Wikipedia:Date formattings

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Active Wiki Fixup Projects
Leading the charge in the War on Error! Must be active, systematic, have lists, & need help.
Writing
Dead-end pages These pages are not wikified. (Updated 11 January 2007)
Most wanted stubs (Updated from January 25 2006 dump, all still active as of Feb 2007)
Most wanted articles (Updated 2007-02-11)
Missing articles Wikipedia is not as complete as you might think! (ongoing)
Other
Stubsensor Help remove the stub tag from articles it does not belong on. (Updated 8 March 2007)
Uncategorised articles Help categorise articles. (Category, live update)
Orphaned articles Help link to these orphaned articles. (Category, live update)
Articles that need to be wikified Massive backlog. (Category, live update)
Orphaned talk pages Talk pages without corresponding articles. Administrators only.
Disambiguation pages with links (Updated February 6, 2007)
Linkrot Fix broken links to external websites. (Updated January 13, 2007)
Transwiki log cleanup Articles that have been transwikied and need to be checked for possible merging or deletion.
Main - Inactive - Mini

Aim: to fix up all date references on WP be cromulant with the MoS WP:DATES

Note that this is a moving target - every day hundreds if not thousands of incorrectly formatted/linked dates come into being. However we do have #Tools to help us.

1 Full dates
- 1.1 Areas to avoid
2 Day month or month day
3 Date ranges
4 Centuries
5 Months and days of week
- 5.1 Whitelists
6 Month year combinations
7 Tools

[edit] Full dates

Full dates should be linked per MOSNUM

[edit] Areas to avoid

Direct quotes
Proper names (eg. organisations, movements, book titles)
Names of images
Wikilinks
URLs

- Tip: sometimes inserting a non-breaking space between day and month can prevent a date being picked up in future.

[edit] Day month or month day

Beware rare false positives, for example:

The Long March 2 Rocket

[edit] Date ranges

Something like 12 - 13 July (or May 21-22) needs to become the slightly unfortunate 12 July - 13 July. If only one date is linked some people will see 12 - July 13 or 21 May - 22.

[edit] Centuries

In many cases centuries have been given an un-cromulent capital C. or a capital for the ordinal e.g. Eighteenth. Also sentences starting with a numeral should be changed where possible, either by using words or by re-casting. The Oxford style manual recommends using words throughout.

Also look out for Roman numerals, especailly in articles translated frmo the French.

Avoid changing case in titles of books or articles. (Except we convert all-caps titles as a mtter of MoS anyway.)

[edit] Months and days of week

Months and days of the week should only rarely be linked.

Irregular task: chose a month or day of week, click "what links here" and remove any undesirable links. Note that links can be piped links, or using the cite web template accessdate=February (replace with accessmonthday=February).

[edit] Whitelists

We maintain provisional "whitelists" of articles which may have one or more valid links, please feel free to add new instances or remove any that are wrong.

Note a rough catchall is Category:<something>calender(s) and Category:Days , Months and Weeks

/Whitelist Monday
/Whitelist Tuesday
/Whitelist Wednesday
/Whitelist Thursday
/Whitelist Friday
/Whitelist Saturday
/Whitelist Sunday

[edit] Month year combinations

Generally Month Year or Year Month should not be linked.

/Whitelist Month Year

[edit] Tools

Useful tools include:

The wiki itself:
- What links here
AWB see WP:AWB
- Here is some XML to unlink dates, based on User:Bobblewik's dates javascript.
- Here is XML that solely unlinks "straight" links to days of week and months of year
Javascript
- For unlinking dates
- For linking dates