[WikiEN-l] Date conditional switching templates

[stevertigo]

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk>wrote:

> Yeah, it's suboptimal, but people
> don't seem unduly distressed by it on a day-to-day basis.
>

"Suboptimal" means something like "not as good as it could be" doesn't it?
Are you promoting a status quo or else an editorial standard that WP should
be not quite all that it can be? I agree its not quite as useful as finding
water in the Sahara, but I disagree that any suboptimal situation that can
be corrected, shouldn't, nor any attempt at such be made.

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.


Using language like "hostage to fortune" and "spurious... timeliness" is a
bit dispensensational and hyperbolic.

Assuming this possible "factually incorrect" aspect will be any more
compounded than it already is, or else is worse than the incorrectness of
future/past tense clauses, one possible solution is simply to have the
dateswitch show a small flag. Maybe a red colored asterix next to the
datestamp, indicating that a date flag has been switched and needs to be
checked: "Wikimania will begin on August 26, 2009*." Don't know how to deal
with the containment problem with the period being outside the tag.

And I also don't know if its wise to use visible inline editorial tags
anyway, though I do know we currently use a dozen or more even more
conspicuous such tags and they appear to work extremely well.


> 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?
>

Disservice? Using basic tagging, template computing, server automation and
scheduling funtionalities to make uniform switching between tenses accross
all articles is a disservice?

-SV