[cgi-wiki-dev] Review date field

Dominic Hargreaves dom at earth.li
Tue Jun 19 21:16:25 BST 2007


OpenGuides has had a long-standing feature request from me which I'm now
thinking about implementing:

http://dev.openguides.org/ticket/1

The idea would be to prevent entries from getting too stale by storing
some meaningful data about when the node was last checked over for
accuracy (as opposed to other minor changes).

This could be done a couple of ways:

- as per http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Trinity%2C_SW4_0JG
  in free-text in the node content

With a ticky-box:

"If you have verified the  content of this article as correct, please
ticky ticky [ ]"

Suggested rendering of this data - at the bottom of pages:

"This page was last checked for accuracy on yyyy-mm-dd"

This itself could be done two ways:

- as Wiki::Toolkit metadata - automatically populate it with a standard
  string representation of the date if appropriate

The way I'm starting to favour, though, is a new sort of Wiki::Toolkit
data. This has the advantage that it can be typed correctly (as a date
object). It's a bit more work to implement, but not too much.

The question is, whether this is an appropriate addition to
Wiki::Toolkit. Since it is in many ways similar to the modified stamp,
I think it is.

The question also arises of whether we could also use a "should be
reviewed on the following date" - ie an explicitly staleness factor,
rather than just inferring such (6 months after last reviewed date, for
example). Would it be overkill to be able to specify both?

Kake is in favour of retaining free text descriptions (useful of only
some parts of the content have been verified) but this doesn't allow
systematic searches on this data (so we can proactively go out and
regularly review nodes, for example. There's no reason, of course, that
we can't keep both functions - people can carry on doing this even if
there is more structured data available too. Or we could add a separate
free text field, as a normal metadata field.

Any opinions welcomed.

Cheers,

Dominic.

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)



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