On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 11:26 AM, Andrew Gray <[email protected]>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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
