On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 7:26 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
2009/5/12 stevertigo stvrtg@gmail.com:
Better to do something like: "Wikimania {{dateswitch|is scheduled to begin on|began on|August 26, 2009}}, and {{dateswitch|will run until|ran until|August 28, 2009}}"
Or (simpler): "Wikimania {{dateswitch|will run from|ran from|August 26-28, 2009}}.
Producing: ante) "Wikimania will run from August 26-28, 2009. post) "Wikimania ran from August 26-28, 2009.
Is having "Wikimania will run...", read after the fact, really a problem for us? I mean, people read things all the time that refer to ongoing or past events in the future tense; they just notice the text is a bit out-of-date and carry on. Yeah, it's suboptimal, but people don't seem unduly distressed by it on a day-to-day basis.
More importantly, there's two new problems that this template would introduce, aside from the markup concerns.
a) It makes us a hostage to fortune.
b) It gives a spurious sense of timeliness.
The first is fairly clear - if the event *doesn't* happen, for whatever reason, or is postponed, or the like, then unless we remember to go and fix it, we've published an article claiming it did. This is pretty definitely bad, because it's taken a factually-accurate statement (intended to begin X) and turned it into a factually-incorrect one (began X).
The second is a little fuzzier - if I read an article which says something was intended to happen last week, I know that it's an old article, that it may not be right. If I read an article which says something *did* happen last week, however, I assume it's been written in the past few days, that it's fairly up-to-date, etc. Are we doing our readers a disservice by giving off these signals when the actual content of the article hasn't been changed?
Agree wholeheartedly with Andrew Grey here. For the reasons he gives, this sort of thing doesn't really work.
Carcharoth