I'm not sure if this got brought up on the mailing list already, but I'd like to see some discussion on it anyway.
So the Canadian government had a cabinet shuffle today, and just like that, twenty pages became outdated. About ten articles that said something along the lines of "the current minister is ..." needed to be changed, and infoboxes and succession boxes also needed to be updated. This kind of thing happens once every year or so (sometimes more often, sometimes less often), so is it at all possible to limit the amount of time Wikipedia spends in the present tense? Would it be difficult to use phrases like "as of 2007" more often?
Obviously, not all present tense should be reverted. Something along the lines of "zoology is the biological discipline which involves the study of non-human animals" is obviously a definition, not a reference to anything temporal. But I'll bet anybody that within four or five years, all of those cabinet pages will be outdated in their present form again. Same goes for, say, sports records. "Records are made to be broken", as the saying goes.
Basically, my issue is with pages that contain statements that may be *directly* false in the future. (Omission of facts that may be true in the future is, of course, completely expected.) So instead of "Person X is the CEO of ABC Company, Inc.", or even "as of 2006, Person X is the CEO of ABC Company, Inc.", we'd write instead, "as of 2006, Person X was the CEO of ABC Company, Inc." Even if X is no longer the CEO of ABC sometime down the road, that statement -- as of 2006, he WAS the CEO -- is still true. I was thinking something along the lines of a template saying "this article contains facts that may not be true in the future", but any thoughts?