Talk:Intelsat 5

ISO 8601 time format
The ISO 8601 should be used for articles due to their geographic independence and logical layout relationship to the decimal system. More over satellite articles should use them as any spacecraft is launched, operated and decommissioned on the UTC offset and the ISO 8601 format reflects this timezone the best. Unlike long formatted ambiguous date strings that are only easily readable for local timezones. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Helmboy (talk • contribs) 01:43, 28 September 2013‎
 * Okay, I really don't understand your position. True, the ISO format is better than other short date formats (dd/mm/yy, mm/dd/yy and yy/mm/dd can be confused) however that isn't the issue here because the article is using long dates with the month names spelled out. How can "August 28, 1997, 00:33:30 UTC" possibly be ambiguous? That is readable to anyone who can read English, whereas far fewer people are familiar with the ISO format, and especially the military-style formatting you used. I can understand what it means, but I'd expect many readers to be confused by the presence of a T in the middle of the string and not to interpret the "Z" as meaning zulu, or UTC, time. I can also assure you there is no "official" date format to use with UTC times - I live in a country which uses UTC (at least for the half of the year that my government doesn't insist on arbitrarily moving the clocks forward an hour) and absolutely never use this date format. If you're insistent on changing to a date format which "reflects" UTC, we use "D MMMM YYYY" in my country - although I'd rather follow WP:TIES/WP:RETAIN and keep this one in the American format. -- W.  D.   Graham  09:14, 28 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Huh? With the exception of RFC email and HTTP headers both long date formats were only designed to display local time only with no indication of timezone. Also the correct suffix for long formats for UTC is the offset +0000 which was taken from the ISO format, the Z is just shorthand for zero offset, not Zulu.  As for military-style formatting, they use the phonetic alphabet instead of time offsets with J for local time, most people in the science and technology sectors have embraced the ISO format due the the stated reasons in the first post.  Not using the format for the reason that people are not use to it, is like countries like the US not going metric at all because most Americans are use to imperial, even though they redefined imperial, essentially creating another measurement system.  But then the UK went metric and still kept using miles.  Also both long formats only achieved wide acceptance because the Catholic church promoted one and newspapers promoted the other and look where they are today.  Behind the times, outdated and slow to change, just like their followers.Helmboy (talk) 11:42, 28 September 2013 (UTC)
 * And if your want to follow WP:TIES/WP:RETAIN, as stated spacecraft are in space and outside of a single geographic area, so the international format should be used.Helmboy (talk) 11:48, 28 September 2013 (UTC)
 * First of all, you are already on record as saying that there are national ties to the United States. It is a US satellite. Most of the events aren't happening in any particular timezone, so quite rightly UTC is used, however the language and date formats used should reflect the country of origin. While "most people in the science and technology sectors have embraced the ISO format", this article needs to be accessible to non-experts who have not embraced that format. Long date formats are in general use throughout the world, understandable to anyone with the most basic grasp of English. Per WP:DATESNO, ISO dates "are uncommon in English prose" and your desire to promote their usage does not seem a valid rationale to change this. The only place such date formats should be used in Wikipedia besides references is "in long lists and tables for conciseness" - in the case of an infobox - the primary source of basic information to readers - clarity is clearly more important than conciseness. -- W.  D.   Graham  14:38, 28 September 2013 (UTC)
 * For the last time it's a object in space, like international waters is outside of territorial boundaries. The spacecraft is generally self controlled with operational commands and uplinks that can come from anywhere on Earth.  Secondly like any encyclopedia that is used, it is a source of knowledge for learning, if you don't make the reader adapt to a better way of thinking, then is that reader really going to learn from what they have read.   And last of all the infobox is a table so the use of the long outdated format is mute, also the info box is the most compact table used so conciseness should be a priority.Helmboy (talk) 21:02, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Geographical location has nothing, whatsoever, to do with date format. Different formats may be used in different countries, and per WP:TIES the format should reflect if their is a country with strong national ties to the subject - in this case the nationality of the satellite's operator. And yes, events occurring in space should be given in UTC - but nowhere does it say that events occurring outside a region with an established date format should use an obscure "international" format. Your entire argument has been based on your claim - for which you have provided no evidence whatsoever - that this is somehow the "official" date format of UTC. Living in the UTC timezone I can assure you that you are wrong, and even if you weren't, the manual of style says nothing about using this format for this reason. The rest of the arguments you have made are that you just don't like it, which carries no weight whatsoever. Please provide some evidence to support your position, because as things stand you aren't going to convince enough other editors to find a consensus to change this page, or any others. -- W.  D.   Graham  08:01, 29 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Huh!?! Space is NOT geographic as it's not on Earth since Earth is in space.  Also no one lives in UTC, people live in regions that are offset from UTC ie, London is either UTC+0000 or UTC-0000 or UTC+0100 depending on the season.  GMT is the same, just without fractions of a second for leap seconds.   Bottom-line is, as you stated short dates like the ISO format should be used in tables for conciseness and given the extremely small size of the infobox table long dates strings should NOT be used.  If you are worried readers having comprehension issues, then the ISO date can have a link to the ISO 8601 article for clarification.Helmboy (talk) 12:10, 29 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Firstly, don't put words into my mouth, I never said that "short dates like the ISO format should be used in tables". Secondly, while it is technically a template the infobox is a special case and is not generally regarded as a template - an in any case most articles use long dates in infoboxes. Thirdly you have still not provided any evidence to support your dubious assertion of a link between the ISO date format and UTC. -- W.  D.   Graham  16:39, 29 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Quoting from your post The only place such date formats should be used in Wikipedia besides references is "in long lists and tables for conciseness".  The infobox is a template that generates a specifically formatted and very compact HTML table, similar to the wikitable template.   Long dates should only be use in prose for better integration with the grammatical structure of a sentence.  And lastly, ISO 8601 dates were design from the start to use a timezone offset.  Long date formats have been around long before UTC or GMT were and have their roots in local time.  It is grammatically incorrect to tact on a geographic or timezone after any long formatted date.Helmboy (talk) 23:37, 29 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I said that, and went on to explain why it wasn't relevant here so don't just cherry-pick a quote to suit your own ends. Infoboxes may be an HTML table, but they are not a table in the wiki-sense of the word. To be quite frank with you, the rest of your statement is starting to sound like a crank theory because you just keep restating it and never have any evidence to back it up. I can assure you that timezones predate the ISO date format. -- W.  D.   Graham  08:58, 30 September 2013 (UTC)


 * (Coming here from WikiProject Spaceflight) The common practice as far as infoboxes go is to use long date formats. Infoboxes have plenty of space for that, and aren't compact tables (in the common sense of the word), so ISO dates do not really have to be used in them. Other than that, the WP:MOSNUM policy isn't to use ISO dates for subjects that may be connected to areas where ISO dates are commonly used, but rather to use long date formats everywhere. Timezones are not relevant here, as long date formats can be used to represent various timezones just as well as ISO dates can—see Apollo 11 if you want an example. There isn't really any particular need to use ISO8601 in this article, and in the absence of such a need there is no reason to hammer it in anyway.  — daranz [ t ] 11:01, 30 September 2013 (UTC)