[WikiEN-l] Temporal tags and outdating

[Martijn Hoekstra]

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 10:24 PM, stevertigo <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Recap: A while ago we discussed date conditional switching templates:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-May/100714.html .
> The problem to be corrected was the use of future tense language which
> then becomes outdated and thus notably incorrect. This also has a
> greater effect of casual correction patterns which essentially
> annotate the error rather than fixing it. For example:
>
> ""Apple's iTunes store *will start* to sell DRM-free 256 kbit/s (up
> from 128 kbit/s) AAC encoded music from EMI for a premium price (this
> has since reverted to the standard price).""
>
> A proper correction would have simply changed "will start [to sell]"
> to "began [to sell]" and that would be that. Time and tenses require a
> little bit of thinking however, and an editor made a parenthetical
> comment (edit note, annote) in place of a considered switch of tense.
> Forgivable but incorrect. If the {{dateswitch}} template idea was
> fully implemented and used, anyone writing future events could simply
> write {{dateswitch|will start|began|ON DATE}} and the switch would
> happen on the date.
>
> The idea had some support, but people had some issues with dateswitch
> templates that would produce the wrong output because of some later
> change in the input. I guess that this might be more rare than common.
> The above example is notable however of where they miss the point. I
> note that we now have a category for some tags which relate to time,
> but I don't know about some of them:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Temporal_templates  These appear
> to be largely template messages, and if we are to employ actual
> computational power in helping deal with outdating, would it make
> sense to make a distinction between temporal messages and temporal
> (functional) tags?
>
> -SC
>

Could a temporal template in one way or another subst: itself once the
expiriation date passes? Now that would be awesome.

Martijn