Template talk:Start date text/doc

Terminology

Coordinated Universal Time did not exist in its present form until 1972. One could discuss whether the time scale stretched back into the 1960s, but certainly it cannot be traced back far enough to meet the needs of Wikipedia, which covers all of recorded history. Thus I suggest the term UT (for Universal Time) be used instead in the documentation.

Also note that ISO 8601 does not require that UTC be used, but Z is the UTC designator. Thus microformats that use that designator violate ISO 8601 whenever they give a date and time before UTC was defined. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 16:37, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Please feel free to change the docs to suit the UT terminology, or make other such improvements. Regarding Z- yes it is not required by ISO, and there is an issue that users may not be aware of the implications. I will lift my note to A. di M and put it here since this may be a topic of interest: Note that I always emit UTZ as the first parameter demands users be specific with time zones if they specify hours and minutes. That was a tactical decision, not anything driven by the template. It allows the contributor to vary the precision eg hours only, but these values are meaningless without timezone. First parameter is about "what the time is", the second is "how the contributor wants it to appear. Just the same as the semantics of the familiar [[precise article name|abbreviated form of name]] pattern. You can link to fuzzy name articles but you will wind up on disambig pages. We can allow vagueness of course, and I can omit the Z at the cost of adding an additional parameter that explicitly declare that this is a valid UTC time. Junks it up a bit, and you are on the road to the wonky date templates again. Anyway, ISO date values can be verified in the Opera Browser or in articles that demo this template. Let me know if you are interested in verifying the microformats code emitted, and I will provide instructions and an example. I will make the change to whatever the consensus opinion is. I enumerated above my rationale for doing it one particular way, but I have no religious feelings on the matter. -J JMesserly (talk) 16:59, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

I am interested in verifying the microformats. I use Internet Explorer 7. I would like to clarify whether the microformat needs the Z to work, and if so, what organization says the Z should be used. I don't advocate removing the Z, just describing the format properly. For example, "this template emits a date in the format defined by the XYZ special interest group, which is a modified nonconforming variation of ISO 8601". --Gerry Ashton (talk) 17:52, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Microformats work perfectly fine without the Z. It is optional according to spec- ISO8601 says it is optional, and microformats spec do not contradict. So it is the communities' call whether we want to emit it or not. The only microformats extension that works directly on wikipedia at this point (at least that I am aware of) is the one for Firefox. I am a heavy IE user as well, but the firefox thing is free, stable and relatively easy to use so I just use that. Instructions on installation, and a very detailed case of its use may be found under "Case 2: at on this page: link to operator install just before Case 2". If you have any questions or problems, just drop a note here, as others may have the same questions -J JMesserly (talk) 18:42, 9 February 2009 (UTC)