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PROD of VSS Imagine

Hi folks -- I just saved VSS Imagine from a PROD, but the article could certainly use a little love from anyone who can help out please? -- Rlandmann ( talk) 21:59, 16 June 2024 (UTC) reply

Date format

The style guide states that "Since space is not within any Earth-bound time zone, and to avoid regional bias, the WP:WikiProject Spaceflight community has established a consensus (discussed here) to use UTC."

What it doesn't make explicitly clear, does that include using the DMY date format too?

It appears to me that most pages use the DMY date format, but the Apollo and SpaceX Starship pages appear to be notable exceptions. I attempted to change over the Starship pages, @ Redacted II opposed to the changes ( discussion here). RickyCourtney ( talk) 19:34, 9 July 2024 (UTC) reply

I was hoping to get some clarity on the matter from those involved in the earlier discussions (@ N2e @ ChiZeroOne @ Craigboy @ Secretlondon).
Thanks! RickyCourtney ( talk) 19:34, 9 July 2024 (UTC) reply
For additional info, the changes were to the IFT-1, IFT-2, IFT-3, and IFT-4 articles.
All the articles listed above did have the "Use MDY" template, while most other spaceflight articles have the "Use DMY" template (including SpaceX Starship and SpaceX Starship Flight Tests).
(Additionally, the draft List of SpaceX Starship Launches uses DMY) Redacted II ( talk) 19:51, 9 July 2024 (UTC) reply
How articles were originally created matters. Whether some more recent editor might have changed the article template to the "Use MDY" template", the improtant question is whether there was a solid discussion & consensus for the change from DMY to MDY. So that would need to be looked at for some of the articles you mentioned.
But broadly, I think we are much better off if English Wikipedia spaceflight articles are in a more global standard of date and time formats, and not the US-centric narrow flavor. So, I'd be in favor of DMY data format and UTC times as the default starting point. For orbital launches, I believe we adopted the practice long ago to give times in UTC (with parenthetical local time, if relevant). N2e ( talk) 03:53, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
I too am in favour of DMY data format. This is implicitly endorsed by the project Wikipedia:WikiProject Spaceflight/Style guide and the MOS ( Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers). The use of DMY dates used to be explicitly endorsed in the project style but we had problems with people changing the style of articles. The guidelines state that the date style of an article is that of the first non-stub version of an article. ( MOS:DATERET) Where there is a {{ use dmy dates}} or {{ use mdy dates}} template, that will be honoured by the bots and templates, and should be honoured by editors too. While MOS:MILFORMAT trumps MOS:DATERET, my preference has always been to seek consensus. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:29, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Can we add something back to the style guide to reflect this? I see there was something there until January 2022. I’d suggest:
It is preferred that dates be in a day-month-year format (7 July 1983), however Wikipedia’s guidelines on retaining established date formats (see WP:DATERET) should be respected.
-- RickyCourtney ( talk) 06:21, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Pinging @ BilCat and @ Ergzay who were involved with that removal. RickyCourtney ( talk) 06:35, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Strong national ties to a topic
Articles related to Apollo and Starship have a strong national tie to the US (both single-nation endeavors), so MOS:MILFORMAT supports MDY for both sets of articles Redacted II ( talk) 12:49, 10 July 2024 (UTC) EDIT: misinterpreted definition of "strong national ties", so wouldn't apply to Starship. It would still apply to Apollo, though. Redacted II ( talk) 13:14, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Yeah, I agree that the Apollo pages should remain in MDY. I mentioned them here in an effort to have a more complete discussion. I do, however, continue to believe that the Starship IFT pages should use DMY format. RickyCourtney ( talk) 16:14, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
As you said, WP:DATERET is relevant. The IFT articles have evolved considerably using MDY, so policy suggests keeping MDY.
(Additionally, I believe that MDY should be endorsed over DMY) Redacted II ( talk) 18:42, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Care to expand on why you believe that MDY should be endorsed over DMY? -- RickyCourtney ( talk) 19:04, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Its (in my opinion) better, and a significant percentage of the worlds population uses it. Redacted II ( talk) 19:13, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Actually, it is a small minority of the world's population. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:01, 11 July 2024 (UTC) reply
I misread the map. LOL my bad Redacted II ( talk) 22:19, 11 July 2024 (UTC) reply
I agree that WP:DATERET is important. WP:DATERET overrides wikiprojects. Wikiprojects are for setting rules that are left vague by the MOS. However see the new discussion I started below. Ergzay ( talk) 20:27, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Why do you think that "strong national ties" does not apply to Starship? SpaceX has on a number of occasions invoked nationalistic sentiment when talking about its space launch ("returning space launch to America", employees cheering "USA USA USA", and the general sentiment of American fans of SpaceX). Ergzay ( talk) 20:45, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Most Americans do not care about SpaceX (which, as a fan of spaceflight, is very hard for me to understand).
But if you think it has strong national ties, then your probably correct.
EDIT: Ergzay, please use fewer messages. Several of your posts could have been merging into one post. Redacted II ( talk) 21:27, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Apologies, it's a bad habit of mine as I write first and then develop additional thoughts and write those as well. Ergzay ( talk) 21:31, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
That's fine (I have the same issue).
Just use the edit function to modify the original post. Redacted II ( talk) 22:25, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
This is a wider subject that is long overdue for being covered in WikiProject Spaceflight. That WikiProject Spaceflight is about things that happen in space (edit: beyond suborbital trajectories) or things launching into space into or beyond orbit. In that case it absolutely makes sense to use UTC and probably DMY. However for events that are happening on land at launch sites not directly related to launch activities, local time of day is absolutely relevant, as is local use of date formats. Where these must be mixed (for example launch prep or pre-launch operations) a judgement call needs to be made and policy should be left vague. Ergzay ( talk) 20:32, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
In cases where local time is used however, it should be mandatory to append the time zone or wording like "local time" or similar. Ergzay ( talk) 20:43, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
I think that's good nuance. For launch and landing, it would be good to use the time zone code and the local time format in the infobox and include something more explanatory in the intro prose. An example of what that would look like here. -- RickyCourtney ( talk) 20:54, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
To be clear, I'm relatively in favor of unifying Starship related articles into MDY and local-time formats. Almost all starship activities thus far have been happening on the ground or in the airspace above the launch site. For example all of the IFT launches did not reach full orbit and so have no events that would be relevant for UTC/DMY usage. When we start getting orbital launches with Starship and payload deployments I think UTC/DMY usage should come into play. Ergzay ( talk) 20:57, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
Your Boeing example is a good example of how orbital launch should be formatted, but we're not quite there yet with Starship. Ergzay ( talk) 20:59, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
To be more clear I edited my earlier comment mentioning exactly what I mean that I think suborbital launches are not covered. Ergzay ( talk) 21:02, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply
For example, I did a quick survey of a couple US-based sounding rocket pages picked at random and they either use military date formats or they use MDY formats. I didn't see any DMY formats or UTC. See Category:Sounding rockets of the United States. Ergzay ( talk) 21:09, 10 July 2024 (UTC) reply

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Galaxy 2 (disambiguation)#Requested move 14 July 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. 98𝚃𝙸𝙶𝙴𝚁𝙸𝚄𝚂[𝚃𝙰𝙻𝙺] 22:33, 14 July 2024 (UTC) reply

Hi, there is a requested merge discussion at Talk:IM-1#Proposed merge of EagleCam into IM-1 which may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. The discussion has been open since the end of February. Thanks, Consigned ( talk) 11:08, 21 July 2024 (UTC) reply

Assistance cleaning up Timeline of Mars 2020?

I'm trying to go through and clean up some articles related to Martian topics and it appears that Timeline of Mars 2020 is a complete mess that lists every single event, day-by-day, of Mars 2020. This one I'm a bit stuck on, since it clearly is a bit of a WP:TNT situation but it's not immediately obvious to me how best to approach it. Would anyone have any time to help me work through this one and clean it up so it passes muster? Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 15:14, 25 July 2024 (UTC) reply

Requested move of SpaceX Starship flight test pages

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:SpaceX Starship integrated flight test 4, impacting all of the SpaceX Starship integrated flight test pages, that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. -- RickyCourtney ( talk) 15:23, 30 July 2024 (UTC) reply

I think this is important to comment on, as again some individuals try to capture discussion on own interpretations. Maybe members of this project also might want to re-consider the "Low‑importance" assessments for all the SpaceX Starship articles. This is the most media commented spaceflight action nowadays, even before Ariane + Artemis (which is dependent on Starship, of course), but rated "low importance" leaves these acticles orphaned, neclected and more or less to a single editor who had put in original reseach and exaggerations while blocking others, especially IPs, from co-editing. The articles suffer greatly. 47.69.66.56 ( talk) 10:53, 1 August 2024 (UTC) reply
First, stop with the baseless accusations. They aren't constructive.
There also isn't a correlation, AFAIK, between the official article importance and the # of editors working on the article. SpaceX Starship flight tests is a good example; low importance, almost 350 editors have edited it.
For a list of the classification and quality of every Starship article, they are below:
SpaceX Starship: Class B, High Importance. Former "Good article".
SpaceX Super Heavy: Class B, Mid Importance.
SpaceX Starship (spacecraft): Class B, Mid Importance.
Starship HLS: Class C, High importance.
SpaceX Starship flight tests: Class B, Low Importance. (For comparison, List of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches is a "featured list", Low Importance)
SpaceX Starship integrated flight test 1: Class C, Not listed in importance. (This should be fixed, and placed at low-mid importance)
SpaceX Starship integrated flight test 2: Class C, Low Importance.
SpaceX Starship integrated flight test 3: Class C, Low Importance.
SpaceX Starship integrated flight test 4: Class C, Low Importance.
SpaceX Starship integrated flight test 5: Stub, Low Importance. (This should be mid-high, as this is SpaceX's first attempt to catch a booster)
SpaceX Starship integrated flight test 6: Not listed in quality, Not listed in importance. (This should be fixed, and set to Stub, Low Importance.)
DearMoon project: Start Class, Low Importance.
Rocket Cargo: Class B, Low Importance.
SpaceX Starship design history: Class C, Low Importance
Polaris program: Class C, Mid Importance.
SpaceX Mars Colonization Program: Start Class, Mid Importance.
Blue Origin Federation, LLC v. United States: Stub Class, Low Importance
(Also, just so you are aware, Starship has 0 connection to Ariane. They're direct competitors) Redacted II ( talk) 12:26, 1 August 2024 (UTC) reply

How should time intervals be displayed?

Several articles of interest to this wikiproject use {{ time interval}} with |abbr=on. The issue of what should be displayed by this template is being discussed at Module talk:Age#abbr=on violates MOS. Please comment there. Johnuniq ( talk) 04:12, 1 August 2024 (UTC) reply