Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Wikidata/Time and date handling improvements

Time and date handling improvements

  • Problem: Dealing with time and dates on Wikidata is a long-standing problem, with several aspects that usually are brought forward to discuss. This is an attempt to summarise the most pressing aspects, by selecting the relevant Phabricator tickets and checking all previous Community wishlist requests:
  1. allowing time values more precise than "day" (task T57755) - this is a recurring request that dates back to October 15, 2013 to have a potential time precision up to seconds, and not limited just to days;
  2. supporting non-Gregorian/Julian calendars (task T252627) - this is another non-trivial request for handling sources that express dates and occurrences in calendars other than Gregorian and Julian;
  3. fixing annoying problems with displaying date values (task T63958 and task T95553) – pretty self-explanatory, mostly related to a better localisation of values, that nonetheless is needed.
These are the main three aspects, though many other things might be needed to be looked at. Our common hope is to find finally someone who can tackle those problems.
  • Who would benefit: primarily Wikidata contributors, but also Wikidata re-users at large
  • Proposed solution: add functionalities and fix current problems in this field
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
    • task T57755 – Allow time values more precise than day on Wikidata
    • task T63958 – Use existing $dateFormats to format dates on Wikidata
    • task T95553 – Full stop in messages such as Wikibase-time-precision-century is incorrect in English
    • task T252627 – Support for additional calendar models
  • Proposer: Sannita - not just another it.wiki sysop 13:56, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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