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twenty pages became outdated.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
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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_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 is", which will become outdated upon the death of the individual.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 But we should minimize the amount of potentially outdated statements as much as possible.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*...