I'm not sure if this got brought up on the mailing list already, but I'd
like to see some discussion on it anyway.
So the Canadian government had a cabinet shuffle today, and just like that,
twenty pages became outdated. About ten articles that said something along
the lines of "the current minister is ..." needed to be changed, and
infoboxes and succession boxes also needed to be updated. This kind of thing
happens once every year or so (sometimes more often, sometimes less often),
so is it at all possible to limit the amount of time Wikipedia spends in the
present tense? Would it be difficult to use phrases like "as of 2007" more
often?
Obviously, not all present tense should be reverted. Something along the
lines of "zoology is the biological discipline which involves the study of
non-human animals" is obviously a definition, not a reference to anything
temporal. But I'll bet anybody that within four or five years, all of those
cabinet pages will be outdated in their present form again. Same goes for,
say, sports records. "Records are made to be broken", as the saying goes.
Basically, my issue is with pages that contain statements that may be
*directly* false in the future. (Omission of facts that may be true in the
future is, of course, completely expected.) So instead of "Person X is the
CEO of ABC Company, Inc.", or even "as of 2006, Person X is the CEO of ABC
Company, Inc.", we'd write instead, "as of 2006, Person X was the CEO of
ABC
Company, Inc." Even if X is no longer the CEO of ABC sometime down the road,
that statement -- as of 2006, he WAS the CEO -- is still true. I was
thinking something along the lines of a template saying "this article
contains facts that may not be true in the future", but any thoughts?
--
theProject