User:Tony1/Revised guidelines for autoformatting

Dates

Date formats

Autoformatting

• The use of WikiMedia's date autoformatting system for full dates, and days and months, is optional. Autoformatting is achieved by inserting double square-brackets, as for linking; this instructs the MediaWiki software to format the item according to the date preferences chosen by registered users. Thus:
  • either [[January 15]] or [[15 January]] will be rendered as either January 15 or 15 January, according to a registered user's set preferences; and
  • [[January 15]], [[2001]] (US editors), [[15 January]] [[2001]] (others), [[2001-01-15]] (ISO), or [[2001 January 15]] will be rendered as January 15, 2001, 15 January 2001, 2001-01-15, or 2001 January 15, according to a registered user's set preferences.
• The vast majority of readers do not log in and set their autoformatting preferences; for them, autoformatted dates are displayed in their raw form as entered. Therefore, if autoformatting is used, the raw formatting within the autoformatting syntax must be consistent throughout the main text, footnotes and references of each article.
• Do not autoformat dates that are:
  • in article and section headings,
  • on disambiguation pages,
  • within quotations (unless the original text was wikilinked).
  • in date ranges (see below).
• The autoformatting mechanism will not accept date ranges (December 13–17, 1951) or slashes (the night of 30/31 May), which must be input without using the function.

Without autoformatting

The following formats are acceptable:

• 14 February and 14 February 1991 (more common in the UK, Australia, Ireland, NZ and South Africa);
• February 14 and February 14, 1990 (more common in the US and Canada).

Disputes between editors over date formats are avoided by using three simple guidelines.

Consistency within articles

• The same format should be used in the main text, footnotes and references of each article, except for:
  • dates within quotations and titles, where the original format is retained;
  • explicit comparisons of date formatting.

Strong national ties to a topic

Articles on topics with strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation should generally use the more common date format for that nation.

Retaining the existing format

• If an article has evolved using predominantly one format, the whole article should conform to that variety, unless there are reasons for changing it on the basis of strong national ties to the topic.
• In the early stages of writing an article, the format chosen by the first major contributor to the article should be used, unless there is reason to change it on the basis of strong national ties to the topic. Where an article that is not a stub shows no clear sign of which format is used, the first person to insert a date is equivalent to the first major contributor.

Other formatting issues

• Wikipedia does not use ordinal suffixes, articles, or of, or put a comma between month and year. The following formats are unacceptable: February 14th, 14th February, the 14th of February, October of 1976, and October, 1976.*Date ranges are preferably given with minimal repetition (5–7 January 1979; September 21–29, 2002), using an unspaced en dash. If the autoformatting function is used, the opening and closing dates of the range must both be displayed in full and be separated by a spaced en dash.
• Rarely, a night may be expressed in terms of the two contiguous dates using a slash (the bombing raids of the night of 30/31 May 1942); this cannot be done using the autoformatting function.
• Yearless dates (5 March, March 5) are inappropriate unless the year is obvious from the context or irrelevant ("January 1 is New Year's Day").
• ISO 8601 dates (1976-05-12) are uncommon in English prose, and are generally not used in Wikipedia. However, they may be useful in long lists and tables for concision and ease of comparison. Note that this is a YYYY-MM-DD format, never YYYY-DD-MM, and retains leading zeroes.
• Wikipedia has articles on days of the year, years, decades, centuries and millennia. Link to one of these pages only if it is likely to deepen readers' understanding of a topic. Piped links to pages that are more focused on a topic are possible ([[1997 in South African sport|1997]]), but cannot be used in full dates, where they break the date-linking function.