Talk:Central European Time

WikiProject Time assessment rating comment

Want to help write or improve articles about Time? Join WikiProject Time or visit the Time Portal for a list of articles that need improving.
—Yamara ✉ 18:02, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Discussion

Time Difference between IST and CET — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.56.242.194 (talk) 09:04, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Span of UTC+1

A close look at the time zone map shows that geographically UTC+1 end at the western boarderline of Germany and Switzerland. The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Spain - all currently using UTC+1, should be in time zone UTC+0 together with the UK. On the other hand, Republic of Irelnd, Iceland, Portugal and a number of Arican states (currently all in UTC+0 together with the UK) should be in time zone UTC-1. Why is this so? --Gazibara 23:49, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

MET

The abbreviation "MET" is believed by the maintainers of the public-domain timezone database to have arisen from an earlier error in that database. "MET" is a corruption of the German "MEZ" (Mitteleuropäische Zeit). 121a0012 19:31, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

This information would be quite interesting to verify and add to the article! Do you have any reference? --Ptandler (talk) 20:59, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Summer time

I live in Belgium, and I was wondering if we can still use the term CET during the summer, to indicate our local time?

• According to the explanation at the beginning on this webpage ("(CET:) Its time offset is UTC+1 during standard time and UTC+2 during daylight saving time"), we can.
• According to the sentence later on ("The following countries and territories use Central European Time during the winter only: Belgium"), we can not.

I think the second statement is not correct. Belgium is also using CET the whole year. But in the summer, this CET is UTC+2, and in the winter this CET is UTC+1. CET is per definition the time in Centrale Europe (summer or winter). So I assume this list (of countries that do or do not change the time) would be better in an article about daylight savings time?

- Edward Velo 10:39, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

There is no standard for time zone abbreviations, unless your national government has enacted one. You can call it whatever you want (presumably using a French or Flemish name as appropriate). If you want to be understood, call it "UTC+0100" or "UTC+0200" as appropriate for the time of year. For what it's worth, the public-domain timezone database, which is as close to a standard as anything, uses the abbreviations "CET" and "CEST", except between 1892 and 1914 and between 1918 and 1940, when "WET" and "WEST" are used instead. (Belgium adopted standard time, as Brussels Mean Time, in 1880. In 1892, the country switched to GMT ("WET"), on which it remained until the Germans invaded. Summer Time was first introduced by the German occupation in 1918, and continued until the end of the Second World War. It was not reinstituted until 1977 when the first Summer Time Directive came into force.) 121a0012 01:09, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

My interpretation is that CET is the local time (UTC+0100). But in Europe we use legal time which is either local time or local time+0100 in summer. - Alexandre 24 July 2007 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alex dacosta~enwiki (talk • contribs) 09:25, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Regardless of the formal or technical details, I think it should be worth noting that CET is routinely used to refer to Central European Summer Time in informal contexts and occasionally in media (e.g. http://metronews.ca/news/world/1412811/eurotunnel-service-resumes-after-french-ferry-workers-block/). 81.148.186.105 (talk) 12:32, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

The Spanish case

I live in Spain and the school starts at 09:00 or 08:30. The 09:30 is used sometimes for kids in age below 5.

80.33.107.34 07:31, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

This part seems rather unencyclopedic and anecdotal, I vote that we reword it as a cultural note or remove it. trisweb (Talk) 19:14, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

I ask for rewriting or deletion of this part. Maybe all other people are wrong. Obviously, I'm Spanish. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.161.73.234 (talk) 13:32, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Meridians on map?

Could someone add them, please, to illustrate the W/E 7°30' and E 22°30' cases which are discussed? Thanks in advance. -- Matthead  DisOuß   16:48, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Major metropolitan areas

I do not see the relevance of this toppic to the article. My sugestion is to delete it from the article. by 212.18.162.33 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.18.162.33 (talk) 10:36, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

agree, TimeCodex (talk) 13:47, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

The reason of the "Major metropolitan areas" section is that Americans are used to having lists of cities instead of lists of countries when talking about time zones. Esmito (talk) 19:31, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a site for USAmericans. There is no reason to cater to one nation, unless, of course, that nation 'owns' Wikipedia. But that is against the ethos of the web site. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.17.87.2 (talk) 23:20, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Which war?

The usage section introduces itself with the following:

The German Empire unified its time zones in 1893, to use CET (MEZ). During the war, this time was implemented in all occupied territories.

Before World War II, Lithuania used CET (MET) in the years 1920–40. In France, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg CET was kept. After the war Monaco, Spain, Andorra and Gibraltar implemented CET.

In the first paragraph, a war is mentioned, but it is not mentioned which war. Is the first world war? Or is the second? Less ambiguity, thank you! --Svip^pong 18:34, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Germany did not occupy France in World War I. Therefore, I'm assuming that whoever wrote this sentence meant World War II. -- Prince Kassad (talk) 17:29, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Except it says The German Empire, where the phrase 'the war' would usually mean the First World War. It is either ambiguous or incorrect. --Svip^pong 22:58, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

Proposed adoption in the United Kingdom

Yank, here, so mayhaps the rather extensive discussion of year-round British Standard Time (equivalent to CET) doesn't mean as much to me here as it might were I over there. Still, it seems to this editor, that the discussion isn't warranted in this article and should be moved - perhaps to British Summer Time or even to it's own article. --Trappist the monk (talk) 00:15, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Romance Standard Time

This page redirects from Romance Standard Time and yet doesnt mention it at all in the article. So visitors like me looking for info on RST come away with no idea what it is despite being redirected here.. Clever... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.213.140.86 (talk) 11:41, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Second this, came for the same (finding the identifier in an Exchange .ics file) and found nothing but the implicit association given by the redirect. Digging a bit, I found some old discussion about the redirect and some evidence from Microsoft that this time zone identifier is their invention, probably together with a bunch of others in those lists. Question is what the authoritative naming of time zones are and whether the Microsoft identifiers are prominent enough to be mentioned along those. This stack overflow question and reference to a SO wiki page has some insights, and refer to the tz database by IANA, the POSIX standard and Microsoft's identifier list as the major established/de-facto ways to refer to time zones. None of those, however, seems to be used in current articles such as this and fx. UTC+01:00. When people are looking for these identifiers, maybe they should be listed?

Kirkgaard (talk) 21:36, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Definition somewhat ambiguous wrt summer time

[This is sort of a restatement of the discussion about #Summer time above.]

Our article defines CET as being UTC+1, but is it worth some more discussion of the ambiguity that can result if people colloquially use it to mean "the time kept by most nations in Central Europe"?

The article says that (a) it is UTC+1, (b) it used in most parts of the European Union, and (c) "all member states of the European Union observe summer time". But, depending on how you look at it, those three facts can not all hold true. In particular, for about half the year, all of those member states of the European Union are not using UTC+1.

This difficulty could be resolved if only there were a commonly-accepted term for "Central European Time" which encompassed the summer time shift, that is, if there were a term that meant "UTC+1 or UTC+2, as appropriate for the time of year." But since there is no such term, people often use "CET" instead. In practice, then, the term "CET" is ambiguous.

So I guess what I'm wondering is whether it's worth adding something along the lines of "Colloquially, the term "CET" is often used to refer to the time kept by a county in this time zone, including its summer time adjustment". Under that interpretation, 'CET' means 'UTC+01:00 or UTC+02:00, depending on the time of year.'"

See also this thread at the Reference Desk. —Steve Summit (talk) 15:53, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

The article contradicts itself. In the introduction it says CET is UTC+01:00. But the paragraph on the United Kingdom says Central European Time is always one hour ahead of British time. So this means that in summer CET is UTC+02:00. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rpt0 (talk • contribs) 16:08, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Deleting nonsensical statement

" 1884 ** The areas of current Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia start using CET. "

This statement does not make sense. Those territories were part of several different countries -- Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina (protectorate) were parts of of Austria-Hungary, the territory of what is now FYROM does not correspond to any particular political subunit or grouping of subunits of the Ottoman Empire, and the other two were independent countries. I'm deleting that line rather than putting a citation needed, because I highly doubt one can be provided. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.121.52.96 (talk) 14:03, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

92.34.200.187

@92.34.200.187: At first you started removing 1,400 bytes, and now you are removing over 2,600 by giving weak reasons. Can you discuss first per WP:BRD? Capitals00 (talk) 18:43, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

Need for more authoritative sources

This article relies heavily on the private website www.timeanddate.com, which in turn does not cite any sources as far as I can see. And I don't see any references in the article to more authoritative sources like international bureaus, governments, or universities. I'm trying to find the actual treaties that must lie below all the information, but I'm failing to find them—even on Google. Shouldn't we try to find some more authoritative sources and cite them? Does anyone have any suggestions to such authoritative sources? --Jhertel (talk) 22:39, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

Seconded. In particular, it's not clear that the reference to African countries is appropriate. My understanding is that CET is legislated, probably somewhere in the European Union, and that even countries like Switzerland go along with it without being part of it. It would be nice to find out who determines things like DST. Groogle (talk) 23:17, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

• No, CET is not legislated by the EU, it has no jurisdiction. Members of the EU are actively considering an agreement to abolish DST (or, to be more precise, abolishing the time change as some countries will adopt permanent summer time and others permanent winter time) but that is incidental. There are EUComm policy documents that use the terms EET, CET and WET, but that is just an example of adoption by usage rather than by law. See [1] Currently there are three standard time zones in the EU: Western European Time (Ireland, Portugal, UK), Central European Time (17 Member States) and Eastern European Time. And [2][3][4] (with acknowledgement to the work of Thjarkur, who found these).
• Civil times are usually legislated nationally, a long time ago: AFIK all such legislation precedes the establishment of UTC as the primary definition.
• I have seen African time zones: East African Time (UTC-03:00), Central African Time (UTC-02:00) and and West African Time (UTC-01:00) but not a Far West African Time (UTC+00:00). Again, these are just examples of adopted usage rather than any legislation.

Wikipedia follows rather than leads, but if we can observe real-world adoption of the terms (for example, by the EU - but also by "specialist" sites like timeanddate.com and timeserver.com) then we certainly can and indeed should document it. Doing so doesn't mean we have to update every page on the site to use it. --Red King (talk) 13:19, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

References

Nominal rather than physical

I started to change the word 'physical' to 'nominal', but decided that I had best stop to verify consensus. I suspect whoever wrote 'physical' in scare quotes felt at some level it isn't the right term but it was the best they could come up with. In other contexts, the word 'nominal' is used to mean that the figure is indicative and gets used in specific cases (especially when the word 'nominal' is being used to weasel word short measure!) to indicate a reference measure rather than a correct-to-the-micron measure.

Does anyone want to argue for retention of 'physical'? --Red King (talk) 13:30, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

Biggest city Berlin

I don't see the relevance for that information nor a clear justification for its truth. If Berlin is bigger than say Paris certainly depends on which criteria are used. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.217.4.27 (talk) 19:09, 30 May 2021 (UTC)