User:Yamara/Sandbox-helptime

Precise language
Avoid statements that will date quickly, except on pages that are regularly updated, such as those that cover current events. Avoid such items as recently and soon (unless their meaning is clear in a storyline), currently (except on rare occasions when it is not redundant), in modern times, is now considered and is soon to be superseded. Instead, use either:
 * more precise items (since the start of 2005; during the 1990s; is expected to be superseded by 2008); or
 * an as of phrase (as of August 2007), which is a signal to readers of the time-dependence of the statement, and to later editors of the need to update the statement (see As of).

Times
Context determines whether the 12- or 24-hour clock is used; in both, colons separate hours, minutes and seconds (1:38:09 pm and 13:38:09).
 * 12-hour clock times end with dotted or undotted lower-case a.m. or p.m., or am or pm, which are spaced (2:30 p.m. or 2:30 pm, not 2:30p.m. or 2:30pm). Noon and midnight are used rather than 12 pm and 12 am; whether midnight refers to the start or the end of a date will need to be specified unless this is clear from the context.
 * 24-hour clock times have no a.m., p.m., noon or midnight suffix. Discretion may be used as to whether the hour has a leading zero (08:15 or 8:15). 00:00 refers to midnight at the start of a date, 12:00 to noon, and 24:00 to midnight at the end of a date.

Dates

 * Wikipedia does not use ordinal suffixes or articles, or put a comma between month and year.
 * {| class="wikitable"

! Incorrect ! Correct ! Incorrect ! Correct
 * -valign=top
 * February 14th, 14th February, the 14th of February
 * -valign=top
 * 14 February, February 14
 * -valign=top
 * October, 1976
 * -valign=top
 * 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 be given in full (see Autoformatting and linking) 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. There is no such ambiguity with recurring events, such as "January 1 is New Year's Day".
 * ISO 8601 dates (1976-05-13) are uncommon in English prose, and are generally not used in Wikipedia. However, they may be useful in long lists and tables for conciseness and ease of comparison.

Full date formatting
In general, the following formats are acceptable:
 * International format: 14 February and 14 February 1991 (more common in many countries);
 * American format: February 14 and February 14, 1990 (more common in the US).

Disputes between editors over date formats are avoided by using three simple guidelines. See also autoformatting and linking.


 * 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.

Articles on topics with strong ties to a particular English-speaking nation should generally use the more common date format for that nation; articles related to Canada may use either format consistently. Articles related to other countries that commonly use one of the two acceptable guidelines above should use that format.
 * Strong national ties to a topic


 * 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.

Dates of birth and death
At the start of an article on a person, his or her dates of birth and death are provided. For example: "Charles Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was a British ..."
 * Locations of birth and death are given subsequently rather than being entangled with the dates.
 * When only the years are known: "Socrates (470–399 BC) was ..."
 * For a person still living: "Serena Williams (born September 26 1981) ...", not "... (September 26 1981–) ..."
 * When the date of birth is unknown: "Offa (died 26 July 796) ..."
 * When the date of birth is known only approximately: "Genghis Khan (c. 1162 – August 18, 1227) ..."
 * When the dates of both birth and death are known only approximately: "Dionysius Exiguus (c. 470 – c. 540) ..."
 * When the date of death is unknown, but the person is certainly now dead: "Robert Menli Lyon (born 1789, date of death unknown) ..."
 * When only the dates of the person's reign are known, and only approximately: "Rameses III (reigned c. 1180 BCE – c. 1150 BCE) ..."
 * When the person is known to have been alive (flourishing) at certain dates,  is used to link to floruit, in case the meaning is not familiar: "Osmund (fl. 760–72) ..."
 * When the person is known to have been alive as early as about 660, and to have died in 685: "Aethelwalh (fl. c. 660–85) ..."

In biographical infobox templates, provide age calculation with birth date and age for living people and death date and age for the deceased when the full birth or death date, respectively, is known.

Other date ranges
Dates that are given as ranges should follow the same patterns as given above for birth and death dates. Ranges that come up to the present (as of the time that the information was added to the article) should generally be given in ways that prevent their becoming counterfactually obsolete, e.g. from 1996 onward (as of October 2007), not from 1996 to the present; "the present" is a constantly moving target. In the main text of articles, the form 1996– (with no date after the en-dash) should not be used, though it is preferred in infoboxes and other crowded templates or lists, with the caveat that they may need to be examined by editors more frequently to see if they need to be updated; it is helpful to other editors to add an HTML comment immediately after such constructions, giving the as-of date, e.g.:. The form since 1996' should be used in favor of 1996–present in article text and infoboxes.

Longer periods

 * Months are expressed as whole words (February, not 2), except in the ISO 8601 format. Abbreviations such as Feb are used only where space is extremely limited, such as in tables and infoboxes. Do not insert of between a month and a year (April 2000, not April of 2000).


 * Seasons. Because the seasons are not simply reversed in each hemisphere—and areas near the equator tend to have just wet and dry seasons—neutral wording may be preferable (in early 1990, in the second quarter of 2003, around September). Use a date or month rather than a season name, unless there is a logical connection (the autumn harvest). Seasons are normally spelled with a lower-case initial.
 * Years
 * Years are normally expressed in digits; a comma is not used in four-digit years (1988, not 1,988).
 * Avoid inserting the words the year before the digits (1995, not the year 1995), unless the meaning would otherwise be unclear.
 * Either CE and BCE or AD and BC can be used—spaced, undotted (without periods) and upper-case. Choose either the BC/AD or the BCE/CE system, but not both in the same article. Style guides generally recommend writing AD before a year (AD 1066) and after a century (2nd century AD); however, writing AD after the year (1066 AD) is also common in practice. The other abbreviations always appear after (1066 CE, 3700 BCE, 3700 BC). The absence of such an abbreviation indicates the default, CE/AD. It is inappropriate for a Wikipedia editor to change from one style to another unless there is a substantive reason; the Manual of Style favors neither system over the other.
 * Uncalibrated (bce) radiocarbon dates: Do not give uncalibrated radiocarbon dates (represented by the lower-case bce unit, occasionally bc or b.c. in some sources), except in directly quoted material, and even then include a footnote, a &#91;square-bracketed editor's note&#93;, or other indication to the reader what the calibrated date is, or at least that the date is uncalibrated. Calibrated and uncalibrated dates can diverge surprisingly widely, and the average reader does not recognize the distinction between bce and BCE / BC.
 * Year ranges, like all ranges, are separated by an en dash (do not use a hyphen or slash (2005–08, not 2005-08 or 2005/08)). A closing CE/AD year is normally written with two digits (1881–86) unless it is in a different century from that of the opening year (1881–1986). The full closing year is acceptable, but abbreviating it to a single digit (1881–6) or three digits (1881–886) is not. A closing BCE or BC year is given in full (2590–2550 BCE). While one era signifier at the end of a date range requires an unspaced en dash (12–5 BC), a spaced en dash is required when a signifier is used after the opening and closing years (5 BC – AD 29).
 * A slash may be used to indicate regular defined yearly periods that do not coincide with calendar years (the financial year 1993/94).
 * Abbreviations indicating long periods of time ago—such as BP (before present), as well as various annum-based units such as Ka (kiloannum) and kya (thousand years ago), Ma (megaannum) and mya (million years ago), and Ga (gigaannum or billion years ago)—are given as full words and wikilinked on first occurrence.
 * BP: Do not convert other notations to BP unless you are certain of what you are doing. In some contexts the unit BP is actually defined as "years before 1950 CE/AD", not "years before the literal present", and the conversion may introduce an error if the date being converted is not a wide approximation (18,000 BP) but a more narrow one or an actual known year. BP years are given as 18,000 BP or spelled out as 18,000 years before present (not 18,000 YBP, 18,000 before present, 18,000 years before the present, etc.)
 * To indicate around/approximately/about), the abbreviations c. and ca. are preferred over circa, approximately or approx., and are spaced (c. 1291). Do not use a question mark for this function (1291?), as this may indicate to the reader an uncertainty on the part of Wikipedia editors rather than on the part of reliable historians.


 * Decades contain no apostrophe (the 1980s, not the 1980’s); the two-digit form is used only where the century is clear (the ’80s or the 80s).
 * Centuries and millennia
 * There was no year 0. Thus, the first century CE was AD 1–100, the 17th century AD was 1601–1700 CE, and the second millennium AD/CE was 1001–2000; the first century BCE was 100–1 BC; the 17th century BC was 1700–1601 BCE, and the second millennium BCE was 2000–1001 BC.
 * Use figures to name centuries, not words (the 9th century; not the ninth century).
 * Do not capitalize century or millennium.
 * Because expressions like the 1700s are ambiguous (referring to a century or a decade), they are best avoided.

Calendars
Dates can be given in any appropriate calendar, as long as the date in either the Julian or Gregorian calendars is provided, as described below. For example, an article on the early history of Islam may give dates in both Islamic and Julian calendars. Where a calendar other than the Julian or Gregorian is used, this must be clear to readers.
 * Current events are given in the Gregorian calendar.
 * Dates before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar on 1582-10-15 are normally given in the Julian calendar. The Julian day and month should not be converted to the Gregorian calendar, but the start of the Julian year should be assumed to be 1 January (see below for more details).
 * Dates for Roman history before 45 BC are given in the Roman calendar, which was neither Julian nor Gregorian. When (rarely) the Julian equivalent is certain, it may be included.
 * The Julian or Gregorian equivalent of dates in early Egyptian and Mesopotamian history is often debatable. Follow the consensus of reliable sources, or indicate their divergence.
 * Dates of events in countries using the Gregorian calendar are given in the Gregorian calendar. This includes some of the Continent of Europe from 1582, the British Empire from 1752-09-14, and Russia from 1918-02-14 (see the Gregorian calendar article).

The dating method used in a Wikipedia article should follow that used by reliable secondary sources. If the reliable secondary sources disagree, choose the most common used by reliable secondary sources and note the usage in a footnote.

At some places and times, dates other than 1 January were used as the start of the year. The most common English-language convention is the Annunciation Style used in Britain and its colonies, in which the year started on 25 March, Annunciation Day; see the New Year article for a list of other styles. 1 January is assumed to be the opening date for years; if there is reason to use another start-date, this should be stated.

If there is a need to mention Old Style or New Style dates in an article (as in the Glorious Revolution), a footnote should be provided on the first usage, stating whether the "New Style" refers to a start of year adjustment or to the Gregorian calendar (it can mean either).

Time zones
When writing a date, first consider where the event happened and use the time zone there. For example, the date of the Attack on Pearl Harbor should be December 7, 1941 (Hawaii time/date). If it is difficult to judge where, consider what is significant. For example, if a vandal based in Japan attacked a Pentagon computer in the United States, use the time zone for the Pentagon, where the attack had its effect. If known, include the UTC date and time of the event in the article, indicating that it is UTC.

Autoformatting and linking

 * Full dates, and days and months, are normally autoformatted 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.

Do not put square brackets around dates when

 * in article and section headings,
 * on disambiguation pages,
 * within quotations (unless the original text was wikilinked).
 * in date ranges within the same calendar month. The autoformatting mechanism does not work correctly with date ranges (December 13–17, 1951) or slashes (the night of 30/31 May).

Limit links to other time period related articles
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.

Do not use piped links for date elements that cause date formatting problems
Piped links to pages that are more focused on a topic are possible. But see next paragraph.

Do not pipe links to date elements that contain a month and a day e.g. 20 or June 20 or 20 June 1997. Such piped links break the date formatting function.

Templates: Calendars
There are a number of templates used to construct calendars, either current or prospective.


 * Template:Calendar
 * Template:CalendarSelAnniv
 * Template:CalendarSingle
 * Template:CalendarSource
 * Template:Calendar download
 * Template:Calendar thank you
 * Template:Calendar today

Month templates

 * Template:Calendar/MonthStartSun
 * Template:Calendar/MonthStartMon
 * Template:Calendar/MonthStartTue
 * Template:Calendar/MonthStartWed
 * Template:Calendar/MonthStartThu
 * Template:Calendar/MonthStartFri
 * Template:Calendar/MonthStartSat