Wikipedia:Mosnum/proposal on YYYY-MM-DD numerical dates

Proposal: to amend WP:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) as follows:

Present text: YYYY-MM-DD style dates (1976-05-31) are uncommon in English prose, and should not be used within sentences.

Proposed text: YYYY-MM-DD style dates (1976-05-31) are uncommon in English prose, and should not be used in sentences or footnotes.

-- Alarics (talk) 18:44, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Support

1. Support (as proposer). YYYY-MM-DD has become prevalent in citation footnotes largely as an accidental by-product of the former date autoformatting policy, now abandoned. The assumption was that readers would not actually see the date in that form. YYYY-MM-DD numerical dates were designed for computers to read; we are writing for humans, not machines. It looks jarring, and some people find it ambiguous. Along with other wording in MOSNUM which already deprecates other kinds of numerical dates as ambiguous, the intention of this change is to make clear that months should be written out as a word, giving the date in whichever order has been adopted as the norm for the article in question. -- Alarics (talk) 18:54, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
2. Support per nom; Alarics mentions all the points that I had myself stated elsewhere --Redrose64 (talk) 19:07, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
3. Support - I started seeing this in footnotes when I disabled my autoformatting prior to its deprecation. It has always looked odd, and ambigious, and I always assumed it was a by-product of autoformatting as Alarics has said. This accidental use is now being cited by some editors as precedence, but I believe this is accidental, and not with consensus.—MDCollins (talk) 19:40, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
4. Support: YYYY-MM-DD is unfamiliar and ambiguous to most non-technical readers, and makes it hard for them to style their own footnotes in a way that's reasonably compatible with the format of existing footnotes. (Not everyone uses citation templates.) A written-out or abbreviated month is also much more apparent to most eyes, when judging the proximity of an account to the event, or the freshness of a link. —— Shakescene (talk) 20:15, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
5. Support. I am one of those who finds YYYY-MM-DD ambiguous. My natural reaction is to assume that dates come before months, so if the DD is 12 or less I will generally read it as a month. My first reading of 2009-05-04 is 5 April, not 4 May. So when Eubulides says it's unambiguous in practice, I must dispute this. It may be unambiguous in theory, but this is irrelevant to most of our readers, who are unlikely to know the theory by which it is unambiguous. This is a systematic bias issue: a relatively large proportion of Wikipedians are technophiles and YYYY-MM-DD is, in most of the English-speaking world, a technophile's format. Better, surely to use an unambiguous and unmistakeable format such as 4 May 2009 (abbreviating other months as appropriate). Pfainuk talk 20:19, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
6. Support. Dates in the YYYY-MM-DD format are not commonly used in good writing generally. I also agree with the points made by the editors who have commented above. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 20:32, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
7. Support — per all above reasons & all reasons for eliminating YYYY-MM-DD per this discussion. 「ɠu¹ɖяy」¤ • ¢  20:47, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
8. Support There is tremendous confusion about whether ISO 8601 applies to the YYYY-MM-DD format. Many editors who espouse this format say that is IS0 8601 but have never read that standard. The format should be totally expunged from Wikipedia except in articles that discuss that format unless a Wikipedia POLICY is adopted which formally applies the standard to the format.

   Anyone who thinks it does not matter if the standard applies should go read the standard before commenting. --Jc3s5h (talk) 21:29, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

   • Much of that confusion is blather and nonsense. I have a copy of ISO 8601:1988 right in front of me as I write this, and CCYY-MM-DD is explicitly documented in §5.2.1.1 of the standard. Uncle G (talk) 03:09, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
     • Of course ISO 8601:2004 (the current version) uses the YYYY-MM-DD format. The question is, when you find a date written in the YYYY-MM-DD format, was the author governing himself/herself by ISO 8601. That is where the confusion lies. --Jc3s5h (talk) 03:20, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
       • No. That's just blather and nonsense, as I said. There's no actual confusion. Whether one writes 2009-09-30 because one knows ISO 8601 or because one was told to by little green mice from Venus, there is no actual confusion as to what the date is. It's CCYY-MM-DD either way, per the international standard or per the mice. Uncle G (talk) 03:37, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
         • No one learned about the format from little green mice from Venus; most learned about it by imitating dates they saw in that format. The problem is, they don't know what to do if they try to extend the format to dates they've never seen before in that format. And on Wikipedia, there is no one to tell them how to extend the format, because we have not adopted ISO 8601. --Jc3s5h (talk) 03:58, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
           • As I said, that's just blather and nonsense, and invention of confusion where none in fact exists. If one is writing CCYY-MM-DD, then there's nothing to know about "extending the format to dates they've never seen before". One knows what digit of the date to put where, irrespective of what date one is writing. Uncle G (talk) 04:16, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
             • So just how is someone who learned the format through imitation, and never saw a date outside the 19th and 20th century in that format, supposed to write February 24, 1582 in the YYYY-MM-DD format? --Jc3s5h (talk) 04:21, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
9. Support, per Alarics. I cringe when I see YYYY-MM-DD. Anathema to clear communication in my book, because the reader has to virtually stop and think about it to decipher it. Doesn't naturally flow. Kaiwhakahaere (talk) 21:37, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
10. Strong support. YYYY-MM-DD is ugly and brings no benefits that cannot be met by "29 September 2009" or "September 29, 2009", as appropriate for the article. —Josiah Rowe (talk • contribs) 21:42, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

    Or even just "29 Sept 2009"/"Sept 29 2009"... 「ɠu¹ɖяy」¤ • ¢  22:31, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

11. Strong support. Because: (a) it is not reader-friendly (i.e., it is not how readers speak the date); (b) it is ambiguous to most readers and most inputters (most people I submit are unaware of ISO; and are also unaware that while some countries opt for DD-MM in certain numerical formats, they don't follow that order in this format); (c) there is evidence that I have referenced below of computers, data processing programs, and programmers using the YYYY-DD-MM format (futher evidence of ambiguity); (d) we have an alternative (writing out or abbreviating months) that avoids the ambiguity completely with little or no loss of space; (e) "popularity" of the format on wikipedia has been exaggerated by highly active bots (including SmackBot and YoBot) changing editors' inputs from non-YYYY-MM-DD formats to the YYYY-MM-DD format, despite that not being overtly allowed by MOS; (f) it is a distinctly minority format on the web (as evidenced by a google search of over 100 million formats of the same date--and even that search likely overstated the degree to which editors chose the format, as that search likely included Wikipedia articles that had been revised by bots) and almost never (well under 1% of the time) in news articles searchable on google news; and (g) using the same standard for text and footnotes results in standardization, which makes the article more readable and appealing and is an overarching general goal of MOS.--Epeefleche (talk) 01:05, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
12. Support. Writing out the month removes all possible ambiguity. Yes, YYYY-MM-DD is an ISO standard, but I'm willing to bet most readers have never heard of it so there's still all sorts of potential for confusion. There's no reason not to use a completely unambiguous format when one is so easily available to us. BryanG (talk) 03:57, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    The thing is that these potentials for confusion do not, upon examination, turn out to actually exist. There's a fear of confusion, but no actual confusion to be fearful of. And as I said above, a lot of this is based upon blather and nonsense — stuff that is just pure invention and not actually true in fact. Like the nonsense claims that CCYY-MM-DD isn't an ISO 8601 date format (It is. The precise section of ISO 8601:1988 that specifies it is given above.) or that if one is writing CCYY-MM-DD there's some mysterious bogeyman that stops one from being able to, for example, work out how to write the year "1985" if one has only ever seen the year "2009" written in that format. Uncle G (talk) 04:16, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    You say "these potentials for confusion do not, upon examination, turn out to actually exist", but we have had a number of WP editors saying that they have, personally, actually been confused. Are you saying they are lying? And in any case, even some of us who do know what it means find that we have to stop and mentally "flip over" the date to work out what it is in terms the brain can understand, thus interrupting the thought process. It is therefore an obstacle to understanding. -- Alarics (talk) 06:55, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

13. Support. Tired to unpack YYYY-MM-DD to Month Day, Year or Day Month Year inside my brain. I know, i'm stupider than the average human being. --KrebMarkt 09:46, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
14. Strong supprt The sooner we get rid of that ambiguous row of numbers that is YYYY-MM-DD, the better. Debresser (talk) 10:02, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
15. Support ISO is not a standard used by any common reference system. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 11:28, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
16. Support YYYY-MM-DD is not familiar & there is no good reason to use it anywhere on Wikipedia (except hidden). JIMp _talk·cont 13:32, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
17. Support - regardless of how "technical" refs are in comparison to article prose, the simple fact is that we are here to write an encyclopedia, one that is intended primarily for (this is pretty clearly implied by our charter) and used primarily by laypersons. The average layperson is not going to know that we use ISO 8601 (or even know what that is), nor are they going to be able to see "2004-07-28" and just know that we mean "July 28, 2004"/"28 July 2004" without stopping and thinking about it (and woe to the average nontechie whose first ISO date encounter is with a date like "1999-04-06"). 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000} 16:40, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
18. Weak support. Abbreviated months would do the job quite fine, and we wouldn't have the strange inconsistency that dates without the day of the months are "September 2009" but those with it are "2009-09-30". (Another way to fix that would be using "2009-09" for the latter, but the hyphen in it looks dangerously similar to the dash in "2008–09", which is twenty-four months, not one.) ___A. di M. 17:45, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
19. Support All-numeric dates are not used by professional publications because they are inherently ambiguous because—nothwithstanding *international standards*—the real world has its own practices and those practices vary from English-speaking country to English-speaking country. Also, written-out months are easier to understand than counting on one’s finger as to what month “5” equals. That’s why in Encyclopedia Britannica (found internationally throughout the world), Scientific American, and pretty much any English-language newspaper distributed throughout the international community, you will never find the ugly abomination “2009-11-09” in body text; the expressions “November 9, 2009” and “9 November 2009” are much more natural and fluid to read and don’t distract as one tries to parse through the all-numeric expression. Greg L (talk) 21:15, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
20. Support. Why would anyone want to read "1976-12-31" when they can read "31 Dec 1976" or "Dec 31, 1976"? (I am of course supporting the use of abbreviated month names only when space restrictions apply—e.g. in footnotes as per the wording of the RfC) The YYYY-MM-DD format is very useful behind the scenes (e.g. for imposing a sort order in tables), but shouldn't be part of the text of a professional publication.  HWV258  22:01, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    There's an endless battle of which to use. 2009-09-30 is geographically neutral and everyone can understand it, unlike the other two. However, you can currently use whichever you choose. There's no need to say that people can't write them a certain way that's absolutely fine. If you prefer another format, you can still use that format. hmwith☮ 22:39, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    We are after professionalism, consistency and ease-of-use. Main body text copes easily with DD MMM versus MMM DD issues (trust me, I know something about that now). In terms of ease-of-use, "Aug" and "August" are much easier to understand than "08". You will not convince me that "2009-09-30" is easier to understand than "30 September 2009" or "30 Sep 2009" (especially when read at speed).  HWV258  23:15, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

21. Support. It has been consensus for years that each article should pick one date style and stick with it. Obviously that applies to footnotes as well, for the same reason we would not use American spelling in prose and British spelling in footnotes, or use en dashes in prose and em dashes in footnotes. Footnotes are part of the article, the MOS applies to them too, and there is no argument below for why footnotes should use a different date style.
    Most of the oppose arguments below are invalid because they are defending the use of YYYY-MM-DD in general, which is not what we are debating! It is already near-unanimous consensus that we do not use YYYY-MM-DD, and if someone wants that to change, they can start up a separate discussion for why it should be allowed. That discussion would get plenty of attention, but this isn't it. This discussion is whether footnotes should expressly use a different style than the rest of the article. Any argument that doesn't address that point is irrelevant. The point of this discussion is whether the MOS should be internally consistent (use one date format throughout the article, don't use YYYY-MM-DD in one part of the article, therefore don't use YYYY-MM-DD in the rest of the article).
    Since we're debating the format anyway, let me add: Yes, YYYY-MM-DD is unambiguous. So are normal dates! What, dare I ask, is "ambiguous" about "September 30, 2009" or "30 September 2009"? They are completely unambiguous. If normal dates were ambiguous, if there was any problem with normal dates, they would've been supplanted in normal writing. They have not been. Furthermore, YYYY-MM-DD is not unambiguous to people who have never seen it before. Yes, it's straightforward once you know what it is, but most of our readers are not familiar with it because it's extremely uncommon in literature. This is the same problem we had with binary units — yes, it's a nice format, and it's unambiguous once you know what it is, but we should use the language that our readers are familiar with because we're writing this for them. Our mission is not to spread new ideas! Our mission is to reflect the ideas of all published academics, and they use normal, English-language dates. So that's what we do. We use American English and international English where appropriate, because that's what other writers do, but we format our articles consistently, because that's what other writers do.
    The idea that we might someday have automatic date formatting is irrelevant as well. Right now, we don't. So that's the situation we need to deal with. The fact that some writers use YYYY-MM-DD doesn't particularly matter since most don't. The fact that some authors fight over American vs. British style is irrelevant because passing this proposal won't increase it and denying this proposal won't stop it. The idea that footnotes are "technical" is just meaningless; footnotes are for our readers and therefore accessibility to our readers is equally important. The idea that YYYY-MM-DD is an "international standard" is moot because the English language is an international standard with a far, far greater footprint. The idea that we should use YYYY-MM-DD for the benefit of non-English speakers is ridiculous; our entire encyclopedia is next to useless to non-English speakers without a translator which would have no problem with dates. The idea that it's commonly used is moot; normal dates are just as commonly used, and most of the existing cases are artifacts of the date-delinking event. The idea that this is "cruft" or "creep" doesn't really fly since this makes things less complicated (right now editors are getting the false impression that YYYY-MM-DD is somehow encouraged or required, which of course it's not). Obviously there's always IAR, we don't have to specify it every time.
    Again, I don't see any argument for using a different style guide for footnotes. If YYYY-MM-DD is better, we should use that everywhere. If it's worse, we shouldn't use it anywhere. There is no logical reason why they would be better than normal dates when used in footnotes and worse than normal dates when used in prose. So this proposal should, of course, be passed. —Noisalt (talk) 00:15, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Oppose. The style guidelines should not prohibit what is probably the most-commonly style used in Wikipedia footnotes.

   The use of yyyy-mm-dd dates is standard in some citation styles off-Wikipedia as well, e.g., the ISO 690-2 standard for citation format specifies it.

   The yyyy-mm-dd style is in common use off Wikipedia; for some recent examples, please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) #Real world often uses yyyy-mm-dd in citations.

   The style is not ambiguous in practice (unlike mm/dd/yyyy for which there is agreement that there is ambiguity).

   The main reason given for banning the style is that it is "jarring", which is another way to say WP:IDONTLIKEIT. This is not at all sufficient to prohibit a widely used, clear, and concise format.

   Eubulides (talk) 19:50, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

2. Oppose. Eub mentions a few good points, but there's another benefit, in that it prevents an outcropping of "how do we format the dates" (Day Month, Month Day) crap that affects the article body. No reason I can see for changing besides arbitrariness. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^(talk) 21:08, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
3. Oppose. Footnotes are not prose, and to lump them together is misleading. Footnotes are a technical part of an article, and a technical date format such as YYYY-MM-DD is entirely appropriate for such a purpose (especially in the accessdate field of citation templates). It also has the advantage of being unambiguous and language independent. Any attempt to legislate against the use of a widely used international standard format is bizarre in the least and, as with much of what goes on at MOSNUM, this seems very much a case of "I don't like it, so everyone else should be banned from doing it". _wjemather^bigissue 21:20, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
4. Oppose I don't personally like this format, but telling editors that they're not allowed to use it is dramatically WP:CREEPier than I'm willing to accept, especially since it is currently used in literally thousands of articles. (Quick demonstration: Search on "2009-08-", which will give you results for any reference to any day last month using this format. There are 25,000 articles in that list. The reverse ("-08-2009"), which finds anything using date-first, all-numeric format last month plus anything using a month-first date that involved the 8th of the month anytime this year, gives you just 254 hits. That's two orders of magnitude in difference, folks, and the only possible interpreation is "in practice, editors have a strong consensus to use this format".
   Furthermore, it has significant advantages over the xx/xx/yyyy formats, which may be either middle-endian or little-endian without warning: this big-endian date format never swaps the month and date around. Personally, my choice is to spell out the month, even when the date makes it perfectly clear, but I see no reason to impose my personal preference on anyone else. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:23, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

   [Neutral comment on the above: Just to be clear, the other numerical date formats (xx-xx-YYYY) are, indeed, even more ambiguous, but they are already deprecated, so not relevant to the present proposal.] -- Alarics (talk) 21:54, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

5. Oppose. Any alternative uses a format that is not used by some number of countries and therefore does not read correctly for many readers. So while not ambiguous, it is not natural for many readers. Using the number form of the ISO standard is clear and does not favor one form of English over another. The fact that this form is in fact neutral is one of its strongest points. This form also allows us to use one form in footnotes across all articles, while the text can vary based on other issues. The footnote would follow a common neutral form and why is that wrong? One could argue that any ambitiousness that exists in the ISO form is based on preconceived notions of how a date should be formatted and are not in fact truly indicative of an ambiguous form. Vegaswikian (talk) 21:32, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

   Wikipedia has not adopted the ISO 8601 standard. THAT is the chief ambiguity, in my view. There is no standard, nor any English language convention, about the meaning of the YYYY-MM-DD format for old dates. --Jc3s5h (talk) 21:36, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

6. Oppose. There is no need for a ban on an internationally recognised unambiguous format. −Woodstone (talk) 21:51, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

   But it IS ambiguous. A less ambiguous format would be 29 Sept 2009. 「ɠu¹ɖяy」¤ • ¢  02:35, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

   ... and it's not "internationally recognised" in that many are unfamiliar with it at all. JIMp _talk·cont 13:48, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

7. Oppose I think that Alarics and Vegas make good points. Avoids favoritism and is clear and widely used. Martin Raybourne (talk) 22:38, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
8. Oppose As long as we limit this format to references and limited instances in tables, I don't think we need to ban this outright. Dabomb87 (talk) 23:04, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
9. Oppose. YYYY-MM-DD is clearly not ambiguous, since putting the year first only makes sense if you're putting the date components in major-to-minor order. I've seen YYYY-MM-DD used in international business correspondence for over 20 years, and everybody always knew how to interpret it. At some point in the hopefully not too distant future, WP software will come to its senses and autoformat dates automatically (i.e. without the bogus link syntax of the now-deprecated previous autoformatting) according to the locale that the browser is operating in. At that point, readers will not see the date in YYYY-MM-DD format unless they want to. But, YYYY-MM-DD will remain the most reliable and least error-prone format to have the dates in from which that autoformatting will take place. Wasted Time R (talk) 23:21, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

   We do already have the {{#dateformat}} parser function, but certain extremely vocal parties loudly oppose any sort of user preference for date formatting. See WP:VPP#accessdate format for more. Anomie⚔ 23:28, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

   Thanks for the pointer, but that discussion like every other WP date style/formatting discussion gets too tangled to be worth wading through. I've done work in I18N/L10N software and the approach is pretty straightforward: dates along with many other locale/language-dependent entities are represented in an internationalized form, which is then be localized many different ways, and the user's configuration settings determine which localization they see. Why this is so difficult here in WP is a bit beyond me. Wasted Time R (talk) 23:57, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

   Computer software is rarely designed to deal with the date range covered by Wikipedia articles. Furthermore, while this or that piece of software might have some ability to tailor date presentation to the reader's locale, on the whole, no provision is made for one computer user to present a date to another computer user and have the date automatically presented in the reader's favorite format; only computer high priests can do that. --Jc3s5h (talk) 00:32, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

   Well, WP software is antiquated in many respects. There's no way to indicate the amount of text a given cite covers, there's no decent way to centralize text so that one instance may be used in many places (outside of limited cases like nav templates), there's no good way to conditionally factor text between a main article and a subarticle, there's no semantic tagging of content, there's no indexing within or across articles like real books have. All there is is raw text and raw text search. From the software perspective of building an enormous database representing human knowledge, it's a disaster. Wasted Time R (talk) 00:58, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

   Apparently I'm a high priest. Thanks! See my essay below for how I achieved such exalted status. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:35, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

10. Oppose Yet another attempt by the MOSNUM crowd to force their preferences on the whole encyclopedia. I for one cannot understand how anyone could honestly think it was "YYYY-DD-MM", and in general I find any longer date format in references to be a needless waste of space. Anomie⚔ 23:28, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

    So you don't find "29 Sept 2009" easier to recognized & still just as compact, while being less ambiguous than 2009-09-29? 「ɠu¹ɖяy」¤ • ¢  23:33, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

    No. Anomie⚔ 00:43, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    "Needless waste of space"? Do you realise that "10 September 2009" (the longest possible date) is only 7 characters longer than "2009-09-10"? When are we ever that short of space in a footnote? -- Alarics (talk) 06:37, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    Yes. That's 7 unnecessary characters (or 8 if you use US date order with the comma), an increase of 70% over the more compact format. Anomie⚔ 11:55, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    How about "10 Sep 2009"? That's only one extra character. JIMp _talk·cont 13:48, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    Nope, I still prefer 2009-09-10 for references. Also, BTW, that should probably be "10 Sep 2009" to prevent odd linebreaking. Anomie⚔ 16:37, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    Yep, I still prefer "10 Sep 2009" for references. Also, BTW, use   to write out the non-breaking space. JIMp _talk·cont 20:58, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    I am not "the MOSNUM crowd". My first-ever visit there was on 10 August. -- Alarics (talk) 15:28, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    And yet your viewpoint and style of argument fits with theirs so well. I guess you're just precocious. Anomie⚔ 16:37, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    What exactly would this MOSNUM crowd viewpoint and style of argument be? JIMp _talk·cont 21:00, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    I would like to know this also, especially since I didn't come to MOSNUM till about a 10 days ago. 「ɠu¹ɖяy」¤ • ¢  00:09, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

11. Oppose I see no problem with using this internationally recognized format in article references. In fact, I think it makes dates most unambiguously clear to international readers. I will note that I have seen these sorts of date formats begin to appear in some citations in the social science literature; I would guess that this too is partially related to international ease of comprehension, even for non-English-language souces which, in the old days, would have often showed the date in the non-En-lang also. N2e (talk) 23:49, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
12. Oppose. Ridiculous. We should be moving towards this format, not away from it. — RockMFR 01:45, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
13. Oppose - This should be the preferred format for use in footnotes! I use it all the time, and it looks good. --Blargh29 (talk) 02:09, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    It looks terrible but that's my point of view. JIMp _talk·cont 13:48, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

14. Oppose It should be avoided in prose, obviously, but footnotes are another issue entirely; footnotes deserve much more flexibility across the project. And it's not ambiguous at all—certainly less ambiguous than the other ISO styles, MM-DD-YYYY (U.S.) and DD-MM-YYYY (Europe). rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 02:51, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    What do you mean, "other ISO styles"? Wikipedia has not adopted any ISO standards for date formats. --Jc3s5h (talk) 03:06, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    I mean MM-DD-YYYY and DD-MM-YYYY, just like I said. Maybe those aren't called ISO, whatever, you still know what I was referring to. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 03:10, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    I don't think anyone disputes that MM-DD-YYYY and DD-MM-YYYY are even more ambiguous than YYYY-MM-DD, but that is neither here nor there, since nobody is recommending using those formats, and they are already explicitly deprecated in the guideline. -- Alarics (talk) 06:42, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

15. Oppose - This format is concise, unambiguous, language independent, and internationally recognized. It is an international standard (ISO 8601 international standard date and time, ISO 890 bibliographic references). For an electronic medium, it has the additional advantages that it is easy to sort, search, and parse. I've worked for international companies where it has been the corporate standard for decades because of its unambiguity and cultural neutrality. In Canada, where I live, it is a commonly used date format. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 03:09, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    No, it is wrong to say "It [YYYY-MM-DD] is an international standard", because that implies that the international standard and the format are interchangeable. But the YYYY-MM-DD format is also an informal usage that people just started using through imitation. The imitation-derived YYYY-MM-DD format has no formal rules, and there is no consensus on how to use it when the year has fewer than three digits, or for years BC. --Jc3s5h (talk) 03:26, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

16. Oppose - It is pointless to favour US or UK English versions when, as in citations, there is a perfectly good neutral alternative. Should we have to cite the same source with different format dates depending on the subject of the citing article? The idea that a significant portion of Wikipedia users will long be puzzled by a form they see regularly on other websites is almost insulting to them. Consider http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/browser/1909/09/29/ as one of many archives that routinely use yyyy/mm/dd in the URL for an article described as being for September 29, 1909. Readers are more mentally agile than we habitually give them credit for. So long as the information is available to them, they will work out the format details without thinking twice about it. LeadSongDog come howl 04:27, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    Its use in URLs is quite beside the point. URLs are for computers to read, not humans. -- Alarics (talk) 15:30, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

17. Oppose. I don't see any problem with the use of YYYY-MM-DD. If people don't like seeing it, then somebody should find a way to automatically display dates in a way that a user does like by setting their preferences accordingly. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 05:09, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
18. Oppose. Often in footnotes I'm most interested in the year to see how recent the refs are. Allowing YYYY-MM-DD makes this nice as the year comes first. This isn't such a huge problem anyway. Just look at how many refs have only a year, or only a month and year. As for the potential ambiguity, there usually is at least one date in a ref list with a day > 12 that will give readers a real fast clue as to how to parse the numbers. Personally, I don't care for abbreviated months. Numeric or spelled out is best. I would like to see us endorse use of {{#dateformat}} for dates since 1583 since it seems to solve most of the problems of the old style auto formatting. UncleDouggie (talk) 05:58, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    While everyone has his or her preferences, I don't think that most supporters of this proposal would have any problem at all with 2009 Sep 30, 2009 Sept. 30, or 2009 September 30, which are not forbidden by the proposed rule. Even if they're unfamiliar forms, they're not ambiguous after the year 99. Personally speaking I'm not keen on a rule (sorry: guideline) that's too specific, pervasive or intrusive, and like to fit the citation to the matter or need, while trying to keep some consistency with an article's other citations. —— Shakescene (talk) 06:29, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

19. Oppose. It's about footnotes, right? So the prose argument is void. Footnotes are merely a reference mechanism, and (unlike prose) some simplification of presentation is welcome for the sake of regularity; if not, reference sections will be flooded by different date formats. As if we don't have enough problems with prose, now we have to track changes to date styles, enforce their regularity, clash in moswars etc... NVO (talk) 06:41, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    It is already the case that there is supposed to be consistency of presentation within the footnotes of any given article. Allowing YYYY-MM-DD adds one more format to those available, making inconsistency more likely, not less. Reference sections are already "flooded by different formats". Simplification means having fewer available formats, not more (unless you are proposing to make YYYY-MM-DD compulsory in footnotes, which I don't think even its most ardent admirers have yet suggested). -- Alarics (talk) 07:07, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    That is not a valid argument for ditching by far the most commonly used format in citations. Obviously YYYY-MM-DD is already "allowed", so no-one is "adding" any inconsistency. _wjemather^bigissue 07:58, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    Whether it is "already allowed" is moot. Certainly it is not explicitly allowed. Its prevalence in footnotes has come about by accident, as already explained, not because most people liked the look of it or thought it was per se a good thing. Under the previous date-formatting regime, now abandoned, it was never the intention that YYYY-MM-DD would appear in that form to the reader. -- Alarics (talk) 08:15, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

20. Oppose. YYYY-MM-DD is most unambiguous way of formatting a date. I'd be OK with not using it in prose, but footnotes is another story altogether. As many have mentioned, it's often the best way to format a date in a citation. Good Olfactory (talk) 07:00, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
21. Oppose. per YYYY-MM-DD is unambiguous, and because there is no alternative presented. A standard is necessary, even if it would be YYYY-MMM-DD, that is 2009-September-30. Still 2009-09-30 is compact and unambiguous, so why change it? --HappyInGeneral (talk) 11:13, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    "A standard is necessary"? How are you going to impose a single standard on everybody? There is a big difference between not deprecating YYYY-MM-DD in footnotes and positively requiring it, which nobody has proposed. -- Alarics (talk) 11:26, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    Also, it is a misunderstanding to say "there is no alternative presented". Taken together with the existing guidelines in that section of MOSNUM, the proposal means "write the month as a word, either in full or abbreviated". -- Alarics (talk) 15:39, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

22. Oppose. I use it for my own work elsewhere and the the other format I use is a private one where I leave out the hyphens as in for instance ad20090325whitbury.pdf. It is my preferred format and makes it easy for me to search and sort. It seems obvious to me it should especially be used in footnotes for things like last accessed. It would solve a lot of this bother if one had a special marker so dates could be automatically formatted as users desired. Just because some people anagram it into an illogical order which conflicts with an international standard is not a very strong case for deprecating it thast I can see. Dmcq (talk) 13:04, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
23. Oppose. I prefer YYYY-MM-DD in footnotes; it's logical, concise, readable, and fits the citation aesthetic. Powers ^T 13:06, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    It is logical (for those who get it) but so is "12 Sep 2009", it is concise but only one character shorter than "12 Sep 2009", readable? well, you can convert it into something sensible (like "12 Sep 2009") in your head (if you get it), it's æsthetically displaesing but that's my take. JIMp _talk·cont 13:39, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

24. Oppose as per my 100% agreement with what Anomie said above, as well as WP:CREEP. — Kralizec! (talk) 13:10, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
25. Oppose Looks just fine, and is a lot more clear than many people are willing to admit. I don't think it should be mandatory, but its status as the preferred style indicates that it's not the huge problem people make it out to be. Other things to consider: there are much, much more important things to focus on, and the vast majority of readers don't care about dates in footnotes, regardless of their format. As long as it's not used in prose, I see absolutely no problem. GaryColemanFan (talk) 16:15, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

    This "status as the preferred style" is an illusion created by the mistaken principles on which the citation templates were based. JIMp _talk·cont 19:15, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

26. Oppose vehemently. We don't need even more stylecruft to get in the way of writing articles. WP:MOSNUM has been nothing but trouble for years and it should have been deleted. *** Crotalus *** 20:55, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
27. Oppose I am sorry dear friend who made me aware of this discussion. I am in this camp. I attended a wonderful talk today, in which the speaker shared the following: "Literacy in the 21st century is not about the knowledge of letters, but the ability to unlearn and learn and unlearn and learn..." I think we should have a standard numerical way to represent date and time, and ISO has one (was not sure what it was but now I do a little, I looked it up). It is actually not as abstract as it looks like in the first place, and very easy to remember once you understand the rule, it is, in my words, descending order, left to right, year, month, day, hour, minute, seconds, and smaller fractions, in other words YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS and so on, perfectly simple. I am sorry for coming across as ambivalent and vacillating, I was just thinking aloud then. We unconsciously use the same format for time, without trouble, don't we? I know that I have made a mistake once (which has been referred here, which happened because I was not aware of the format's principle and in life we here use the dd - mm - yyyy format. Yogesh Khandke (talk) 18:57, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
28. Oppose per Anomie. It's unambiguous, scientific, and geographically nuetral. See also: WP:CREEP. hmwith☮ 21:47, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
29. Oppose. Too much instruction creeep, and I just cannot vote for banning the style that is widely used in my country, and that I prefer. Actually, my first choice is YYYY-MMM-DD (which gives 3 chars of monthname) rather than YYYY-MM-DD. Incidentally, one of the chief proponents of this ban has already started removing YYYY-MM-DD from accessdate entries. I probably would never have even voted if that was not already happening --JimWae (talk) 23:17, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
30. Too much instruction creep. What problem exists, with the current wording? ISO 8601 is a perfectly fine, internationally recognized standard, very widely used on the internet, and -- more to the point -- is currently used in countless citations across countless Wikipedia articles. In specific cases where this particular format is not ideal, the obvious solution is to avoid using it in those cases; to ban the format outright solves nothing and creates an instant maintenance backlog for no apparent gain. Far from being any widespread problem, I find this format quite useful: it is compact and clear, which is more than I can say for most other formats. – Luna Santin (talk) 23:41, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
    • No, Wikipedia has not adopted ISO 8601. There are no rules governing the use or interpretation of the YYYY-MM-DD format on Wikipedia. --Jc3s5h (talk) 23:47, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
      • And? If WP doesn't officially adopt a standard, it no longer exists and in fact we're banned from even considering it for use, or something? I don't follow your point. – Luna Santin (talk) 23:50, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
        • Writers are not responsible for obeying the rules of a standard unless (1) the standard is imposed by law—ISO 8601 isn't a law—or the publication has adopted the standard and requires its writers to follow it. Since Wikipedia has not adopted the standard, there is no criterion to decide whether a specific instance of the YYYY-MM-DD format is correct or incorrect. People are free to argue about it, just like people argued about whether the new millennium began January 1, 2000, or January 1, 2001. --Jc3s5h (talk) 00:02, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
          • With respect, I don't see how anything you've just said has to do with the proposal under discussion. If you're going to claim that YYYY-MM-DD dates are problematic because they cause widespread arguments and confusion, please provide some examples of such. Wikipedia hasn't adopted a standard for the color red, either, but we seem to get by alright without one. – Luna Santin (talk) 00:14, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Neutral

1. I've come across many articles, where the prose/body is WP:MOSNUM-compliant, which have more than one date format. In close to 50% of cases of articles where there is a ref section, there is a mixture of dd mmm yyyy and yyyy-mm-dd formats (or mmm dd yyyy and yyyy-mm-dd formats) in that reference section. I can see the need to use yyyy-mm-dd in sortable tables, as an exception. If there is no consensus to deprecate the use of yyyy-mm-dd formats in toto, editors should still at least ensure that all dates in the reference section are uniform. Hotchpotch date formats are an open invitation for some editor to come along and unify them all, to dd mmm yyyy or mmm dd yyyy. Ohconfucius (talk) 08:35, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

   I've seen that as well. One of the causes may well be the bots I mentioned. In fact, in the instances I looked at, the bots revised some (but not all) of the footnote dates from another format that was consistent throughout the footnotes to the YYYY-MM-DD format. I would hope that after this conversation is finished, a bot could take care of updating date formats in articles to make them MOS-compliant and uniform. (I would also vote for the date format in the footnotes (which may contain text, I might point out) being uniform with the date format in the text--which of course means not having YYYY-MM-DD in footnotes).--Epeefleche (talk) 08:52, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

2. As much as I prefer to write out the dates in full, I am not supportive of the "should not be used" wording. I used to write dates in YYYY-MM-DD mainly because of the date linking feature that existed before. Some of my Good Articles still have it. I don't think it's something to forcibly banish; I'd rather have wording that says that writing dates out in full is the better practice. Current proposal makes me wary that people will use it to go on a re-formatting blitz. I'd rather let it be a natural changeover. Erik (talk | contribs | wt:film) 12:21, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

   But there won't be a "natural changeover" unless people are given some guidance as to what is preferred. The proposal, taken together with the rest of that section of MOSNUM, does indeed mean "write out the date in full", or (if abbreviated) at least write the month as a word. So actually I think do you support the proposal. -- Alarics (talk) 15:47, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

   Given the history of MOSNUM, give certain parties any excuse and you'll see a re-formatting blitz anyway. Anomie⚔ 16:40, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

   It does not sound like guidance to me; it sounds like an ultimatum. That's why I prefer "better practice" type of wording. If YYYY-MM-DD is the preferred formatting of the primary contributors of an article, I won't contest it. Erik (talk | contribs | wt:film) 19:51, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

   That may be difficult to divine, however, as bots that have made millions of changes have inter alia changed footnotes from non-YYYY-MM-DD format to that format. That of course severely skews what otherwise looks like the preferred formatting of the primary contributors of the article. If you, however, check a specific date by a search in Google News, looking for it under the various competing formats, you will see just how little the YYYY-MM-DD format is used in real life when people write for the layperson.--Epeefleche (talk) 21:57, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

   Which is why it's a discouraged format in prose... but we're not talking about prose, here. How often do laypeople muck around with citation templates? Is a layperson interested in and capable of doing so honestly going to be even remotely confused by such a format? – Luna Santin (talk) 23:45, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

3. I don't have a preference so long as the article is consistent in the format. ~Itzjustdrama ^{? C} 20:18, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Comments and questions

• Question -- Does the term "footnote" in the RFC text include all references that are in a {{cite xyz ...}} format and would therefore be picked up by a Reflist? In other words, I'm not quite sure if footnote is being interpreted broadly or narrowly. Thanks. N2e (talk) 20:38, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Yes, that is the intention. -- Alarics (talk) 20:58, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
• Comment I'm most surprised that some people find YYYY-MM-DD ambiguous as no organisation or country uses YYYY-DD-MM so XXXX-XX-XX is the only numeric date format that is inherently unambiguous. Plus its an ISO standard, widely used in computer software, and lexically sorts correctly. But then, as a UK editor, I can't imagine why anyone in their right mind would think MM/DD/YYYY was a sensible format. If a good number of people genuinely find YYYY-MM-DD hard to parse, then I suppose we should just ban all numeric date formats and require the month to be a word or abbreviation. I also don't understand why prose should have a different rule to footnotes. I can't imagine any other style-guide having different rules for different sections. Colin°^Talk 20:56, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  • But it's only unambiguous if you already know that "no organisation or country uses YYYY-DD-MM". Ordinary, non-technophile readers can't be expected to know that. -- Alarics (talk) 21:03, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  • "ISO standard, widely used in computer software" -- But WP is not computer software, it is an encyclopaedia for the general reader. -- Alarics (talk) 21:12, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
    • The ISO 8601 standard is widely used. Full stop. See this list. Uncle G (talk) 03:34, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I'm just a little concerned that some folk think it is ambiguous, but in practice few people parse it wrongly. Has anyone done any studies on this? Surely there's a paper somewhere???? Colin°^Talk 21:14, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
    • A number of contributors to the discussion have said they they, personally, actually have found it ambiguous. If some WP editors don't understand what the format means, how much more that must be true of some, maybe many, casual readers. -- Alarics (talk) 21:30, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
      • I've been to 40 countries, worked with most of them, and just learned to my surprise this month (through investigation here) that there is no YYYY-DD-MM format. I can't imagine that most people know that--why would they? I imagine most readers have also never heard of ISO, let alone read it. In the absence of the majority of readers knowing that, the format is ambiguous, as it could be read (and input by editors) as either MM-DD or the reverse. Supporting that notion is a quick google skim which yields the following references to YYYY-DD-MM: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], and [8]. I agree w/Colin's points re using the same format for footnotes that we use for text.--Epeefleche (talk) 21:33, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
        • If you actually look at your examples, most of them are typos, people getting confused, bugs, odd lot cases, theoretical possible formats supported by parsers, etc. Few if any of them indicate actual substantial use. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:08, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
          • Yes, you're correct that these don't reflect any ISO or national standards. They are just a hodgepodge of some of the first entries that came up on a YYYY-DD-MM search. They range from how some certain servers work (such as the SQL servers in [9]) and IBM machines work (as in [10]) and software works (as in the Linux commands at [11] and [12]) and Kirix at [13] to formatting by individual people or companies (as in [14]) to non-widespread (I think) date formatting conventions (as in [15]). All of the cites were techie-speak. My point is only that with even the techies/servers/software confused at times, it is much to expect average readers/editors to be aware of the absence of a YYYY-DD-MM convention. It is one thing to say there is not acceptance of a YYYY-DD-MM format by ISO or a country. It is quite another thing to assert that the general non-techie Wikipedia readership/editors are aware of this fact and therefore no ambiguity exists. Spelling out months eradicates the ambiguity that will trouble all readers who do not know that no YYYY-DD-MM format exists. I propose that that is a sizeable percentage of the Wiki readership and editors.--Epeefleche (talk) 03:02, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
            • Just to take your first example, "YYYY-MM-DD Not Working In UK", I doubt the underlying problem is that SQL Server 2000 in the UK interprets dates as YYYY-DD-MM. More likely, there's some intervening layer or two that's changing the date into a different format with some notion of the proper locale, then mangling it on the way back to this format with some other possibly different notion of locale (similar to the timezone and GMT offset bugs that programs often have). And if you work in the software development field, you know that these online "Something's not working, what's the fix?" sites are riddled with people posting questions (and answers!) who are hopelessly confused, who have screwed up their environment, who haven't fully described the sequence of events that produced the error, who don't realize that some other variable is the key factor, and so forth. In other words, you can find practically anything in these sites if you do a search for it. Wasted Time R (talk) 03:23, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
              • Thanks. I hear you. Though I'm not sure I completely follow the techie part--my failing completely, not yours, as I'm not a techie. But I guess my point is that if even techies run into problems because some of them don't know that no YYYY-DD-MM format exists (or their computers or software don't know it), what reason do we have to believe that non-techies in general would have that knowledge? And if non-techies don't have that knowledge, the ambiguity issue will affect them both as readers and as inputting editors (your above phrases "hopelessly confused" and "screwed up their environment" come to mind). Separate but related point -- IMHO the fact that news articles almost never seem to use that structure is informative.--Epeefleche (talk) 07:18, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
                • As examples of YYYY-MM-DD ambiguity causing problems, as editors input dates in Wikipedia in the (non-existent) YYYY-DD-MM format, we have this and the advice given here.--Epeefleche (talk) 09:01, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
• What about DD-MM-YYYY and MM-DD-YYYY? These can be very confusing if the day of the month is <12, and in this case is is ambiguous (IIRC). –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 21:22, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  • The numerical dates DD-MM-YYYY and MM-DD-YYYY are already explicitly deprecated by MOSNUM, precisely because of their obvious ambiguity, so they are not at issue here. -- Alarics (talk) 21:28, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
    • Agree w/Alarics (though I would note that this was just clarified in the guidance this month).--Epeefleche (talk) 21:33, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
• I don't have a copy of the standard, but from what I'm reading it appears that the standard allows [29 September 2009] and [2009-09-29]. I see no indication that [20 Sep 2009] is valid. Does anyone have an online pointer to exactly what the standard says? Vegaswikian (talk) 21:23, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  • What standard are you asking about? --Jc3s5h (talk) 21:33, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
    • The standard we are talking about is ISO 8601 "Data elements and interchange formats - Information interchange - Representation of dates and times", and according to this website may be obtained here(registration required) --Redrose64 (talk) 22:02, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
      • The version referred to by Redrose64 does not appear to be available to the public; it seems one must have been assigned a userid and password by ISO. --Jc3s5h (talk) 22:55, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
        • More blather, you'll find. All published ISO standards are available to the public. Anyone can buy a copy of ISO 8601:2004 from here, for example. Published international standards are not secrets. Uncle G (talk) 04:16, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
          • I am aware that you need to log in, that's why I put {{Registration required}} and also the website pointing at it, which has much background information and discussion. My last employer had an actual copy, primarily because we communicated electronically with suppliers and customers, and not always using EDI (which allows at least fourteen different representations of a date). We needed common ground for interchanged data when EDI wasn't used, and international standards provide common ground, simple as that. Standards - whether ISO, BS, ASA or DIN - are not enforced in law, unless the parties have agreed to abide by a given standard and one party then supplies goods outside the standard - they are then technically in breach of contract. What organisations do internally is entirely up to them and no standards agency can say otherwise.
            We took advantage of that. In our database, dates were stored as integers, using a simple count of days (where 1 January 2000 was defined as 730499), there being several good reasons: (a) it occupies 3 bytes instead of 10+; (b) it is ideal for sorting; (c) it was a simple matter to write functions to extract the day, month or year, week number or day-of-week; (d) it readily lends itself to arithmetic - subtract the product manufacturing date (as integer) from today's date (as integer) and you get the age of the stock, in days. Dates stored as integers were converted to any desired human-readable (or computer-readable) format as required. When displaying dates on screen or in printable reports, it was normally DD/MM/YY because that was (a) compact; (b) common in Britain; (c) what the bosses wanted; some programs used DD/MM/YYYY if there was room on the screen. Users were trained to expect either form, and one of the great things about the system was that they could enter either "30/09/2009", "30-09-09", "30 Sep 2009", "30.9.9", or any conceivable combination of those provided the elements were in the order day, month, year. What they entered was instantly converted to the integer form for storage, and then reconverted and displayed back at them as DD/MM/YY. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:17, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I do have a copy of ISO 8601:1988. It is, as said earlier, right in front of me as I write this. There is no allowance for named months. The standard is quite explicit that what it specifies are numeric representations. Uncle G (talk) 03:34, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
    • From what I understand, it has been revised twice since then. In 2000 and on "2004-12-03". And it is "maintained by ISO Technical Committee TC 154" (whatever that means).--Epeefleche (talk) 10:44, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
• Comment — Just one question for the people that oppose the change; Which is easier to recognize in a footnote, 2009-04-07 or 7 Apr 2009/Apr 7, 2009? The use of abbreviation for the month, which is international recognized in the English language irregardless of the dialect, is easier to recognize & actually about the same amount to type. 「ɠu¹ɖяy」¤ • ¢  21:38, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Abbreviations are bad practice, and it is wrong to assume that non-native English speakers can easily adapt and understand them. _wjemather^bigissue 21:58, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
    • "Abbreviations are bad practice" says who? Isn't any numerical date format itself an abbrevation, anyway? -- Alarics (talk) 22:01, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
      • No, it isn't. Uncle G (talk) 03:34, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
      • Who? Me! There are many ways to write the date; one editor will insert a red with "Apr 7 2009" without comma, another "Apr 7, 2009" with it, all in the same article, then the references section, indeed, becomes unpalatable. Perhaps you assume uniform use of a single date format, now imagine sixteen different date styles in the same ref section. Nein danke. NVO (talk) 06:47, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
        • That completely misses the point. Allowing YYYY-MM-DD will not do anything to stop people using 16 other different date styles. Or are you trying to make YYYY-MM-DD the only format allowed? That would be a step far beyond what anyone has proposed, as far as I know, and quite impossible to police. -- Alarics (talk) 08:21, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
• Eubulides and WhatamIdoing claim that YYYY-MM-DD is the most common format found in the footnotes etc, the latter editor gives us a snapshot of how things look now. I would be very interested to see (if anyone is capable of doing this), a snapshot of footnotes from say 2 years ago, and see how they are "displayed" then, before the autoformatting was turned off. At that time, YYYY-MM-DD was used by many editors (and templates) merely as a shortcut to input the required information, with the knowledge that it would never display like that. There must be countless references that still have this format as a relic to the autoformatting days. I'd just like to know how many - to see whether Eubulides and WhatamIdoing have a point, or whether my view (under support) is more valid.—MDCollins (talk) 22:16, 29 September 2009 (UTC)
• If the effort to allow the YYYY-MM-DD date format succeeds, how shall we write the issue date of Inter_gravissimas (ctrl-click)">''Inter gravissimas'', which is February 24, 1582? How shall we know we did it right? --Jc3s5h (talk) 02:52, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
  • While pre-Gregorian dates come up often in article text, they don't come up that often in publication dates in footnotes, and never in access dates. When they do come up in footnotes, you are free to write them out. Wasted Time R (talk) 02:58, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
• The current prevalence of ISO dates in footnotes should not be construed as a consensus. This is a consequence of the hurried removal of date-linking from the cite templates in August 2008. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 11:36, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
  • It may not be not completely accurate to say that the "prevalence of ISO dates in footnotes ... is a consequence of the hurried removal of date-linking from the cite templates". The prevalence was always there for the unlogged-in and those without a different preference set. Where date-linking enters the scene is that it was more or less taken as a given when the templates were designed. The templates would only accept YYYY-MM-DD (other formats would generally give a red link & not autoformat). So, it still "should not be construed as a consensus". JIMp _talk·cont 20:47, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
• Question (to the nominator): have you evaluated the way to automatically re-format refs? Will it be a bot crawler actually editing all articles one by one, or some live, on-the-fly conversion, or simply a fix to {{cite}} ? In both cases, does the bot have enough AI to correctly identify the correct alphanumeric format (the article text may mix different formats and lack any definite geographic clues etc.). NVO (talk) 12:02, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

• I personally would not envisage any wholesale automated conversion. It would probably be best done gradually whenever one is editing an article for any other reason. There exists a script for doing it on an article-by-article basis, but you have to check the output manually because some URLs contain YYYY-MM-DD, and obviously those have to be left as they are. -- Alarics (talk) 15:53, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

I prefer to write the month in words, that leaves no ambiguity. Untill we have a universal convention for date. For example in India, the one followed is DD-MM-YY/ DD-MM-YYYY. Yogesh Khandke (talk) 12:42, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

If you prefer to write the month in words, then you are a supporter of the present proposal. -- Alarics (talk) 15:55, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Preferring a spelled-out month to "DD-MM-YY" doesn't warrant such an assumption, as neither "DD-MM-YYYY" nor "MM-DD-YYYY" are at issue here. Anomie⚔ 16:42, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

On the contrary. The reason those aren't at issue is because they are already deprecated, leaving YYYY-MM-DD as the only possible alternative to writing the month as a word. So anyone who like Yogesh Khandke prefers to see the month written as a word is agreeing with me that YYYY-MM-DD should not be used. -- Alarics (talk) 18:39, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

How about this:

Proposed tweak to wording

Replace

• YYYY-MM-DD style dates (1976-05-31) are uncommon in English prose, and should not be used within sentences. However, they may be useful in long lists and tables for conciseness. (If the only purpose why they are used in a particular table is ease of comparison, consider using {{sort|2008-11-01|1 November 2008}}.)

with

• YYYY-MM-DD style dates (1976-05-31) are uncommon in English prose, and should not generally be used. However, they may be useful in narrow table columns for conciseness; consider adding a legend (e.g. !Joined <br />(YYYY-MM-DD)) to the header of such columns. (In sufficiently wide columns, consider using {{sort|2008-11-01|1 November 2008}} so that the full month name is shown but the table is sorted correctly.)

(The example was taken from Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics/Participants, in case you're wondering.) ___A. di M. 18:07, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Why {{sort}} and not {{dts}}? --Redrose64 (talk) 18:30, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

No, the suggestion to use {{sort}} (or {{dts}}) needs to be removed, or at least a warning added, as both templates have important WP:ACCESSIBILITY problems and neither template should be recommended until the problems are fixed (which may take a while). Please see Template talk:Dts #Accessibility problem. In the meantime, yyyy-mm-dd is the best format for accessible and sortable full dates in tables. Eubulides (talk) 20:34, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Sort and dts are used in many, many tables, especially in featured lists. I can't support advocating using YYYY-MM-DD because while it may be sortable, it is also much less understandable. Dabomb87 (talk) 21:49, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

• I feel wikipedia would be better off if templates to output dates like the user wants could be supported. I see no reason to assume that anyone wanting to use the english wikipedia will use dates from Christ. Dmcq (talk) 21:57, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Instruction vacuum

Many understood the current wording to proscribe YYYY-MM-DD format in footnotes because footnotes are not tables and are not especially constrained for space. If the proposal fails, there will be no instructions on the proper way to incorporate YYYY-MM-DD into footnotes, other than not to use it outside the year range 1583 through 9999. For example, there will be no instruction about whether the access date and the publication date should use consistent format. --Jc3s5h (talk) 23:29, 30 September 2009 (UTC)