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:
