Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Wikidata/Improve handling of dates in languages other than English
Improve handling of dates in languages other than English
- Problem: Wikidata does not display dates correctly in many languages. When entering data, it also cannot parse many common forms of dates in other languages. This makes Wikidata difficult to use in other languages. e.g. 1997-02-01 is displayed in Chinese and Japanese as "1 2 1997" instead of "1997年2月1日". When editing, it does not understand "1997年2月1日" even when the interface is in Japanese. In Spanish, it can parse "11 mayo 1961" but not "11 de mayo de 1961". In German it can parse "1. März 2000" but not "1. märz 2000". It can parse "01.02.1997" if the language is Slovak, but not if the language is Czech.
- Proposed solution: Display dates using the date format from MediaWiki. Improve the parsing of dates so that it can understand dates written in the usual format for that language.
- Who would benefit: Non-English speakers using Wikidata
- More comments: This is a long-standing problem which has been proposed here multiple times in the past:
- Phabricator tickets: phab:T63958, phab:T221097, phab:T214002, phab:T65732, phab:T260699
- Proposer: Nikki (talk) 13:25, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
Discussion
- As I was told, phab:T221097 should be fixed in the following days. The bugfix only concerns parsing, though. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:11, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
- Long-standing problem. I can just add two personal experiences with Italian interface: it parses months with lowercase initial (e.g. 22 marzo 2022) but not with less common (but sometimes used) uppercase initial (e.g. 22 Marzo 2022); since in Italy the most-common usage is dd mm yyyy, I can say that dd-mm-yyyy and dd mm yyyy are interpreted correctly, whilst dd/mm/yyyy is interpreted wrongly as mm/dd/yyyy (which can cause errors, if the user doesn't notice the problem when saving). I think this inversion of month and day is a problem perceived also in other languages: probably, in ambiguous cases (e.g. 01/02/2022), the system should just present the two options to the user and ask them to choose, in order to avoid misinterpretations. --Epìdosis 18:46, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
Voting
Support Strainu (talk) 20:20, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
Support TLSOSLT (talk) 21:23, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
Support Joalpe (talk) 21:45, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
Support عُثمان (talk) 23:34, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
Support NMaia (talk) 00:01, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Support ·addshore· talk to me! 00:13, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Support - PKM (talk) 00:17, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Support ··· 🌸 Rachmat04 · ☕ 02:41, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Support HHill (talk) 08:33, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Support --Epìdosis 08:42, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Support Envlh (talk) 09:17, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Support Oltrepier (talk) 10:08, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Support Nw520 (talk) 12:33, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Support Кирилл С1 (talk) 14:36, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Support OwenBlacker (Talk) 15:15, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Support Mbkv717 (talk) 16:59, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Support Abzeronow (talk) 19:18, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
Support --NGC 54 (talk|contribs) 01:07, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Support Ahkei (talk) 01:49, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Support Betseg (talk) 03:44, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Support Mauricio V. Genta (talk) 08:02, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Support HLFan (talk) 08:52, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Support Ameisenigel (talk) 09:13, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Support Mehman 09:41, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Support QuickQuokka [talk • contribs] 16:58, 12 February 2023 (UTC)
Support Bencemac (talk) 20:21, 12 February 2023 (UTC)