[WikiEN-l] Date conditional switching templates

[Carcharoth]

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 7:26 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
> 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 is a bit out-of-date and carry on.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?

Agree wholeheartedly with Andrew Grey here. For the reasons he gives,
this sort of thing doesn't really work.

Carcharoth