Simian

Templates

Heya, what's your plan with all the templates you're making? They don't make much sense to me. --fvw* 02:06, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Ok, I see where you're getting at now. I think you'd be better off submitting a patch to mediawiki to allow for this though, as I suspect you're going to have to manually purge the caching each time the month changes. My congratulations at how disgusting the construction you've made is though. :-) --fvw* 02:17, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. Multiple people submitted multiple bugs up to four months ago, but still no response. I'll check if the purging you mentioned is an issue in the future. --Simian, 2005-10-17, 02:45 Z

Number notation

Thank you for your message about my posting, "I would suggest that, because of its different meanings in different countries, wikipedia style guide should deviate from ISO 31 by discouraging use of the comma in English language articles."

I don't think there's a typo here, but maybe I could have worded it more clearly. ISO 31 allows either the comma or point as a decimal separator. What I was suggesting is that the MoS should deviate from ISO 31 by allowing only the decimal point. IMHO, the comma should not be used at all in English language numbers, so that no one can think it is a thousands separator.

If this isn't clear, please let me know and I'll see if I can reword the sentence. Cheers. By the way, how do you get your signature to use the ISO date format? --Yaf201 12:01, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Then you might consider changing, "by discouraging use of the comma in English language articles" to "only in discouraging use of the comma as a decimal sign in English language articles."

Regarding the signature string date and time format, I am amazed they thought anything besides the international standard format should be default for an international information system. Very illogical. The only way I currently know of to get the standard, correct date format in your signature is to manually type it in yourself [see my section, below, entitled standard date and time format in signatures]. --Simian, 2005-10-17, 18:49 Z

International standard date and time format in signatures

"I would really like to know how to show the day padded with zeros, so that, e.g., the third of the month renders as 03." --Michael Z., 2005-10-18, 16:54 Z

Michael: Per my requests for two years, the wikipedia system programmers have finally fixed two of the date and time bugs in their software, such that the standard day of month format now appears in a variable named {{CURRENTDAY2}}, and the extraneous seconds (if ISO date format is selected in your preferences) have now been removed from {{CURRENTTIME}}.

Therefore, you can now use the following to obtain a wikipedia signature string using the standard ISO 8601 date format. Go into your wikipedia Preferences, turn on the "Treat the above as wiki markup" signatures checkbox, enter the following string into the Signature field, and press Save.

--[[user talk:username|Username]], {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}-{{subst:CURRENTMONTH}}-{{subst:CURRENTDAY2}}, {{subst:CURRENTTIME}} Z

Then, to use this, enter three tildes (~~~) in your text, instead of the usual four (or five) tildes. --Simian, 2006-08-28, 15:43 Z

I finally got around to this. It works! Thanks very much for the note. --Michael Z., 2006-09-08, 05:27 Z

The workaround you describe here seems to be working for me. Thanks a bundle! Now, all I have to do is remember to sign with three tildes, and not four. --superluser_tc, 2007-06-27, 12:00 UTC

Specs

"The ASTM specs. are partially inapplicable to that table. The table is ISO 898-1 and SAE J429. I think it would be good if you or I remove the ASTM specifications." --Simian, 2005-10-28, 00:14 Z

OK. --Duk 02:15, 28 October 2005 (UTC)