[WikiEN-l] Date conditional switching templates

[Falcorian]

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>wrote:

> 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 is a bit out-of-date and carry on.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


Likewise, his reasoning has convinced me that it's better to leave it in the
future tense and be right, than to automatically change it and risk being
wrong.

--Falcorian