Today, I learned that:

The purpose of international standards is to ensure quality, safety and efficiency in international matters involving products, services and systems. They are normally issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), based in Geneva, Switzerland.

ISO 8601:2004 is the current standard for writing calendar dates, also adopted by all countries in EU. It defines that dates shall be written as in this post’s title, “YYYY-MM-DD (2016-01-10)”. Although there are only some well defined alternatives to this format, one the few countries that uses this standard notation coherently is Sweden, but there are also Swedes that ‘prefer’ to use other formats. Some examples of a different notation in other countries are:

USA 1/10/2016
Brazil 10/01/2016

… That’s what I learned in school!

Refs.:

1: ISO

2: A summary of the international standard date and time notation

3: Date format by country

+: What did you learn in school today ?