Talk:DATE (command)

Article split

I’m not sure if it is a good idea to split this into two articles. I haven’t used these DOS commands for a long time but I got the feeling they were closely related. Wouldn’t it be less awkward to discuss both commands in the one place rather than individually?

Even if the split does stay, we should not delete the old history. Usually I think we leave a redirect or disambiguation page at the page title to handle article splits. Even if you remove all the internal Wikipedia links you can find, there may be other links to the page, externally, etc, that you cannot fix. This case seems a bit tricky to me but I guess a special disambiguation page might be an appropriate start.

Also, if the split does go ahead, the new articles should probably be given less ambiguous names; perhaps date (DOS) and time (DOS), to distinguish them from other date and time commands, such as date (Unix) and time (Unix). Vadmium (talk, contribs) 02:23, 10 July 2012 (UTC).

I propose the split, but agree with that it should be carried out differently (not by deleting an existing article). In order to bring the titles of all DOS command related articles into the proper upper-case form, I would suggest names DATE (DOS) and TIME (DOS) (in analogy with those (Unix) articles), or DATE (DOS command) and TIME (DOS command) to be more descriptive (since there are other uses for date and time under DOS as well). Whatever we choose, it should be consistent over all such articles (and existing articles should be moved in this format as well, with redirects in place from the old names and, where possible, the uppercase forms without designator, f.e. DATE, but not TIME). --Matthiaspaul (talk) 07:59, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

DATE and TIME also exist in OS/2 and Windows so DATE (command) and TIME (command) are appropriate. Asmpgmr (talk) 15:34, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

So there are now DATE (command) and TIME (command) articles. What is the point of keeping the now redundant Date (command) and Time (command) articles around ?? Delete those and fix the links and anyone entering date (command) or time (command) will get the correct article. Asmpgmr (talk) 21:57, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

No, redirects typically should remain intact (unless they are clearly wrong and still very fresh). They can be targets for external links, for example in other language Wikipedias or from pages in web-space. We cannot detect this via "What links here", but we don't want to break external web-pages or even inter-Wiki links. Actually, it is common practise to create new pages just for the purpose of redirecting to existing pages in order to "catch" possibly existing red (or future) links and direct to the corresponding subject. In some cases, this even includes spelling variants. Redirects can even have categories added (there is even a large sets of templates defined for the purpose of adding redirects to categories), so that one article will show up under different subjects in the same of different categories. This helps when searching for keywords. In some cases, this can even be used to profile the usage of certain spelling variants in order to find the optimal spelling for an article (however, this particular case is not a good example for this).

In the case of "DATE (command)" vs. "Date (command)", they seem to be redundant, and they are, if you type them in the search box. However, in links, DATE (command) and Date (command) are not the same, and if the later would no longer exist, you would get a red link. It is OK to update the links afterwards, so that they point to DATE (command) rather than Date (command), however, this is a maintenance task carried out with low priority (there even is a policy against "unnecessary" edits). Links to redirect pages are OK, and sometimes even prefered, since editors should link to the actual term they want to link to in the context of their article rather than the title of the article discussing that term (not in this case). This helps a lot, when the structure of articles gets changed later on (f.e. an article refering to the DATE command should have linked to a redirect page "DATE (command)", rather than directly to a page "time and date (command)".). It is important, however, to fix up double-redirects immediately. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 22:36, 10 July 2012 (UTC)