User:Mini-mitch/Sandbox Three/Time formats

Years
For technical reasons, the names of articles about years cannot contain commas. timeline and its associated templates require "clean" numbers to function properly. This is one instance in which the argument, "We should name the article exactly how it is in the primary source" fails. So: 100000000000000 must be the name of the article, but a more visually-friendly 100,000,000,000,000 may be created as a redirect for use within the body of articles. That said, editors may never use a comma when referring to a year that is shorter than five digits.

As was agreed through consensus, appendages which establish a year's position relative to year 0 shall be given in terms of "AD" and "BC". This is the overwhelmingly dominant usage within the DWU. BCE and CE may be more "politically correct" because they have no religious overtones, but such designations are very rarely used within the DWU. The Doctor himself has been heard on several occasions to use "BC" and "AD" within televised episodes, making their validity in the DWU hard to refute.

In a separate discussion, it was demonstrated that DWU sources were divided between those that believed in a year 0 and those that didn't. With a year 0, the year 2000 is the start of the second millennium and the 21st century. If there is no year 0, as is generally accepted in the real world scientific community, then 2001 is the the "anniversary date".

Because of the split in DWU fiction, however, we had to choose one or the other. In the end, it was decided to officially "believe in" a year 0, since this made programming of certain templates, like timeline, much easier.

Dates
Following a community discussion, the names of articles having to do with dates shall be in cardinal format — as seen in 25 December. However, redirects shall be maintained for the ordinal format, as in the case of 25th December.

Since the general goal on this wiki is to preference British English, this rule derives from a perception by the community that placing the day in front of the month is the "most British" way of handling dates. Additionally, the forum discussion stipulated that the cardinal form was simply used more often than the ordinal form in modern British English.

The cardinal form was also cited as being easier to use from a technical, coding standpoint.

That said, the ruling only applies to the names of the articles, and not to links made to those articles.

There is no consensus which prohibits other formats being used within the body of articles through pipe switching, since it can easily be proved that the British use "1 January", "January 1" and "January 1st" in various circumstances. It would be advisable, however, to use the same format within the confines of a single article.