I've whipped up a quick example at < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Luna_Santin/Dateswitch>gt;, currently: - {{#ifexpr: {{#time:U| {{{date|{{{3|}}}}}} }} > {{#time:U}} | {{{pre|{{{1|}}}}}} | {{{post|{{{2|}}}}}} }} Which would give us: - {{dateswitch | text before date | text on or after date | date}} This might have some problems with page cache, and honestly I'm a bit dubious about its utility, but from a template standpoint it shouldn't be too hard. -Luna On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 10:41 PM, stevertigo &lt;stvrtg(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On 12/05/2009, Luna &lt;lunasantin(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The problem is, you don't know whether it actually happened or not. There's going to be problems if it was supposed to happen, and then got cancelled. Either you have to use it with a built-in fact template or you only use it for things that nothing can even conceivably stop (things that need *no* human input), like orbital mechanics, rotation of the Earth or centenaries etc. I suppose you could add a category to the template to help find things that have passed so as to permit people to remove the template and check that it actually happened; that would at least be an improvement. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be *much* better. Life in an imperfectly perfect world would be pretty ghastly though.

2009/5/12 Sam Korn &lt;smoddy(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: FWIW, these have all been replaced now, it seems, in favour of this system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:As_of ...which puts a template in the article text and silently creates a category. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Isn't it easier just to change the tense when the event has happened: it needs a human eye to reword and update it anyway. ----- Original Message ----- From: "stevertigo" &lt;stvrtg(a)gmail.com&gt; To: "English Wikipedia" &lt;wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, 12 May, 2009 06:41:25 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Date conditional switching templates On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 6:26 PM, Carcharoth &lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: "As of" is great for ongoing concepts which require only occasiona updates, but that convention doesn't deal at all with the problem that we make dated statements because we have to, but this leaves the problem that they must then be manually updated. We don't for example say: "As of May 2009, the 2009 Wikimania will be held on August 26-28, 2009." Different concept altogether, though they are indeed both date-related. 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. BTW, a bot can cull any templates which have been switched to their post position, replacing the tag with plain text. And we use in-article templates all the time now, anyway, so I dunno what your concern was there. The real concern should be in removing any such outdated phrasing, and making the usage of tense clauses less of a hassle, and more uniform. -SV _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 7:26 PM, Andrew Gray &lt;andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk&gt; wrote: Agree wholeheartedly with Andrew Grey here. For the reasons he gives, this sort of thing doesn't really work. Carcharoth

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Andrew Gray &lt;andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk&gt;wrote;wrote: "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 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. Disservice? Using basic tagging, template computing, server automation and scheduling funtionalities to make uniform switching between tenses accross all articles is a disservice? -SV

Thing is though, you can always use a future tense like: The London Olympics {{dateswitch | is due to start | was scheduled to start | 05052012}} on 5th May 2012; that way, you're always right, even if it later rescheduled. So, I think this is a slight improvement over the 'as of' system, if used carefully. On 12/05/2009, stevertigo &lt;stvrtg(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be *much* better. Life in an imperfectly perfect world would be pretty ghastly though.

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 9:00 PM, Mark Nilrad &lt;marknilrad(a)yahoo.com&gt; wrote: I suggested above that because these template tags can be categorized, and are distinct from other text, and can contain also a simple way of indicating (visibly or in code) their switched position, that they would be easily visible to a bot, which could then check and replace switched tags with the past tense text. We could also I suppose automate other kinds of content in other simple ways, but I can't think of anything that would be computationally feasible. I suppose we already do present auto-calculated personal age based on their birth date, or their birth and death date. Any other [[Wikipedia:Content automation]] templates/tags/processes? -SV