On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 7:26 PM, Andrew Gray <[email protected]> wrote: > 2009/5/12 stevertigo <[email protected]>: > > >> 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 is a bit out-of-date and carry on.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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
