I changed this once but Brion or Tim reverted me.

Yeah, you right: r13987 and r15725

But that time is not better, than the other. The current time is the best one, because you have not a wheel war for a example and no hardcoded stuff, which nobody can interpreted.

• Bug 18850 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

(In reply to comment #3)

• Bug 18850 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Good point from this dupe: using current time would make stuff a lot clearer for users with different calendars than ours.

I think it's cute to use Wikipedia Day. People can read the time just fine, current or otherwise.

Created attachment 6159
show what the 'no preference' time looks like; use current time, not 2001; show server date too

This patch that achieves all of my goals.

The only question I have left is what should we do when in some
languages, like uselang=en, the "No preferences" item is the same as one
of the other choices:

Date and time Date format

(*) 09:14, 27 May 2009 (No preference)
( ) 09:14, May 27, 2009
( ) 09:14, 27 May 2009
( ) 09:14, 2009 May 27
( ) 2009-05-27T09:14:50

That might be rather confusing to the user.
Should we make the duplicate disappear from the choices?

I think it's cute to use Wikipedia Day. People can read the time just fine,
current or otherwise.

If you were a wristwatch store owner, would you freeze all your wares on
your birthday, or use the current time?
And try using uselang=zh-tw, uselang=ko, or uselang=ja. Such users are
forced to calculate in their heads if 2001 and their local date match or
not.

Attached:

This patch that achieves all of my goals.

<This patch achieves all of my goals. see bug 18850.

Done in r62348. Note that I only did the timestamp change from Wikipedia day to wfTimestampNow().

Other unrelated changes from Jidanni can be filed as a separate bug, if anyone thinks it's worth it.