Template talk:Date

Date preferences

Is there a way (probably using Lua) to get this template to output the date order specified in user preferences?

My preferences are set to day–month–year, but the template hardcodes that all varieties of English are given month–day–year. It would be good to have the output respect user prefs. — OwenBlacker (Talk; he/him) 19:08, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

Unfortunately I don’t think it’s possible – the template output gets cached as part of the page content, and every time preferences are honored, the cache size potentially doubles, so devs want to keep things that can be honored to the bare minimum, and they likely won’t give us access to the preferences. A possible solution is using the language variety: generic English (en) gets month–day–year, British English (en-gb) gets day–month–year, other varieties as appropriate. This way, you would be able to get day–month–year at the cost of seeing ‘s’s instead of ‘z’s, ‘ou’s instead of ‘o’s, and so on, all over the place. (But not consistently, as British English translations of the software are rather spotty.) —Tacsipacsi (talk) 22:27, 31 January 2025 (UTC)