CZ Talk:Managing Editor/2011/008 - Time and date at Citizendium

Existing standards

There is an international standard for how dates and times should be written. [1] Today is 2011-05-14, for example. This removes the ambiguity where Americans might write 05/14/2011 and Europeans 14/05/2011. It also sorts correctly on a computer without any special rules, and it is the way Chinese write dates. The standard uses 24-hour time, not AM/PM.

There is extensive discussion on date & time formats at [2]. Large parts of it are irrelevant to us, but other parts may not be. Sandy Harris 20:33, 13 May 2011 (CDT)

I would add that we should use GMT-5 or some such, not EST, CDT, etc. I have little idea what "CDT" in the timestamp above means. At a guess, Central Daylight Time where "Central" means central US. I can work out that it is GMT-5 by comparing the timestamp to my local time.

I prefer GMT to UCT. Am I being anachronistic? Sandy Harris 20:38, 13 May 2011 (CDT)

Yes, the standardized 2011-05-14 format removes ambiguity in contexts where it is understood to be the standard. Since we cannot (yet?) expect this from a large percentage of Citizendium readers, however, I think it would generally be preferable to use the names of the month instead, as in 14 May 2011 (or May 14, 2011). Anyway, I didn't see the need yet for fixing the format, but I remain open to discuss that aspect as well. As for GMT vs. UTC, they can be considered synonymous for our purposes. --Daniel Mietchen 16:18, 14 May 2011 (CDT)