Automatic timezone selection
This page is kept for historical interest. Any policies mentioned may be obsolete. If you want to revive the topic, you can use the talk page or start a discussion on the community forum. |
Listed as Bugzilla #505.
I propose to add to the recently discussed "single-login" (one user account accross several wikipedia servers) the following feature regarding a single timezone setting for such users:
One user lives usually in one TIMEZONE linked to a location and having certain properties regarding "timecorrection" value and daylight saving time changes twice a year.
I wish to get rid of the manual setting of my timezone (timeoffset to UTC) when I have a single-login; the timezone setting should reflect not only the tiemcorrection to UTC, but also the changes according to national or international or local daylight saving time changes. It can be linked to a country code for most of the countries and for huge countries like the U.S.A. we need a more detailed setting. --Nyxos 07:19, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Links:
- This links detects at least Mid European Timezone in a perfect manner. Perhaps we can check, how they are actually doing it (I know, that Timezone/Timeoffset detection is not so easy as one would expect).
The GNU C library includes standard and comprehensive support for assigning timezones based on locations; following through the source, it turns out these come from the tzdata package, which you can get via FTP. It's kind of fascinating, because not only does it break down the world geographically, but historically as well...