I posit that it's the wording. Keeping using either "The ISO 8601 week-based year" or "ISO year" is enough to keep people confused whenever they read or hear i

I posit that it's the wording. Keeping using either "The ISO 8601 week-based year" or "ISO year" is enough to keep people confused whenever they read or hear it. The reasoning is simply: do we want "international standard year"? -- hell yeah! We all pattern match, so "ISO" and "year" match too much of what we want, so we wouldn't even try to doubt our decision to use it! The proper wording is: don't ever use a word "year" in this case, keep calling the number just a "special G number": "%G -- the very special G number used only when creating week-of-the-year calendars, see NOTES" Then in NOTES it would have to be again elaborated that the number obtained by G is a very special number used only for week-of-the-year calendars as specified in a specific ISO standard in this case meaningful only for week-of-the-year calendars and nothing else, and even then, that there are other week-of-the-year calendar standards that do the calculation differently from that ISO specification, and that all this doesn't have anything to do with ISO standard date formatting! And never should this number be referred to as "year". Just a "G number for week-of-the-year." Write that it is "often, but sometimes definitely not the same as the year number." That's in the line for "easy things should be easy (and obvious) and hard things less easy, especially if the hard thing is for almost all of the uses the wrong thing. But we all know that a lot of man pages are often both completely precise but at the same time almost useless: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial/2015-March/048184.html https://www.mercurial-scm.org/pipermail/mercurial/2015-March... "generates a random man page for a made-up git command... more or less indistinguishable from the official docs" Of course the approach (being precise while remaining useless) is much older and much more universal than that specific tool and specific pages at some point in time.