René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"YearLocator should prefer ticks at the turn of the decade","articleBody":"**Bug summary**\r\n\r\n`YearLocator` is agnostic about decades. Ticks at the decades are nicer, so when choosing a starting value in some cases it should prefer to start a the turn of the decade or even mid decade. i.e 1970 instead of 1968, 1965 instead of 1964. This \"smart\" behaviour should apply when the intervals are factors of 5 and 10. \r\n\r\n**Code for reproduction**\r\n\r\n```python\r\nimport datetime\r\nimport matplotlib.pyplot as plt\r\n\r\nx = [datetime.datetime(1966, 1, 1),\r\n     datetime.datetime(2017, 1, 1)]\r\n\r\nticks = [datetime.datetime(i, 1, 1)\r\n        for i in range(1970, 2020, 10)]\r\n\r\ny = np.arange(len(x))\r\nfig, ax = plt.subplots()\r\nax.plot_date(x, y)\r\n# ax.set_xticks(ticks)  # preferred ticks\r\n```\r\n\r\n**Actual outcome**\r\n![bad-date-ticks](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/780341/33162629-24dcc99a-cff0-11e7-8f9d-61b29de67429.png)\r\n\r\n**Better outcome**\r\n![good-date-ticks](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/780341/33162648-40ddcb26-cff0-11e7-9774-8a9c86a06882.png)","author":{"url":"https://github.com/has2k1","@type":"Person","name":"has2k1"},"datePublished":"2017-11-23T07:54:00.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":3},"url":"https://github.com/9838/matplotlib/issues/9838"}