User talk:Ed Poor/Current time

Why would anyone go to an encyclopedia to look up the current time? It's like the old joke of the poor farmer whose son walked into town to get the time, wrote it down on a piece of paper, and walked home excited and ready to tell his father proudly he "knew what time it was."

I conceive of this article as being able to show what time it is in the major parts of the English-speaking world. Ultimately, it could grow into the world's most authoritative article on what time it is all over the world. It will have to take into account time zones and daylight saving rules, some of which change frequently.

I've created a few templates, and when I have time I'll create some more.

My initial naming convention was been to use the best-known American city for each time zone, simply because I'm more familiar with US time zones and cities. When I publish the templates I'll mostly like use a scheme like this:


 * 19 -
 * 18 -

Any suggestions or requests? --Uncle Ed 13:03, 16 March 2006 (UTC)


 * All very cool. I see this article as a bit of a showcase for the template wizardry that makes it all work. However I think it will find most use as a little template added to location articles. That says "The time in PAGENAME is XX:XX". Another of those "top-right corner" little boxes. Pcb21 Pete 16:19, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Handling Daylight Saving
Problem: The Wikipedia server observes UTC, but the moment the date becomes April 2, 2006 in London it will still be 19:00 (7 PM) in New York. If the template sets new york time ahead one hour at that moment, then the time will be wrong! It shouldn't set the clock ahead until 02:00 (2 AM) local time or 07:00 UTC.

How can we fix this problem before it occurs? --Uncle Ed 01:39, 20 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Not sure if you've found a hack that works or not, but just as a stopped clock is right twice per day, perhaps Ed's template will be wrong twice per year (unless you are somewhere around UTC-1/-2, where you will miraculously jump the time at just the right time once per year!) Pcb21 Pete 16:19, 21 March 2006 (UTC)