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Community Wishlist/Wishes/Support for ISO, EDTF or IETF Date Standards in MediaWiki Parser Functions

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Support for ISO, EDTF or IETF Date Standards in MediaWiki Parser Functions Open

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Description

Proposal: I propose adding support for international date standards, specifically ISO 8601, EDTF or IETF, to MediaWiki parser functions.

Rationale:

Currently, the MediaWiki parser lacks robust support for standardized date formats, which makes it challenging to transfer or reuse information across different language sections and projects. ISO 8601 and EDTF are widely recognized international standards that offer flexibility for handling various date representations, including ranges, uncertain dates, and dates without specific days.

The primary application of these standards would be in citation templates and other templates that work with dates. This improvement would also be highly beneficial for communities without access to programmers who currently need to develop local modules for date conversion (examples: ru:w:Module:Calendar, en:w:Module:Citation/CS1/Date validation, commons:Module:ISOdate).

Benefits:

  • Improved Interoperability: Consistent use of ISO/EDTF/IETF standards will facilitate seamless data exchange between projects, improving collaboration across Wikimedia communities.
  • Enhanced Accuracy: These standards prevent the parser from making assumptions about missing date components (e.g., inferring a day when only the year and month are specified).
  • Reduced Community Burden: Communities without technical resources to create custom modules will benefit from built-in functionality, simplifying their workflows for handling dates.
  • Future-Proofing: Adopting widely accepted standards ensures long-term compatibility and usability of date-related data within MediaWiki.

Implementation:

  • Introduce an ISO/EDTF/IETF compliance mode in relevant parser functions.
  • Ensure proper validation and handling of dates in these formats without altering their meaning (e.g., not inferring missing components).
  • Provide documentation and examples for contributors to use the new functionality effectively.
  • This enhancement will streamline workflows for multilingual projects, simplify the use of date-based templates, and align MediaWiki with international best practices for date management.

Assigned focus area

Unassigned.

Type of wish

Feature request

All projects

Affected users

Simplifies the transfer of articles and information from one project to another 

Phabricator tasks

T132308, T382826

Other details

  • Created: 12:16, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
  • Last updated: 21:48, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
  • Author: Iniquity (talk)
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