On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Carcharoth <[email protected]>wrote:
> 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 is a bit out-of-date and carry on.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 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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
