[WikiEN-l] Date conditional switching templates

[Andrew Turvey]

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" <stvrtg at gmail.com> 
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org> 
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 <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>wrote: 

> Better to say "as of <DATE>, this is known". That way the reader knows 
> they are reading something written at a certain date, and editors know 
> from what point they need to carry on updating. If things change, the 
> conditional template will be saying the wrong thing. I'm also wary of 
> having templates spit out article text, as changes to the template 
> will affect not only current versions of the article, but also the old 
> versions of the article if you look at them in the page history. 


"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concern should be in removing any such outdated phrasing, and making the 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 
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