Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2011/March

Some tsunami OR, hopefully
Okay, I'm (finally) done uploading pictures of the tsunami emergency experienced here in Pichilemu, Chile.

They are generally good-looking, and I'll be preparing an OR story for tomorrow. Cheers, --Diego Grez return fire 04:07, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

"Today", "yesterday" and other language that dates quickly on the main page
One of my particular bug-bears on Wikinews is when the main page says that something happened "today" or "yesterday" when it in fact happened several days ago. As this is a recurring problem, and my edit summaries have clearly not been having the desired effect so far, here are some examples:
 * Aug 2010
 * Sept 2010
 * Sept 2010
 * Oct 2010
 * Nov 2010 ("not yesterday now, not even the day before yesterday", as I said at the time)
 * Nov 2010 (where a blurb still said "Wednesday" which was a week out of date)
 * Nov 2010
 * Nov 2010 (where, 2 days on, the blurb still referred to "noon local time")
 * [gap when I find other things to do rather than edit WN]
 * March 2011 and again (same blurb, accidentally reverted during a page move)
 * March 2011 (event was 11 days old)
 * March 2011 (just now).

PLEASE don't use time-sensitive language in main-page blurbs, even if the article does. Think before accepting the automatic summary suggested by the MakeLead script. If you do use "today", "yesterday" etc, please make sure that you come back and reword the blurb to stop the main page getting out of date. Thank you. Bencherlite (talk) 16:35, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
 * We didn't always have this problem - but that's back when enough stories were published every day to keep the leads fresh. I, too, advise people not to blindly use MakeLead's suggested text, but actually reword it to make it more suitable for the main page. Tempodivalse [talk]  16:42, 21 March 2011 (UTC)


 * I appreciate this is currently a problem, but DO NOT push people to encyclopedic date formats within articles -- —Brian McNeil / talk 17:15, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I've stuck a warning on WN:ML. Hopefully people will take that to apply to WN:ML and not the articles themselves. — μ 17:18, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Bencherlite (talk) 20:40, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
 * @Brian McNeil: Agreed. I have not asked people to use encyclopaedic date formats within articles, nor have I been making such changes to articles.  The two things are completely different. Bencherlite (talk) 20:40, 21 March 2011 (UTC)