Leading zeros in dates before 1000. [13 March 2013]
Why the leading zeros in dates before 1000? To my eye they look computer-database-ish, and do not follow any academic (or mathematical) convention that I am aware of.--Werebear 12:23, 13 March 2013 (EDT)
- I adopted a practice of adding a leading zero for those dates, so they would be less apt to be confused as damaged four digit items. It's the only place that we do that (no leading zeros on single digit day values). Not sure if it's really worth it though.
- One of these days I'm going to write a program that walks over our dates and normalizes them into whatever form the community agrees on, so I don't worry about that detail quite as much as I used to. What I really hate is actually the use of all caps for the month or qualifiers like "ABT/abt" and "BEF/bef". My preference is all lower case for qualifiers and a leading capital only for the month term - and limit the month term to the three letter abbreviation. There's a document on all this somewhere. The most important rule was that date strings are supposed to be acceptable within the GEDCOM specification, but I think we can do a lot better on making them cosmetically appealing... --jrm03063 13:19, 13 March 2013 (EDT)
- I agree on the capitals. As for the leading zeros, they at first sight make me, as a human, more rather than less suspicious that something is amiss. It makes the pages they are on feel somehow automated or computer-generated. Less trustworthy. My first impression would be that this is something that someone is dumping from a database onto a web page without bothering to tidy it up into a human-presentable format. Maybe I am overreacting, but there are already so many pages on Werelate in the medieval section where this is actually an accurate criticism, that I irrationally worry that they will start to infect those pages that were actually worked on by human fingers.--Werebear 16:37, 13 March 2013 (EDT)
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