At the moment, people can set their timezone preferences However, this is not reusable on wiki when we need to set a date. It is a blocker for announcements:
- Tech News only displays UTC times, that are not necessary easy to understand for most users
- Banners for maintenance windows (when servers are in read-only mode) are translated by volunteers who are asked to set the most common timezones for their language. Which results in a very long message for English languages.
The idea would be to have a magicword that would handle how times are displayed.
{{TIMEZONE}} alone would just display time set for the server, in the language used by the user.
If a time is added at ISO format {{TIMEZONE:2019-05-08-T15:00:00}}, then the time is shown to the user depending on:
- the global timezone defined for the wiki
- the preference set by the user on a given wiki.
Display would also be rendered depending on the language:
- on English Wikipedia using English: April 8, 2019 - 15:00 UTC
- on English Wikipedia using French: 8 avril 2019 - 15:00 UTC
- on French Wikipedia using French: 8 avril 2019 - 17:00 CEST
More option could be provided:
- Timezone: {{TIMEZONE:2019-05-08-T15:00:00|CEST}} : April 8, 2019 - 17:00 CEST
- Date filters: {{TIMEZONE:2019-05-08-T15:00:00|hour}} : 15