[WikiEN-l] Temporal tags and outdating

[William Beutler]

A self-updating template seems very unlikely to this non-programmer, but a
bot could certainly be created to handle these tasks. I wonder if that isn't
already done on, say, {{as of}} for example?


On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra at gmail.com
> wrote:

> 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 then becomes outdated and thus notably incorrect.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
>
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