On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.ukwrote:
Yeah, it's suboptimal, but people don't seem unduly distressed by it on a day-to-day basis.
"Suboptimal" means something like "not as good as it could be" doesn't it? Are you promoting a status quo or else an editorial standard that WP should be not quite all that it can be? I agree its not quite as useful as finding water in the Sahara, but I disagree that any suboptimal situation that can be corrected, shouldn't, nor any attempt at such be made.
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.
Using language like "hostage to fortune" and "spurious... timeliness" is a bit dispensensational and hyperbolic.
Assuming this possible "factually incorrect" aspect will be any more compounded than it already is, or else is worse than the incorrectness of future/past tense clauses, one possible solution is simply to have the dateswitch show a small flag. Maybe a red colored asterix next to the datestamp, indicating that a date flag has been switched and needs to be checked: "Wikimania will begin on August 26, 2009*." Don't know how to deal with the containment problem with the period being outside the tag.
And I also don't know if its wise to use visible inline editorial tags anyway, though I do know we currently use a dozen or more even more conspicuous such tags and they appear to work extremely well.
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?
Disservice? Using basic tagging, template computing, server automation and scheduling funtionalities to make uniform switching between tenses accross all articles is a disservice?
-SV