Talk: ISO 8601

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Some people have proposed using ISO 8601 for wikipedia dates. For more of this discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)

BC dates are handled in ISO 8601 with a minus symbol. Beware that before AD 1 (0001) there is, BC 1 which is 0000, so BC 2 is -0001 and so on. I found a draft copy of the standrd at http://www.ray-connolly.fsnet.co.uk/ISO8601-2000_Draft-20001215_ISO-TC154-N362_Final.PDF (anon)

It is odd that Europeans lately are looking at ancient traditions that were brought to America from Europe and thinking they originated in the USA. The USA is more traditional than Europe is; that is why Sunday is still considered the first day of the week here. -- Mike Hardy

I don't think the old version was claiming that the tradition originated in the US, just that it was followed there. Anyway, it's not a big deal. --Camembert

Hm, is this view that Monday is day 1 really more "modern" than the view that Sunday is day 1? I mean, it must come from somewhere, this view. --Camembert

I'll bet you $1 it originated no more than 150 years ago. -- Mike Hardy

-- Hi 131.183.81.100 - I'll think you'll find that the Egyptians started their week on a Saturday. Mintguy

I thought the Egyptian week had ten days. -phma

The Long Now foundation suggests that years should be written with five digits (ie 02003 for the year 2003) in order to avoid the Year 10,000 problem.

This is pointless: all it does is push the problem forward a few years to 100,000, and situation already exists for dates in the past (-10,000 and earlier.) May as well accept that the year number can have a varying number of digits -( 18:57 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

• RFC2550: Y10K and beyond — RFC document published as an April Fools joke in 1999; still it contains many potentially useful ideas.

Without seeing that I assumed they were serious! Brianjd

The article seems to imply that ISO times are only appropriate in UTC, but from what I've read, without a time zone designator, times are assumed to be in local time. Putting a Z at the end designates it as UTC, and other time zones can be designated by include a +hh:mm or +hhmm or +hh or -hh:mm or -hhmm or -hh after the time. This is mostly from Markus Kuhn's page. I'll be updating the article accordingly. kmccoy 05:27, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

scripting error

There was a script in this article generating the current date/time like

This is sometimes incorrect since it does not use leading zeroes for single digit months or days. In an article like this no example is better than a wrong one. So I removed it.

For example,

 "The current time is 2004-3-2T12:34Z"

should be

 "The current time is 2004-03-02T12:34Z"

If someone can figure out a correct script that would be welcome.