[WikiEN-l] Date conditional switching templates

[Andrew Gray]

2009/5/12 stevertigo <stvrtg at gmail.com>:


> 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.

Is having "Wikimania will run...", read after the fact, really a
problem for us? I mean, people read things all the time that refer to
ongoing or past events in the future tense; they just notice the text
is a bit out-of-date and carry on. Yeah, it's suboptimal, but people
don't seem unduly distressed by it on a day-to-day basis.

More importantly, there's two new problems that this template would
introduce, aside from the markup concerns.

a) It makes us a hostage to fortune.

b) It gives a spurious sense of timeliness.

The first is fairly clear - if the event *doesn't* happen, for
whatever reason, or is postponed, or the like, then unless we remember
to go and fix it, we've published an article claiming it did. This is
pretty definitely bad, because it's taken a factually-accurate
statement (intended to begin X) and turned it into a
factually-incorrect one (began X).

The second is a little fuzzier - if I read an article which says
something was intended to happen last week, I know that it's an old
article, that it may not be right. If I read an article which says
something *did* happen last week, however, I assume it's been written
in the past few days, that it's fairly up-to-date, etc. Are we doing
our readers a disservice by giving off these signals when the actual
content of the article hasn't been changed?

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk