User talk:Tony1/MOSNUM draft, date-format consistency

Notes from SG

 * American format: February 14 and February 14, 1990 (predominant in the US).

Can you change that to U.S. format? South America is American, and they use international style.
 * Where a citation template is used, all dates rendered via date-access fields should be consistently formatted throughout the "References" section.

Not quite, independent of whether a template is used, there should still be date consistency. And it's more than references: it's references, footnotes, further reading, external links (appendices at WP:LAYOUT). And it's not only date-access, it's also publication dates.

The word autoformatting in general is confusing; not everyone knows that refers to date linking so that dates are automatically formatted according to user preferences. That should be fleshed out.

Sandy Georgia (Talk) 23:35, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Sandy:

"They aren't necessary, but some editors use citation templates to list items in Further reading and External links. The take home message is that dates should be consistent throughout appendices as listed at WP:LAYOUT, regardless of whether citation templates are used. It doesn't mean they have to switch to ISO or not; as far as I know, this is doable across all possibilities, although the cite templates don't always make it easy. Citations go with the main text? That's the old discussion we already had at WT:MOS, where I thought it was decided that wasn't possible or easy, so we were going to punt to the option of consistency within text and separate consistency within citations? I thought we already had that discussion? Confoozled. Any reason we can't keep this on that talk page, to have everything in one place and off of my talk page?"


 * What aren't necessary?
 * Citation templates in Further reading, External links. But some editors use them there.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 00:50, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
 * So the internal consistency in the second "zone" that you propose is largely based on physical separation, I'm picking up. Is that correct?
 * "dates should be consistent throughout appendices as listed at WP:LAYOUT, regardless of whether citation templates are used"—I don't see how we can insist on consistency in the use of DA or DA-free dates in appendix zone. Does it exist now? Is it mandated now?  Tony   (talk)  00:47, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
 * What is DA? Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 00:49, 13 August 2008 (UTC)