Fremantle
· timezones · MediaWiki · Wikimedia ·
I made the mistake yesterday of looking at how to determine a user's timezone in MediaWiki. I thought it'd be simple! Of course it's not. It does make sense, mostly, eventually. I'm giving up for now because I have other things to do and because I got to the point of reading the Wikipedia article about time zones and now I don't even know what one of these things is.
Some areas in a time zone may use a different offset for part of the year, typically one hour ahead during spring and summer, a practice known as daylight saving time (DST).
An "area in a time zone"?! That's a different time zone! That's what defines time zones, the fact that they have the same time. Or does it? Time zones all have nice unique names, like "Australia/Perth" where I am now (although note that they don't have nice standard or unique abbreviations — but at least the solid fact that 'EDT' doesn't refer reliably to either Australian Eastern Daylight Time (UTC+11) or Eastern Daylight Time (UTC−4) is actually a comforting piece of knowledge in this sea of confusion).
So they do have names, but what do those names mean? Are they time zones? Is "Australia/Melbourne" a time zone, or is it an umbrella term for AEST (UTC+10) and AEDT (UTC+11)? Are those the actual timezones? And for those, it's perfectly acceptable to define them as offsets (in minutes) from UTC.
And is it "time zone" or "timezone". Hurrumph.
(Which reminds me, I still need to switch my {{post}} template to accept time zone names rather than integer hour offsets, because those are the useful things, when combined with a date…)