I would suggest reverting the date format to yyyy-mm-dd on the activity_timeline.

[ckjpn]

yyyy-mm-dd is much more internationally understood.

Perhaps this was an unintentional change.

[AndiPersti]

Have you looked at the other language versions of that page? Do you want to revert the date format only for the English version or in general?

I have no problem reverting the date format. While working on that page I've tried different versions and also thought about whether to change the date format at all. But I would like to hear more opinions.

[jiru]

@AndiPersti I see no reason not to localize the date here.

@ckjpn Note that the date is now localized according to the interface language, thanks to AndiPersti’s recent localization efforts. So it shouldn’t be necessary to use a "more internationally understood" format any more.

That said, as for the English interface, the date format varies between regions. Since we don’t provide per-region locales, it might be better to use yyyy-mm-dd for English, if it is the most commonly understood format among English speaking countries.

[AndiPersti]

A little background information:
The date/time formatting is based on the PHP class IntlDateFormatter which itself uses data from the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR), a project by the Unicode Consortium. They define 4 formats: full, long, medium and short. (for how they are defined for English see https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/36/summary/en.html#1989).
I've mainly chosen the short format because it uses the least amount of space.

[trang]

I would suggest medium format without the year.

Dec 1
Dec 2
Dec 3
etc

The year is already indicated in the title so there's no need to repeat it.

The month is also indicated in the title but having a number all alone might not be very explicit so it's okay to repeat it.

[Poulpisator]

I would suggest to use the day of the week. Currently, I don't find this page useful (personal opinion). However, looking at December 2019, for example, I saw that the 6th had much more contributions (more than 1,000 compared to the average) so I implied it was a Saturday or a Sunday. Looking at a calendar, I realized it was actually a Friday. So now, I'm curious...

Long story short, I personally think this page would provide more information if the day of the week was displayed

Sunday, December 1
Monday, December 2
Tuesday, December 3
etc

[AndiPersti]

Here are some screenshots using the suggestions:

If we include the weekday, using abbreviations for weekday and month looks better IMHO:

[ckjpn]

I think that I like the 3rd one best, too. Perhaps the layout won't look as good once the dates go into 2 digits, but I'm not sure that that matter too much.

It might be nice if the most-recent were at the top, like it used to be years ago.

In other words, in reverse chronological order, so when visiting the page if would be easy to see the most recent days without needing to scroll down the page.

My guess is that if we could see the 2 or 3 most recent days on the upper right of the logged-in home page, that many regular contributors would find that very useful, and wouldn't need to keep coming to this page to find that information.

[trang]

Let's go for option 3 then.

[jiru]

Well, bad news. It’s not possible to implement option 3 (as well as all the other suggested formats without a year) in a way that works with other languages than English because PHP doesn’t allow to use ICU pattern generators. The skeleton that we want for option 3 is MMMEd.