On 1/4/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs(a)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twenty pages became outdated.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
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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_Paton>Borys 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 is", which will become outdated upon the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But we should minimize the amount of potentially outdated statements as much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