article is consistent in the format.~~ ~Itzjustdrama ^{? C} 20:18, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
For the article to be consistent in date format (assuming the article includes both the article text and the article footnotes), a support vote would be helpful. Otherwise, you have a situation in which the article text cannot have the numerical format, but the footones can -- hence, inconsistent formats.--Epeefleche (talk) 05:15, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Got a point. Will change vote as soon as I get to a computer. ~Itzjustdrama ^{? C} 00:32, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
I think you may be the only person who has indicated on this page that discussion of the issues actually impacted his/her thinking (there may have been one other, but I'm not clear on that). Everyone else (me included, I'm afraid) has really just sought to refute (or ignored) comments that didn't match their initial position. Kudos (and not solely because your moved in the direction that I favor).--Epeefleche (talk) 00:38, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
It doesn't bother me, but if something does get changed, I hope a bot can do it. I use the citation tool, and it just adds them that way. I guess a bot can't do it, though, because it's ambiguous. Whatever. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 06:53, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Comments and questions[edit]

Question -- Does the term "footnote" in the RFC text include all references that are in a {{cite xyz ...}} format and would therefore be picked up by a Reflist? In other words, I'm not quite sure if footnote is being interpreted broadly or narrowly. Thanks. N2e (talk) 20:38, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
- Yes, that is the intention. -- Alarics (talk) 20:58, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
Comment I'm most surprised that some people find YYYY-MM-DD ambiguous as no organisation or country uses YYYY-DD-MM so XXXX-XX-XX is the only numeric date format that is inherently unambiguous. Plus its an ISO standard, widely used in computer software, and lexically sorts correctly. But then, as a UK editor, I can't imagine why anyone in their right mind would think MM/DD/YYYY was a sensible format. If a good number of people genuinely find YYYY-MM-DD hard to parse, then I suppose we should just ban all numeric date formats and require the month to be a word or abbreviation. I also don't understand why prose should have a different rule to footnotes. I can't imagine any other style-guide having different rules for different sections. Colin°^Talk 20:56, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
- But it's only unambiguous if you already know that "no organisation or country uses YYYY-DD-MM". Ordinary, non-technophile readers can't be expected to know that. -- Alarics (talk) 21:03, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
- "ISO standard, widely used in computer software" -- But WP is not computer software, it is an encyclopaedia for the general reader. -- Alarics (talk) 21:12, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  - The ISO 8601 standard is widely used. Full stop. See this list. Uncle G (talk) 03:34, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
    - It may be widely used; but so are AK-47s. That doesn't mean that I know how to use one. I consider myself quite computer literate and in possession of a wide amount of general knowledge but I've never come across the ISO 8601 standard. It is undeniable that a format that doesn't spell out which of its components is the month is opaque. I fail to see how anyone can argue against that. Ericoides (talk) 09:26, 28 October 2009 (UTC)
- I'm just a little concerned that some folk think it is ambiguous, but in practice few people parse it wrongly. Has anyone done any studies on this? Surely there's a paper somewhere???? Colin°^Talk 21:14, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  - A number of contributors to the discussion have said they they, personally, actually have found it ambiguous. If some WP editors don't understand what the format means, how much more that must be true of some, maybe many, casual readers. -- Alarics (talk) 21:30, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
    - I've been to 40 countries, worked with most of them, and just learned to my surprise this month (through investigation here) that there is no YYYY-DD-MM format. I can't imagine that most people know that--why would they? I imagine most readers have also never heard of ISO, let alone read it. In the absence of the majority of readers knowing that, the format is ambiguous, as it could be read (and input by editors) as either MM-DD or the reverse. Supporting that notion is a quick google skim which yields the following references to YYYY-DD-MM: [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], and [14]. I agree w/Colin's points re using the same format for footnotes that we use for text.--Epeefleche (talk) 21:33, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
      - If you actually look at your examples, most of them are typos, people getting confused, bugs, odd lot cases, theoretical possible formats supported by parsers, etc. Few if any of them indicate actual substantial use. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:08, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
        Yes, you're correct that these don't reflect any ISO or national standards. They are just a hodgepodge of some of the first entries that came up on a YYYY-DD-MM search. They range from how some certain servers work (such as the SQL servers in [15]) and IBM machines work (as in [16]) and software works (as in the Linux commands at [17] and [18]) and Kirix at [19] to formatting by individual people or companies (as in [20]) to non-widespread (I think) date formatting conventions (as in [21]). All of the cites were techie-speak. My point is only that with even the techies/servers/software confused at times, it is much to expect average readers/editors to be aware of the absence of a YYYY-DD-MM convention. It is one thing to say there is not acceptance of a YYYY-DD-MM format by ISO or a country. It is quite another thing to assert that the general non-techie Wikipedia readership/editors are aware of this fact and therefore no ambiguity exists. Spelling out months eradicates the ambiguity that will trouble all readers who do not know that no YYYY-DD-MM format exists. I propose that that is a sizeable percentage of the Wiki readership and editors.--Epeefleche (talk) 03:02, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
        Just to take your first example, "YYYY-MM-DD Not Working In UK", I doubt the underlying problem is that SQL Server 2000 in the UK interprets dates as YYYY-DD-MM. More likely, there's some intervening layer or two that's changing the date into a different format with some notion of the proper locale, then mangling it on the way back to this format with some other possibly different notion of locale (similar to the timezone and GMT offset bugs that programs often have). And if you work in the software development field, you know that these online "Something's not working, what's the fix?" sites are riddled with people posting questions (and answers!) who are hopelessly confused, who have screwed up their environment, who haven't fully described the sequence of events that produced the error, who don't realize that some other variable is the key factor, and so forth. In other words, you can find practically anything in these sites if you do a search for it. Wasted Time R (talk) 03:23, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
        Thanks. I hear you. Though I'm not sure I completely follow the techie part--my failing completely, not yours, as I'm not a techie. But I guess my point is that if even techies run into problems because some of them don't know that no YYYY-DD-MM format exists (or their computers or software don't know it), what reason do we have to believe that non-techies in general would have that knowledge? And if non-techies don't have that knowledge, the ambiguity issue will affect them both as readers and as inputting editors (your above phrases "hopelessly confused" and "screwed up their environment" come to mind). Separate but related point -- IMHO the fact that news articles almost never seem to use that structure is informative.--Epeefleche (talk) 07:18, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
        As examples of YYYY-MM-DD ambiguity causing problems, as editors input dates in Wikipedia in the (non-existent) YYYY-DD-MM format, we have this and the advice given here.--Epeefleche (talk) 09:01, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
What about DD-MM-YYYY and MM-DD-YYYY? These can be very confusing if the day of the month is <12, and in this case is is ambiguous (IIRC). –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 21:22, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
- The numerical dates DD-MM-YYYY and MM-DD-YYYY are already explicitly deprecated by MOSNUM, precisely because of their obvious ambiguity, so they are not at issue here. -- Alarics (talk) 21:28, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  - Agree w/Alarics (though I would note that this was just clarified in the guidance this month).--Epeefleche (talk) 21:33, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
I don't have a copy of the standard, but from what I'm reading it appears that the standard allows [29 September 2009] and [2009-09-29]. I see no indication that [20 Sep 2009] is valid. Does anyone have an online pointer to exactly what the standard says? Vegaswikian (talk) 21:23, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
- What standard are you asking about? --Jc3s5h (talk) 21:33, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  - The standard we are talking about is ISO 8601 "Data elements and interchange formats - Information interchange - Representation of dates and times", and according to this website may be obtained here(registration required) --Redrose64 (talk) 22:02, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
    - The version referred to by Redrose64 does not appear to be available to the public; it seems one must have been assigned a userid and password by ISO. --Jc3s5h (talk) 22:55, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
      - More blather, you'll find. All published ISO standards are available to the public. Anyone can buy a copy of ISO 8601:2004 from here, for example. Published international standards are not secrets. Uncle G (talk) 04:16, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
        I am aware that you need to log in, that's why I put {{Registration required}} and also the website pointing at it, which has much background information and discussion. My last employer had an actual copy, primarily because we communicated electronically with suppliers and customers, and not always using EDI (which allows at least fourteen different representations of a date). We needed common ground for interchanged data when EDI wasn't used, and international standards provide common ground, simple as that. Standards - whether ISO, BS, ASA or DIN - are not enforced in law, unless the parties have agreed to abide by a given standard and one party then supplies goods outside the standard - they are then technically in breach of contract. What organisations do internally is entirely up to them and no standards agency can say otherwise.
        We took advantage of that. In our database, dates were stored as integers, using a simple count of days (where 1 January 2000 was defined as 730499), there being several good reasons: (a) it occupies 3 bytes instead of 10+; (b) it is ideal for sorting; (c) it was a simple matter to write functions to extract the day, month or year, week number or day-of-week; (d) it readily lends itself to arithmetic - subtract the product manufacturing date (as integer) from today's date (as integer) and you get the age of the stock, in days. Dates stored as integers were converted to any desired human-readable (or computer-readable) format as required. When displaying dates on screen or in printable reports, it was normally DD/MM/YY because that was (a) compact; (b) common in Britain; (c) what the bosses wanted; some programs used DD/MM/YYYY if there was room on the screen. Users were trained to expect either form, and one of the great things about the system was that they could enter either "30/09/2009", "30-09-09", "30 Sep 2009", "30.9.9", or any conceivable combination of those provided the elements were in the order day, month, year. What they entered was instantly converted to the integer form for storage, and then reconverted and displayed back at them as DD/MM/YY. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:17, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
- I do have a copy of ISO 8601:1988. It is, as said earlier, right in front of me as I write this. There is no allowance for named months. The standard is quite explicit that what it specifies are numeric representations. Uncle G (talk) 03:34, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
  - From what I understand, it has been revised twice since then. In 2000 and on "2004-12-03". And it is "maintained by ISO Technical Committee TC 154" (whatever that means).--Epeefleche (talk) 10:44, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Comment — Just one question for the people that oppose the change; Which is easier to recognize in a footnote, 2009-04-07 or 7 Apr 2009/Apr 7, 2009? The use of abbreviation for the month, which is international recognized in the English language irregardless of the dialect, is easier to recognize & actually about the same amount to type. 「ɠu¹ɖяy」¤ • ¢ 21:38, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
- Abbreviations are bad practice, and it is wrong to assume that non-native English speakers can easily adapt and understand them. _wjemather^bigissue 21:58, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  - "Abbreviations are bad practice" says who? Isn't any numerical date format itself an abbrevation, anyway? -- Alarics (talk) 22:01, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
    - No, it isn't. Uncle G (talk) 03:34, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
    - Who? Me! There are many ways to write the date; one editor will insert a red with "Apr 7 2009" without comma, another "Apr 7, 2009" with it, all in the same article, then the references section, indeed, becomes unpalatable. Perhaps you assume uniform use of a single date format, now imagine sixteen different date styles in the same ref section. Nein danke. NVO (talk) 06:47, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
      - That completely misses the point. Allowing YYYY-MM-DD will not do anything to stop people using 16 other different date styles. Or are you trying to make YYYY-MM-DD the only format allowed? That would be a step far beyond what anyone has proposed, as far as I know, and quite impossible to police. -- Alarics (talk) 08:21, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Eubulides and WhatamIdoing claim that YYYY-MM-DD is the most common format found in the footnotes etc, the latter editor gives us a snapshot of how things look now. I would be very interested to see (if anyone is capable of doing this), a snapshot of footnotes from say 2 years ago, and see how they are "displayed" then, before the autoformatting was turned off. At that time, YYYY-MM-DD was used by many editors (and templates) merely as a shortcut to input the required information, with the knowledge that it would never display like that. There must be countless references that still have this format as a relic to the autoformatting days. I'd just like to know how many - to see whether Eubulides and WhatamIdoing have a point, or whether my view (under support) is more valid.—MDCollins (talk) 22:16, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
If the effort to allow the YYYY-MM-DD date format succeeds, how shall we write the issue date of ''Inter gravissimas'', which is February 24, 1582? How shall we know we did it right? --Jc3s5h (talk) 02:52, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
- While pre-Gregorian dates come up often in article text, they don't come up that often in publication dates in footnotes, and never in access dates. When they do come up in footnotes, you are free to write them out. Wasted Time R (talk) 02:58, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
The current prevalence of ISO dates in footnotes should not be construed as a consensus. This is a consequence of the hurried removal of date-linking from the cite templates in August 2008. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 11:36, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
- It may not be not completely accurate to say that the "prevalence of ISO dates in footnotes ... is a consequence of the hurried removal of date-linking from the cite templates". The prevalence was always there for the unlogged-in and those without a different preference set. Where date-linking enters the scene is that it was more or less taken as a given when the templates were designed. The templates would only accept YYYY-MM-DD (other formats would generally give a red link & not autoformat). So, it still "should not be construed as a consensus". JIMp_talk·cont 20:47, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
Question (to the nominator): have you evaluated the way to automatically re-format refs? Will it be a bot crawler actually editing all articles one by one, or some live, on-the-fly conversion, or simply a fix to {{cite}} ? In both cases, does the bot have enough AI to correctly identify the correct alphanumeric format (the article text may mix different formats and lack any definite geographic clues etc.). NVO (talk) 12:02, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

I personally would not envisage any wholesale automated conversion. It would probably be best done gradually whenever one is editing an article for any other reason. There exists a script for doing it on an article-by-article basis, but you have to check the output manually because some URLs contain YYYY-MM-DD, and obviously those have to be left as they are. -- Alarics (talk) 15:53, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

I prefer to write the month in words, that leaves no ambiguity. Untill we have a universal convention for date. For example in India, the one followed is DD-MM-YY/ DD-MM-YYYY. Yogesh Khandke (talk) 12:42, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

If you prefer to write the month in words, then you are a supporter of the present proposal. -- Alarics (talk) 15:55, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Preferring a spelled-out month to "DD-MM-YY" doesn't warrant such an assumption, as neither "DD-MM-YYYY" nor "MM-DD-YYYY" are at issue here. Anomie ⚔ 16:42, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

On the contrary. The reason those aren't at issue is because they are already deprecated, leaving YYYY-MM-DD as the only possible alternative to writing the month as a word. So anyone who like Yogesh Khandke prefers to see the month written as a word is agreeing with me that YYYY-MM-DD should not be used. -- Alarics (talk) 18:39, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Such illogic. Fortunately, it is not my responsibility to educate you. Anomie ⚔ 12:16, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

How about this:

Proposed tweak to wording

Replace

YYYY-MM-DD style dates (1976-05-31) are uncommon in English prose, and should not be used within sentences. However, they may be useful in long lists and tables for conciseness. (If the only purpose why they are used in a particular table is ease of comparison, consider using {{sort|2008-11-01|1 November 2008}}.)

with

YYYY-MM-DD style dates (1976-05-31) are uncommon in English prose, and should not generally be used. However, they may be useful in narrow table columns for conciseness; consider adding a legend (e.g. !Joined <br />(YYYY-MM-DD)) to the header of such columns. (In sufficiently wide columns, consider ~~using {{sort|2008-11-01|1 November 2008}} so that~~spelling out the full month name ~~is shown but the table is sorted correctly~~.) [amended per Eubulides below]

(The example was taken from Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics/Participants, in case you're wondering.) ___A. di M. 18:07, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Why {{sort}} and not {{dts}}? --Redrose64 (talk) 18:30, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

No, the suggestion to use {{sort}} (or {{dts}}) needs to be removed, or at least a warning added, as both templates have important WP:ACCESSIBILITY problems and neither template should be recommended until the problems are fixed (which may take a while). Please see Template talk:Dts #Accessibility problem. In the meantime, yyyy-mm-dd is the best format for accessible and sortable full dates in tables. Eubulides (talk) 20:34, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Sort and dts are used in many, many tables, especially in featured lists. I can't support advocating using YYYY-MM-DD because while it may be sortable, it is also much less understandable. Dabomb87 (talk) 21:49, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Changed. --___A. di M. 10:48, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

I feel wikipedia would be better off if templates to output dates like the user wants could be supported. I see no reason to assume that anyone wanting to use the english wikipedia will use dates from Christ. Dmcq (talk) 21:57, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Instruction vacuum[edit]

Many understood the current wording to proscribe YYYY-MM-DD format in footnotes because footnotes are not tables and are not especially constrained for space. If the proposal fails, there will be no instructions on the proper way to incorporate YYYY-MM-DD into footnotes, other than not to use it outside the year range 1583 through 9999. For example, there will be no instruction about whether the access date and the publication date should use consistent format. --Jc3s5h (talk) 23:29, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Rejecting this proposal would not prevent us from saying "The access dates and publication dates should all use a consistent format" (or that we don't care whether they do, so long as all the access dates match all the other access dates, and all the publication dates match all the other publication dates). If you are trying to solve a simple, concrete problem, then please address the specific problem directly, not with sweeping assertions that are obviously unsupported by a majority of editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:16, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

My point is, how to write dates in footnotes will be fairly clear if the proposal is adopted, but will be unclear if it fails. Of course, someone could create a new proposal, but the guidance will be unclear unless and until a new proposal is adopted. --Jc3s5h (talk) 06:35, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

"No one is being told how to do something so we have to do it this way now with no alternative" is such flawed logic, both in a purely academical framework (False choice) and on Wikipedia (WP:CREEP). OrangeDog (talk • edits) 19:19, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

I just noticed this. What stops us from using earlier than 1583? This isn't a Gregorian-specific format. And if it was, the start year would surely be 1752. - Denimadept (talk) 22:55, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

If you are right, nothing stops us. If all the people who put the letters "ISO" in their comments are right, the ISO 8601 standard stops us for two reasons. One is that the standard requires the use of the Gregorian calendar, the use of January 1 as the start of the year (unless you use their special weeks format), and the use of the AD (a.k.a. CE) era. The other reason is that the standard states "values in the range [0000] through [1582] shall only be used by mutual agreement of the partners in information interchange." (§ 4.1.2.1) No such agreement with our readers has been reached. The reason 1583 is the first year that may be used without mutual agreement is because the Gregorian calendar went into force in Rome on 15 October 1582. --Jc3s5h (talk) 00:08, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Besides 1582 in Rome, see also Gregorian calendar#Adoption in Europe - the date of changeover varied, and seems to have been 1752 only in Britain and the British Empire (including the eastern part of what is now the United States). If you really want to see some confusion, try looking at the two paragraphs above Britaon, concerning Sweden. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:54, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Comment[edit]

I find it amazing that anyone can even pretend that 20091001 is confusing with the useful separators to give 2009-10-01. I also find it amazing that we can have text like "YYYY-MM-DD style dates (1976-05-31) are uncommon in English prose, and should not be used within sentences."

YYYY-MM-DD style dates (e.g. 1976-05-31) should not be used in text.

is sufficient or even:

Dates like 1976-05-31 should not be used in text.

(The proposal here would then be "Dates like 1976-05-31 should not be used." or "Dates like 1976-05-31 and 2/3/1999 should not be used.")

We have a lot of information to pass on in MoS, really the injunction against using these dates in text is almost superfluous - perhaps the only value in having it in MoS is in case of some YYYY-MM-DD warrior getting into an edit war over it.

As far as footnotes go the only place I like to see it is accessdate. I would support any reasonable method of hiding accessdate, it is pretty much a time-stamp in the article. Even Accessed 1999-12-04 would be an improvement. But basically the field should be not shown at all - the only relevance is when the URL is no longer serving the content, and then, to do anything about it it is necessary to go to the edit tab.

Rich Farmbrough, 03:59, 1 October 2009 (UTC).

Amazing? Its clearly the case. Pretend? Are the above examples of Wikipedia editors inputting YYYY-DD-MM formats, Wikipedia editors advising others to use a YYYY-DD-MM format, and computers and software programs using that format -- all examples of people, computers, and software programs "pretending" to be confused? It's not a surprize to me, given the fact that searches of Wikipedia News turn up a far less than 1% use of the ISO format (compared to other date formats). Newspapers are written for people, and newspapers' publishers even in 2009 have overwhelmingly chosen more reader-friendly date formats. Why is it amazing? It is intuitive I believe, as people who have never heard of ISO (most people, I submit) are at the same time far more likely to be aware that some countries use a day-before-month format. If the day comes before the month in another accepted format, why should they presume it does not do so in the year-first format? An all-numerical format is therefore necessarily more ambiguous than one in which the month is spelled out. And that is an ambiguity that we can easily and completely avoid by not using numerical-only formats. As to your suggestion that the accessdate be hidden, I fully support you on that.--Epeefleche (talk) 05:36, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Accessdate provides useful information to readers for web sites that do not provide any publication date, or that change constantly, or both. In such cases I would want the accessdate to be visible to the reader. It would have been helpful, for example, in articles about the cash-for-clunkers program, which, if I recall correctly, was extended several times by Congress at the last minute. I fail to see anything about the accessdate that makes YYYY-MM-DD superior to other formats, so I would prefer to see it consistent with the publication date and body of the article, except that it would be OK to abbreviate months. --Jc3s5h (talk) 06:24, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

WP:CITE already says to comment out access dates for news cites, and also for web sites in cases where the target page has a clear pubication date. I agree with Rich F. that access date is of no value to the ordinary reader. However, that is a separate debate, which has gone on in several places elsewhere, and is not part of the present proposal. -- Alarics (talk) 09:50, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Without getting deeper into that debate looks like there is a dual purpose to access date "first accessed" and "last accessed". <sigh> Shame most sites now hide the real creation date of their pages. Rich Farmbrough, 13:18, 1 October 2009 (UTC).

About bots[edit]

[I'm segregating out this discussion, since it's of some concern to many on all sides of the main question.]

While I've always been rather strongly opposed to all-numeric dates, in footnotes as well as anywhere else they're not clear (though I'm open to persuasion about tables), I don't feel the issue's urgent enough to require 'bots (robots or automated programs) to visit strange sites purely for the purposes of clean-up. It's something that I'm comfortable allowing to be adjusted in the normal course of editing by those who would customarily visit the articles in question anyway.

But if any policy is 'bot-enforced (or added to an existing 'bot like WP:Auto Wiki Browser), the 'bot should be supervised by human eyes and fingers, since (as has been pointed out persuasively above), it would be very damaging if YYYY-MM-DD formats (or, for that matter, MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YY formats) that already exist within the titles, URL's or text of a source were to be altered by a mindless routine. In some cases, the damage would clearly outweigh the increased clarity of alphabetic months. —— Shakescene (talk) 22:26, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

This may only add to the list of bot-related issues, but here are my thoughts. I've observed two bots changing date formats (on what you refer to as "strange sites -- in other words, articles that the author of the bot has not been editing, purely for what appaears to be cleanup) to the ISO format. In fact, the vast majority (well over 95%) of date changes that I have observed on the few thousand articles I've edited have been of this sort. In those cases, revisions have been made where: (a) at the time, the format changed from was acceptable; and (b) at the time, the format changed from was consistent throughout the article. A second problem I've observed is that the bots have changed only some of the dates in the article footnotes, creating inconsistency (often even only changing the format of one of the two dates in the footnote). I do wish those bots would stop doing that, and believe they have done much damage already in this regard. That said, I would be supportive of a bot that changes minority-formats in an article to the majority format.--Epeefleche (talk) 22:41, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
I'd support having a marker for dates and a bot that went round marking dates. That way we could also have an anti marker to explicitly stop it and anything that wasn't marked could be checked by eye. It would make any other bots that went round checking dates more reliable and less bother and wikipedia might even be able to support automatic formatting of the date as the user wants in the future using some userside javascript - for instance to give dates from the islamic calendar or even years and weeks as for a financial calendar. Dmcq (talk) 10:27, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Basically what I'm saying is that wikipedia is an internet based encyclopaedia. We should exploit that power rather than try to be bound by some rules for newspapers. Dmcq (talk) 11:38, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

It really does depend on what is being done. If someone has a stupid-bot that just changes xx/xx/xxxx then it need close supervision. If it is changing only date parameters in cite templates, and understands ambiguities, less so (but there are other reasons why it should sometimes avoid this change - which, I submit, would not occur to the vast majority of human editors). It is all about balancing risk, SmackBot, for example, will correct a date parameter of "Spetember XXXX" to "September XXXX", it happens to be aware that "Spetemeber" is not a month name in any of about 60 languages and will cause an error in the 400 or so cleanup tempaltes it deals with, however it is possible that some whacky organisation (probably the Society for Proving Bots Wrong at all Costs) might have a magazine with issue dates of Spetember, Octember etc. That is a possibility I am prepared to ignore. And I seriously doubt that most humans supervised systems (or even humans) would get that right - and for such bizarre occurrences we have {{Sic}}, {{typo}} and {{lang}}. Rich Farmbrough, 12:40, 2 October 2009 (UTC).

There is no point in having the bots changing dates, mostly per the reasons presented above, where dates can differ a lot, and they might be even wrong to begin with. A much more productive and friendlier way to solve it is to have bots crawl and put some {{wrong date}} date templates wherever it detects dates like 2009-14-11, where 14 clearly can not be a month. Another solution is to create a template for date (there might already be one which I'm not aware of called {{date-ymd|2009-10-02}} where the template itself specifies the format of date, further improving the parsing potential, and even readability if the template is rendered in some smart ways. What do you think? --HappyInGeneral (talk) 12:53, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

There is a template to convert a date from any format you like into a specified format, it is {{date}}, but I don't know of one which converts to the user's date format preference. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:42, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

It is the magic word {{#dateformat}}. UncleDouggie (talk) 00:06, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

Maybe bots could even suggest what the correct date is, but the point is that still it should be a human who says that: "sure, this date proposed is correct". Just in case that the bots get to be as good as to predict 99.999% of the dates, then sure, they can be let loose, but until then, we (humans) are smarter, thus do a better job with it. --HappyInGeneral (talk) 13:08, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

OK I will post a list to your talk page. SmackBot deals with around a thousand dates a day, mainly filing in the missing ones with the current month and year. Of course sometimes it lets the month carry on a few hours too long (though strictly it is me, the "smart" human who is at fault for that. Then perhaps you would also like to take over filling in the date on everybody's sigs, since the program can't be trusted? And no cheating by looking at the edit history, since writing those dates in is your third assignment.... Rich Farmbrough, 18:36, 2 October 2009 (UTC).

Good exhibition of delegations skills, Rich!--Epeefleche (talk) 19:46, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
I'm not that familiar with the quantity of work, bots do (although I imagine is a lot), also I'm not that familiar in the quality of the work they do, it might be acceptable and 99.999% perhaps is too high. Also I'm not sure what you mean by "month carry on a few hours too long". Regarding "Then perhaps you would also like to take over filling in the date on everybody's sigs, since the program can't be trusted?" => so far the bot did an excellent job there, not sure why you say that it can't be trusted. However I do think that it is better to have no edits done by bots then edits of which 10% is wrong. But again it's me who might be wrong. Could you please provide some links so that I can see what the bot is doing exactly? And it might be perhaps a bit too much to ask for statistics on what percentage it is doing the job correctly? As far as I know SmackBot is doing the job 100% correctly on those missing template dates, since it will only fill in the current month or day, right? And I imagine that the algorithm on the talk page signing, can be done to do a pretty accurate job as well. --HappyInGeneral (talk) 23:03, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes that's correct. Sometimes SmackBot will label a template as (for example) September 2009 when it was actually added in the early hours of 1st October - or indeed vice versa - this is of course wrong, but there are good reasons for it, and the exact date isn't critical. As far as correcting stuff like "date = Spetember 2009" I am fairly confident since it removes items from the "invalid date" category - which incidentally is full to bursting right now - and I have had no complaints on that front. But certainly a 10% error rate would in general be unacceptable for any class of edits, but only because we can pretty certainly do much much better. (I say in general, it might be acceptable, for example, for a bot that commented out BLP violations for human review - I would rather have 1 good paragraph commented out than 9 libels remain.) Rich Farmbrough, 20:03, 4 October 2009 (UTC).

Prose in footnotes[edit]

Quick question. Let's assume for a moment we end up with one rule for prose in text (no all-numerical formats), and another rule for footnotes (YYYY-MM-DD is not forbidden). Which rule do people suggest we follow for dates in prose in footnotes? I believe the logic behind no all-numericals in prose would be the overriding principle (even if the prose appears in a footnote), but then again that is my leaning anyway (so I may be biased) -- so I thought that now might be a good time to take other peoples' temperature on this issue. Thanks.--Epeefleche (talk) 12:32, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

that's my understanding as well: i understand that this RfC is about allowing YYYY-MM-DD in citation references, not prose-form footnotes. prose in footnotes is still prose. Sssoul (talk) 13:17, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

I would agree with that. Rich Farmbrough, 20:04, 4 October 2009 (UTC).

Sticking to just issue of prose-dates in footnotes, these should not "automatically follow the general style of dates in the article text", as part of this proposal would seem to imply, but primarily follow the format used by the reference itself. Clearly if all references in an article are say Amercican sources, then all the prose-dates will be in mmmm dd, yyyy US styles (as likely to match the article's own style), but if there are British-English sources then these should maintain the relevant source's choice and so aid looking up of the references by the reader (just as no one would alter the spelling of a reference title between AmE & BrE). However where a source might itself use numerical-only date formats, leaving dates in the reference as mm/dd/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy is sure to confuse if sources from both AmE & BrE countries. yyyy-mm-dd at least kept numerical dates without confusion, but if that is not to be done then such dates should be converted to named months (ie should change 12/11/2008 to at least something else whether 12 Nov 2008 or 2008-11-12), but it is wrong to state that formats must tally with the AmE/BrE selection used in the article - a British newspaper article used in an article adopting AmE with a title of say "Changes since 12 November 2008 in American..." and noted by the newspaper as published on "4 March 2009" or "4/3/2009" should specify BrE style dates. David Ruben ^Talk 22:52, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Almost every article outside Wikipedia, whether one that follows a widely used style guide such as APA style, a style unique to the publisher (for example, IEEE), or a style unique to the article, adopts a uniform style for all the references, and pays no heed to how each source formats dates. --Jc3s5h (talk) 23:43, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Jc--getting away from the initial focus of this thread for a moment, but out of curiosity (I don't know the answer) -- do those style guides tend to have different date formats for the body than they do for the citations?--Epeefleche (talk) 05:27, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

The one that comes to mind is the APA style manual (6th ed.) Since only the author and year are given in parenthesis to site a work, the year is given first in the reference list, followed by the month and day if necessary. This example is from page 200:

Schwartz, J. (1993, September 30). Obesity affects economic, social status. The Washington Post, pp. A1, A4.

That manual is silent on the date format within the text, as far as I can tell. --Jc3s5h (talk) 17:16, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

ISO 8601[edit]

Comment The international standard ISO 8601 (current version being ISO 8601:2004) has been mentioned a lot, and several people seem to be unaware of its scope. Whilst the full version (printed or pdf) does cost CHF 130.00, there is a summary at http://www.iso.org/iso/support/faqs/faqs_widely_used_standards/widely_used_standards_other/date_and_time_format.htm which is free to view. There's a link from there to an order form for the full version, should you so desire. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:09, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

The summary is a trap which will lead those who fail to obtain the complete version into making errors. --Jc3s5h (talk) 14:36, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

For those interested, there is an on-line copy here. −Woodstone (talk) 16:01, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

A completely different proposal[edit]

This is primarily about dates in footnotes, no? Well, here's a rather different proposal: Make accessdates invisible. In short, don't display the accessdate to the reader, but keep them in the same parameter in edit mode so that editors can still check for changes in the source. Then, if wanted, there would be more room in footnotes to write out full DMY or YMD dates. It would still save space, be easier to read for those who don't know about the ISO standards, and remove clutter that is really only relevant to editors from the footnotes. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 18:30, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

If the information is something that would be updated on a regular basis, readers would want to know about the accessdate too, so it should be visible. Also, not everyone uses templates for citations. --Jc3s5h (talk) 19:01, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

The accessdate gives some sort of confidence in the currency of the reference and is very useful information to readers. It is not just for editor use, I would not want to have to go into edit mode to find this information. Keith D (talk) 19:22, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

I think Drilnoth may be on to something. The point is to establish currency, so let's establish currency, not delegate it to the readers. Lots of websites regularly check that links have not gone stale as a simple matter of good housekeeping. We only need to display the accessdate because we don't consistently do that check. A link to http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/index.html won't likely go dead anytime soon, but it will surely get updated. Even http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/world/asia/09afghan.html?ref=world will move to archives. When it does, it ceases to support an article until a replacement link is found. Yet we may go a long time before we realize that it has gone stale. We ought to have bots patrolling for this situation.LeadSongDog come howl 20:20, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

I personally find accessdates extremely useful; they provide a timestamp on a "variable" source-- unlike "static" books, websites can change, and it is helpful to to know when the information in the article from that source was gathered. Though I also find it useful in news articles (such as nytimes), it is especially useful with variable websites, which may list updated statistics such as population (the variable data is noted in prose as "As of July 2008"). Additionally, accessdate is useful in dead links-- rather than deleting a dead ref (as a vandalism-added nonexistant url would be), it is kept and noted with {{dead link}}. A specific example is with many Pitchfork Media articles that were (for all I know) lost when the site redesigned (for example, three of the refs in Arcade Fire). With accessdate, user/reader assuming good faith will see that the site was existant when it was accessed, and will add {{dead link}} rather than deleting. -M.Nelson (talk) 21:08, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

This is a very live issue right now, as both GeoCities and Encarta will shut down by Hallowe'en and could leave us with thousands of dead links. See the Village pump (proposals) archive. Also I usually consult the access date in reading mode, without necessarily intending (or even desiring) to edit the article. For example, if all the references to some political or sporting event in 2004 were retrieved in 2004 and 2005, that indicates something different than if they were retrieved in 2008 and 2009. Cf. New York City mayoral election, 2001, New York City mayoral election, 2005 and New York City mayoral election, 2009. Or if you look at the Fairness Doctrine and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, you can see that many links were researched recently although the source is often several years old. ¶ But, although on reflection I disagree with it, I still want to give the proposer a lot of credit for an interesting and well-intended idea. —— Shakescene (talk) 21:33, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, this is a dead idea; just thought I'd throw it out there. Thanks for your consideration everyone! –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 21:37, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

¶ However, there might still be merit in a parallel idea that has been sometimes floated in various ways: could there be a readable and easy-to-use template that could accept (and show) either numerical or alphanumeric formats in editing mode, but display only written months to the reader? —— Shakescene (talk) 22:06, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

We shouldn't hide data like that. Either include it and show it or remove the field altogether. There is a simple CSS hack to hide accessdates if you just can't stand them.---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 22:12, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

[I agree with Gadget and others that we should let ordinary readers see the access date. I was suggesting that a template (in the same general family as the deprecated auto-formatting) could show the access date with written months to the reader while keeping numeric format in the edit box for those editors who seem to prefer YYYY-MM-DD.]—— Shakescene (talk) 23:18, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

The {{#dateformat}} magic word or {{date}}. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 00:55, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I like {{date}}! Very nice. People could select which date format they want if such is settable in the prefs?. - Denimadept (talk) 23:46, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

I have found some date templates that accept a date in various formats and rearrange for output. These are: {{start date}}, {{start-date}}, {{end date}} and {{end-date}}. Note presence or absence of hyphen - it makes a big difference. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:51, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

(Unindent) Except for the {{#dateformat}} magic word, none of the templates mentioned present different formats to different readers; everyone sees the same thing. Therefore from a formatting point of view, they just make it harder for those unfamiliar with the templates to edit an article and serve no useful purpose.

The templates {{start date}}, {{start-date}}, {{end date}} and {{end-date}} emit metadata, and might be useful in situations where the metadata is accurate, but citations seldom contain start or end dates, so it would be a usually be a falsehood to use those templates in citations.

Date autoformatting is controversial, hence the {{#dateformat}} magic word is also controversial. --Jc3s5h (talk) 17:03, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

A wider subject being controversial does not necessarily imply a narrower one is. Have you an argument against using #dateformat or know where it or something similar has been involved in controversy please? Dmcq (talk) 18:51, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

Arguments made against date autoformatting with links that also apply to the #dateformat magic word include:

Date autoformatting serves no useful purpose, thus, the presence of the extra characters that enable formatting imposes extra effort on editors.
Date autoformatting cannot cover all situations; when plain dates for the cases that are not handled properly are mixed with autoformatted dates, those who choose a date preference will see inconsistent dates
Date autoformatting hides date inconsistencies from editors who have chosen a date preference, so those editors will not realize there is an opportunity to clean up the articles.

Jc3s5h (talk) 19:01, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

Point 1 seems to be saying that providing dates in the format the user wants serves no useful purpose. I can see point 2 but we have that problem anyway. Point 3 seems to be saying that the user getting the dates in a consistent format even though they are written inconsistently is a bad thing. I'm rather surprised that these points should cause #dateformat to be a subject of controversy. Personally I would much prefer if all dates were marked by a bot with something like this which would also solve point 2. Do you remember where these points were made and perhaps they have more there that explains them for me thanks? Dmcq (talk) 19:39, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

Point 1 does indeed say that providing dates in the format certain users want serves no useful purpose. Since a vanishingly small number of readers log in and select a date format, it can be argued that catering to the small number of readers who do that is not useful or worthwhile.

Marking all dates with a bot is infeasible and would not solve point 2. It is infeasible because dates in direct quotes and in discussions of date formats should not be reformatted, and there is no reliable way for a bot to tell if a date is in a direct quote or in a discusson of date formats. Also, now that linking dates for the purpose of autoformatting is being removed by a bot, a bot may not be able to reliably distinguish full dates from other text (on 11 October 19 were killed in western Iraq is not referring to 11 October AD 19). It would not solve point 2 because the #dateformat magic word cannot deal with date ranges except by fully expanding them, so date ranges will have to stay as plain dates.

These points were made at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Date Linking RFC --Jc3s5h (talk) 20:48, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Summary[edit]

Since the RfC has expired, here is my summary:

There is no consensus on whether the YYYY-MM-DD format should be used in footnotes.

There is no consensus on whether dates that are written in this format should follow the ISO 8601 standard.

Proponents of the IS0 8601 standard have not necessarily read the standard and do not necessarily know how to apply it to dates before the 19th century. --Jc3s5h (talk) 19:12, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

The above is not an accurate summary of the discussion. The proposed text said that YYYY-MM-DD style dates should not be used in footnotes. The consensus clearly rejected this proposal, which means there is consensus not to prohibit YYYY-MM-DD in footnotes; or, stating the result in an equivalent way, there is consensus to allow YYYY-MM-DD in footnotes. Eubulides (talk) 20:03, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

I claim there is no consensus because while the opposes were greater in number, the supporters had sounder arguments. --Jc3s5h (talk) 20:25, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

In your opinion. But then you are quite obviously biased. _wjemather ^bigissue 20:42, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

My interpretation is that the consensus was 2 to 1 opposing. On its own that isn't totally overwhelming, what make the defeat absolute in my view was how silly, befuddled, inept, unclear and generally badly thought out the pro arguments were compared to the intelligent, insightful and clearly articulated arguments on the opposition side ;-) Dmcq (talk) 23:58, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. That's funny--gave me my first broad smile of the day (once I saw the smiley face at the end).--Epeefleche (talk) 00:38, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Canvassing[edit]

Canvassing for support
user	previous opinion	canvassed?	result here
Debresser	support	yes	support
Jimp	support	yes	support
HWV258	support	yes	support
Greg L	support	yes	support
A. di M.	support	yes	support
Tony1	support	yes	support
Sssoul	~~support~~	yes	support
Headbomb	support	yes
Pmanderson	support claimed	yes
Noisalt	support, mostly	yes	support
Gadget850	leaning support	yes	support
Josiah Rowe	support	yes	support
Drilnoth	likely support	yes	support
Dinoguy1000	likely support	yes	support
Rich Farmbrough	likely support	yes
Quasirandom	likely support	yes
Itzjustdrama	unknown	yes	support
Ohconfucius	neutral	yes	support
TheFeds	neutral	yes
Johnuniq	unknown	yes
Simetrical	unknown	yes
Govvy	unknown	yes
Dandy Sephy	unknown	yes
Collectonian	unknown	yes
Magioladitis	unknown	yes
Cavrdg	oppose	yes
Darxus	oppose	yes	oppose
Denimadept	oppose	yes	oppose
Offliner	oppose	yes	oppose

Unfortunately the above RfC was skewed somewhat by canvassing. This canvassing didn't overcome the strong "no" vote in the discussion, but it may have artificially inflated the "yes" vote somewhat. Of the canvassees whose opinions I could determine, sixteen were supporters or likely supporters (based on previous edits replacing YYYY-MM-DD dates with other styles), two neutral, and four opposed. The table of users I saw canvassed is at right.

Of the two canvassers I saw, one was given a friendly notice about canvassing, responded that he had notified all sides and not just supporters, was then informed that he had indeed not notified all sides with four examples being given of supporters who were not notified, and then agreed that they hadn't been notified and then notified them (they are the last four rows in the table).

Canvassing like this does not follow the Wikipedia:Canvassing guideline, which calls this sort of practice "votestacking".

Eubulides (talk) 20:03, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

There was no votestacking. The few messages I sent out met the four criteria for acceptability set out in Wikipedia:Canvassing, viz.: (1) Limited posting, (2) Neutral message, (3) Non-partisan audience, (4) Open and transparent. -- Alarics (talk) 20:17, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

(ec) I disagree that I had been canvassed, although I can't speak for the others. I had been going to support the proposal anyway, and had already posted this question before Epeefleche left the note on my talk page. That was more of a "Here's an update on what you commented on" type thing, not a "you might want to support this" type thing. I had already been aware of the proposal (from WP:CENT, IIRC), and the notice Epeefleche gave me didn't influence my !voting. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 20:21, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Given how lopsided (more than 2:1 against proposal) the vote was, if Alaric was stacking the deck, he did a very weak job of it. - Denimadept (talk) 20:26, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

I think it is ridiculous to suggest that the voting has been skewed by canvassing. The table set out by Eubulides is extremely misleading because there was no point in contacting many of the opponents as they had already voted at that point. -- Alarics (talk) 20:33, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

The canvassing fails criteria (3) for acceptability, as it was sent to a clearly-partisan audience. I agree that the canvassing did not overwhelm the final result, but I suspect that it did skew the result somewhat. What happened is that the many people in the table who were in favor were canvassed early on; for example, Josiah Rowe was canvassed on Sept. 29 at 19:16 UTC, less than an hour after this page was created. The four known opponents were not notified until three days later, late on October 2. If one notifies only supporters or likely supporters first, and waits before notifying a few opponents, that helps build up an early lead for support, such as observed here, and this helps to give the impression to other earlier commenters that the proposal enjoys more support than it actually does. Eubulides (talk) 21:00, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Where does it say in Wikipedia:Canvassing anything about how quickly people are to be contacted? The people on all sides of the argument, who had shown any sign of interest in the matter but had not already voted here, were contacted within a few days. And what is the purpose of this discussion anyway? What point are you trying to make? My own feeling is that the proposal almost certainly enjoys a lot MORE support than has been indicated in this voting, because so many of the most active WP editors who get involved in this sort of issue are so untypical of users generally. -- Alarics (talk) 23:30, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Alarics, I also think that you had a (perhaps minor) problem with the third criteria. It ultimately doesn't matter to me "why" you initially contacted only people that were likely to agree with you. Unless you think us all very gullible, though, perhaps you would avoid trying to deny the actual evidence that you "did" contact (initially) primarily perceived supporters -- and also that your efforts at remediating this bias were after someone complained to you. Hairsplitting about exactly how soon WP:Canvassing requires you to notify your opponents isn't an impressive defense.

I also don't think you need to worry about this: honest mistakes happen. You mightn't have realized how your actions would appear to an opponent (it wasn't that many messages); you might have gotten distracted before finishing your originally intended list; you might have forgotten about the policy (who can say that he remembers absolutely every one of them?). Notes on user talk pages also attract attention from people that are watching the user talk page, instead of just the one editor. There are several dozen user pages on my own watchlist, and that's after dramatically shortening the list a while ago. Consequently, I agree with Denimadept's comment: even though a reasonable person would construe your initial efforts as votestacking, it probably wasn't very important.

I usually limit such notifications to WikiProjects, MoS pages and the like to avoid this kind of complaint, but I really don't think that it had much effect on the overall outcome: The proposal was defeated anyway, after all. It's not necessary for us to know exactly how big the margin of "legitimate" opinions were. So perhaps we could all find something more important to do now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:43, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

(outdent) for the record: it's incorrect to say that i had previously supported the proposal - see this edit; when Alarics left the neutral note on my talk page that an RFC was going on, he/she was aware that my stance was at best "mixed emotions". as my "vote" indicates it was Noisalt's reasoning that persuaded me to support the proposal. (but indeed: why is this of any importance, beyond the vaguely educational reminder of how others might perceive what we do?) Sssoul (talk) 07:51, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

I was not canvassed! I was involved in this subject from the very beginning! Debresser (talk) 05:49, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I was converted from a strong no to a medium yes. So if I was canvassed it was successful, but against reasonable expectations. Rich Farmbrough, 12:21, 17 November 2009 (UTC).

Close[edit]

Should this discussion be closed in any way, for archiving purposes? It's quite clear that the proposal was not successful, and relevant discussion has stagnated. -M.Nelson (talk) 06:37, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

How does one close a proposal like this? This is getting like The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. Let it die. Dmcq (talk) 22:34, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure if anything besides {{failed}} is necessary. I suppose if people keep !voting we could wrap the voting sections in {{discussion top}}/{{discussion bottom}}. Anomie ⚔ 00:57, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Wrapped for good measure. --Cybercobra (talk) 01:08, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Hm. ! votes continued to accumulate at the interwiki sorting discussion for years. That was a good thing because it showed changing sentiment and didn't dis!enfranchise later visitors to the page. Rich Farmbrough, 12:24, 17 November 2009 (UTC).

There was no consensus for the pproposal after a reasonable length of time. It failed. It can always be raised again after sometime. AfD's are quite often raised again for instance and sometimes succeed the second time but one doesn't keep them open for years. Dmcq (talk) 14:19, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Would it really show changing sentiment or would it just show more people would !vote for change years after everyone else gave up than would !vote for continuing to maintain the status quo years after the proposal failed? Anomie ⚔ 18:10, 17 November 2009 (UTC)