Signing Witha Date

Potentially redundant pages (merge?): DateStamp, SigningWithaDate, ConsiderTimestampingYourWriting

When a historical event has occurred and is noted in a post to a page, you might consider Signing With a Date. This will make to post readable with regard to the event recorded. If exact dates are known and are edited into the post, it would also be appropriate then to remove the signature.

This would make it possible for historical points to be signified when the poster does not have the exact information, or if the exact date was not necessary for the purpose of the post. It would take the following form: -- 20040404

Alternatively, instead of:

This past week Sun and Microsoft came to agreement with regard to issues which existed between them. -- 20040404

Try:

In early April, 2004, Sun and Microsoft came to agreement with regard to issues which existed between them.

Also, it is not a good idea to use a purely numerical date - it leads to inevitable confusion between dd/mm/yy, mm/dd/yy, yy/mm/dd and yy/dd/mm (though I think I'm just making that last one up). Didn't we learn at y2k that the MostSignificantDigits? are often the most frequently left off? This is 20050429, not 050429 or 290405 or 042905.

If you read carefully the proposal, your illustration is covered! .. If exact dates are known and are edited into the post, it would also be appropriate then to remove the signature''

The form YYYYMMDD is a form which is becoming the standard way to express a date and as presented makes a list sorted on such a date field one which has correct order. It is also LanguageIndependent?, consisting only of numerics, understood regardless of language. In other words, The SimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork. -- DonaldNoyes

How about YYYY-MM-DD? YYYYMMDD is the ISO standard for dates, IIRC, but can be hard for humans to read, for the same reason that 1000000000 is hard to read (that's an American billion, for those who can't count the zeros). It also indicates clearly what the format is, as YYYY-MM-DD is the only common one with the 4-digit year first. -- JonathanTang

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 , ISO 8601 permits either YYYYMMDD or YYYY-MM-DD. (However, YYYY-MM is permitted while YYYYMM is not.) The standard also defines acceptable formats for times and durations as well as more unusual things like OrdinalDate?s and WeekDate?s. Use of ISO 8601 is one of the WorldWideWebConsortium's slightly-official quality tips: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/iso-date .