Template talk:Use dmy dates

Use on templates
This template is used on templates which are then transcluded onto articles. This results in situations such as this on 2010 United Kingdom general election where pages find themselves in multiple maintance cats (in this case the article has  and the template (Template:2010 United Kingdom parliamentary election) has  ). This is a problem because templates don't appear in the tracking categories, making it very difficult to see why 2010 United Kingdom general election is in Category:Use dmy dates from July 2013 (because it is transcluded from the template), effectively meaning that the tracking category for certain months aren't likely to be cleared, as it is very hard to work out why certain articles are still in them. So would it be possible to allow pages in the template name space to appear in the tracking cats? Then we can put the templare in a  tag. SSSB (talk) 13:33, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm struggling to see what advantage having this template transcluded via another actually brings. Surely this is an article level template that should be used at an individual article level. Having a template coded with  so that it puts all of its articles in the 2020 category, regardless of if they truly should be there, seems a bit odd. What massive advantage am I missing? - X201 (talk) 13:54, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I do not think that this set of templates should be used in the template namespace but only in article namespace. Otherwise you can end up with conflicting entries on some articles. i.e. use dmy dates in the article and use mdy dates from a transluded template. I have been attempting to resolve this situation by removing the one in the template. Keith D (talk) 16:28, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I agree. Templates that cause dates to be shown should be coded in a way that allows date formats to be customised by a parameter if they don't obey the article level template. They should not impose their own format. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:34, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Is it still worth having the cats list those in the template space, so we can track and remove them - or can we get a bot to remove them for us? SSSB (talk) 16:31, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * There are times when it is valid to place (or similar) in a template; but when that is done, it must be inside . -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:41, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I have modified the documentation here and at use mdy dates to reflect the above discussion, and I have checked all of the tranclusions in template space to ensure that they are properly noincluded (or removed, in the case of stub templates). – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:56, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Should all articles have a dmy/mdy template?
Input is welcome at Wikipedia talk:Date formattings. – Uanfala (talk) 01:14, 21 April 2022 (UTC)

"High-use" template glitch?
I was just looking at the script documentation page and was mildly shocked to read that "This template is used on approximately 1,530,000 pages, or roughly 3% of all pages." It made me wonder if the number if articles on English Wikipedia have exploded astronomically since I last checked. --  Ohc  revolution of our times 20:10, 6 May 2022 (UTC)
 * You can use  which will suppress the 'percent of all pages' annotation.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 21:46, 6 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks, will do. --  Ohc  revolution of our times 22:06, 6 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Pages here does not mean 'articles' only: it includes redirects, talk pages, categories, user pages... – Uanfala (talk) 13:46, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Whitespace
Might a recent change be causing whitespace at the top of (some) articles? Maybe ones that weren’t affected by having a blank line between the infobox and lede previously. See this page, which I've since fixed. The other template at the top of that article is Use British English, which hasn't been modified recently. I've seen this issue in many articles recently, which is a concern. Seasider53 (talk) 22:36, 14 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Because the fix for the extraneous whitespace was to remove an extra line feed (U+000A, \n) character from the article, this template cannot be the thing that inserted that LF. In fact, that extraneous line feed has been in the article since the article was created.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:00, 14 June 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't think it was, though (or maybe, more likely, that was a bad example). I've removed blank lines from such locations in roughly twenty articles of mine recently that I know didn't have them to begin with. I'll try to find them. Seasider53 (talk) 23:13, 14 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Did they all use ? If so, . The problem arose in where  added two newlines, instead of one (normal) or none (best). -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 15:19, 15 June 2022 (UTC)
 * My bad, I will make sure to avoid adding unnecessary newlines in the future. Terasail [✉️] 17:53, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

General discussion regarding use of this/these templates
Is this the system that we should be using to monitor the consistent use of dates in the articles? Does it need to be done at all? Is there a better way to go about it? Please drop your ideas and/or suggestions here. Dawnseeker2000 04:45, 21 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Yes, it is the system - along with the companion template.
 * Yes,it needs to be done because editors tend to be lazy or nonobservant. I spend a lot of time making articles consistent - and then doing it again because a new editor uses his/her local format even when the entire article uses the other format.
 * I can't think of any better system and it is a lot better than the wild west we had before - and yes, we've tried real hard to think of better. It would be nice if the reader could have a preference to display them in his/her local format but there are technical problems doing this (US format has weird problems with grammar in many cases) and readers not logged in get which format?  Stepho  talk 06:21, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

The only abuse I could see is editors updating all the "Use X dates" date on a monthly, or even yearly basis (i.e. from last month/year to this month), without any significant changes to the article since the last check, and with no needed fixes to the article's date formats, and with no other page cleanup/etc. Articles whose date formats have not been confirmed in 10+ years, though, I think should be checked & confirmed regardless of any other changes to the page (i.e. that date is the only necessary change after a thorough examination), and there is a grey area there somewhere between those 2 extremes. I run a large amount of other cleanup code, regex, and WP:GenFixes alongside each of these 10+ year updates, but maybe 25% have no changes (though it can vary quite a bit from one month to the next). Last-checked dates of any age should be updated whenever there's a change to a non-conforming date, of course. ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf) 12:19, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
 * My experience is that this is indeed needed, because otherwise editors with scripts will run around converting all the dates in your articles and then saying that it didn't have a consistent format so they needed to convert them. With these templates, you can document that your preferred format is the intended consistent format, and you can get the citation templates to auto-convert any that you accidentally format inconsistently (or more often that other editors add later formatted inconsistently). —David Eppstein (talk) 07:11, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
 * This discussion needs to be held at a wider venue like VPT. Use dmy dates is not the only template this discussion concerns, it's also all of the "Use ..." templates at Category:Templates with no visible output. InfiniteNexus (talk) 19:51, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Not necessarily. The primary difference between most "Use" templates and these two is that the instructions here ask editors and bots to update the date parameter after checking an article and fixing any malformatted dates. That causes too much watchlist noise for at least one editor. The other "Use" templates use the date parameter for the date that the template was added, not the date that it was last verified. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:18, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
 * The template documentations may say (or not say) one thing, but most editors in my experience are unaware of the specifics and simply change all of the templates at once, understandably applying the same logic to all "Use" templates. User:Ohconfucius/script/EngvarB, and possibly other tools, automatically updates the date in Engvar templates. If we end up deciding to remove the date parameter outright, as someone suggested in the previous discussion, then that should logically apply to the other "Use" templates as well. InfiniteNexus (talk) 01:31, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
 * For me, it's a substantive edit as it indicates that work has been done. It's certainly the intention of the project. While I personally run my barrage of scripts and so there is never a null edit, to have them occasionally is the nature of the beast. I can also understand the watchers' viewpoint, but hounding of editors who do this work and whose only changes are to the template is to overreact. I just don't see another way of running date audits but would welcome alternative ideas. --  Ohc  revolution of our times 13:46, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
 * It is your script. You could fix it to handle all date formats instead of running roughshod over cs1-dates=ly formats and refusing to fix it. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:18, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
 * The script doesn't "run roughshod over cs1-dates=ly formats" in that the parameter isn't disturbed, and thus the rendered output isn't affected. --  Ohc  revolution of our times 08:29, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
 * It violates WP:DATEVAR by changing all the dates in the source to not respect that format. And in articles that consistently follow cs1-dates=ly format but that have not already been marked with a date format template, it adds a date format template inconsistent with that style. I consider your response above to be yet another refusal to acknowledge that there is a problem with your script, and do not consider complaining about your failure to fix it or about editors who use it and in doing so violate DATEVAR to be "hounding of editors who do this work". —David Eppstein (talk) 08:37, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
 * FWIW, I took "hounding of editors who do this work" to be referring to things like @ User talk:Tom.Reding, not as a response to a complaint about their script, though I don't use 's script(s) and am not privy to discussions surrounding them. (I did try installing MOSNUM dates recently, but nothing showed up, which I suspect is due to me running now-unsupported versions of my OS & browser.)  ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  11:17, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, monitoring/tracking of date formats is useful to the encyclopedia for helping to maintain consistency. As not every editors knows about, or wants to run, WikiBlame, to find the last date-consistent version of a page, having December 2023 makes it very quick and convenient to nail down that point in the history to then check the changes since then.
 * It should added to Bot policy, the template documentations, or some other page to clarify that mass-updating dates without making other substantive changes is disruptive, since it doesn't fall under WP:COSMETICBOT. It just happened again on my watchlist (with a different editor than last time). InfiniteNexus (talk) 01:34, 26 December 2023 (UTC)
 * "mass-updating" and "disruptive" are subjective here, as it depends on what fraction of the edited pages are on the affected user's watchlist, and whether the user is watching their watchlist between the time of the edits and when new, unrelated edits overtake/bury them. For example, thousands of these edits to lightly watched pages may go largely unnoticed, while 500 edits to highly watched pages would consume many editors' watchlists. As such, any requests to slow down or pause for a reasonable time should be respected. A few hundred of these edits per day I think is a reasonable threshold, with an upper limit set by any such requests (and the editor's own time & attention).  ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  11:24, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
 * But there's no point in updating these hidden categories if none of the citations are updated. InfiniteNexus (talk) 01:41, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Imagine you're an editor that cares about date consistency, and you see a page with a very old January 2012.
 * You decide to check if the page complies with the dmy/mdy assertion.
 * It does, and you move on.
 * Another editor comes by that also cares about date consistency, and sees the same old date.
 * The cycle repeats.
 * You yourself come to the same page some time later, not remembering each page you've checked.
 * The cycle repeats.
 * As time goes on, the date gets older and older, becoming a brighter and brighter flag to investigate.
 * The cycle repeats.  ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  10:31, 1 January 2024 (UTC)