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So the Canadian government had a cabinet shuffle today, and just like that, twenty pages became outdated.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 But I'll bet anybody that within four or five years, all of those cabinet pages will be outdated in their present form again.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?
theProject wrote:
So the Canadian government had a cabinet shuffle today, and just like that, twenty pages became outdated.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?
You mean everybody isn't doing that already?
1/2 :-)
Stan
On 1/4/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
theProject wrote:
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?
You mean everybody isn't doing that already?
1/2 :-)
Stan
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Not really, no. Just looking through some of our featured articles, some things jump out at me immediately. For example, from [[Hero of Ukraine]]: "Since the technical scientist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borys_PatonBorys Paton first received the title in 1998, 170 people have been awarded the title." One also sees phrases like "very recently" and "in recent years ..." used in [[Quantum computer]] and [[Swastika]].
I recognize some there need to be some exceptions, of course. All articles on living people start with "... is", which will become outdated upon the death of the individual. That's to be expected, and it'd be extremely awkward to start every single article on a living person with "as of 2007". But we should minimize the amount of potentially outdated statements as much as possible. As it stands now, when I read "only three people have performed such and such an accomplishment", I immediately think, "as of when?"
On a related note: our fictional writing is often written in past tense, when it should be written in present tense. *sigh*...
theProject wrote:
[...] Just looking through some of our featured articles, some things jump out at me immediately. For example, from [[Hero of Ukraine]]: "Since the technical scientist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borys_PatonBorys Paton first received the title in 1998, 170 people have been awarded the title." One also sees phrases like "very recently" and "in recent years ..." used in [[Quantum computer]] and [[Swastika]].
You didn't notice the smiley face? Writing in the present tense as if nothing will ever change is a little bit of sloppiness that everybody is guilty of sooner or later. We've long had a style page somewhere that talks about all this. Feel free to fix any you see, dunno if there's any way to automate detection and/or improvement.
I note that we have some distinguished company, in that many of the 1911 EB articles do the same thing; a number of times I fixed up that kind of wording as part of importing the old article.
Stan
On 1/4/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
You didn't notice the smiley face?
Sorry. I saw the tongue-in-cheek a bit, but I guess I didn't play along as well as I would have liked. :-)
I brought this up on the list because I'm thinking something along the lines of a template much like {{fact}} or {{cn}}. You know, "blah blah blah blah blah [may become outdated]." This would be distinct from [update needed], in that this tag would pick on style, while [update needed] just picks on time.
theProject wrote:
On 1/4/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
You didn't notice the smiley face?
Sorry. I saw the tongue-in-cheek a bit, but I guess I didn't play along as well as I would have liked. :-)
I brought this up on the list because I'm thinking something along the lines of a template much like {{fact}} or {{cn}}. You know, "blah blah blah blah blah [may become outdated]." This would be distinct from [update needed], in that this tag would pick on style, while [update needed] just picks on time.
You make a valid point, but I don't know if there is a general solution at all. The example from the Canadian cabinet shuffle is the kind that is likely to be fixed quickly. Nevertheless there are many more articles where this will pass unnoticed. Articles about schools often name the principal of the school, and I doubt that there is any mechanism for updating these as needed.
Ec
On 04/01/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
You make a valid point, but I don't know if there is a general solution at all. The example from the Canadian cabinet shuffle is the kind that is likely to be fixed quickly. Nevertheless there are many more articles where this will pass unnoticed. Articles about schools often name the principal of the school, and I doubt that there is any mechanism for updating these as needed.
I think the present tense wording is preferable to "As of...". Perhaps articles with present tense wording could be placed in a metacategory similar in function to [[Category:Living persons]]. If this is done using a template perhaps a field would also indicate when the information will no longer be correct in the present.
theProject wrote:
I brought this up on the list because I'm thinking something along the lines of a template much like {{fact}} or {{cn}}. You know, "blah blah blah blah blah [may become outdated]." This would be distinct from [update needed], in that this tag would pick on style, while [update needed] just picks on time.
If we must have Yet Another Template(TM), I'd be more inclined to make it an explicit "[as of when?]". In the cases where you already know, or can easily determine, whether the information still is or when it last was current, it's probably more useful and no more difficult to add the "as of XXXX" part yourself than to stick a template on it.
theProject schreef:
Would it be difficult to use phrases like "as of 2007" more often?
You may be interested in [[Wikipedia:As of]] and associated talk page. Unfortunately, it is not marked as "guideline" or "policy", so I have no idea if these pages are at all sensible. (also 1/2 :-)
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?
See [[Wikipedia:Updating information]] and {{Update after}}.
(Note: I don't know if these pages answer all your questions, and if use of this template is accepted. Just pointing at some relevant and perhaps useful information)
Eugene
--- theProject wp.theproject@gmail.com wrote:
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 don't think there's any one solution to this (sometimes using "is" is quite reasonable), but another option is to simply bypass the issue of the present, and go with something like "person X was appointed CEO in May 2006".
-- Matt
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com
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