GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 348010
Pages should have dates (published, last edited)
Last modified: 2007-07-30 10:02:38 UTC
Pages should have dates (published, last edited) on them. It is Just imagine random surfer (for some unknown reason) arriving say here http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/ and starting to read "The GNOME 2.6 Desktop and Platform release is the latest version of..." and so on. And the news really need dates too. See Nielsens Top Ten Web Design Mistakes http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20031222.html Undated content is third on the list. :)
Hi Tero, thank you for submitting your bug. The response arrives a bit late but it goes on the same direction you suggest: we are in the process of redesigning www.gnome.org and the new version will have pages with dates. See the Authoring Policies section in the http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/WebPolicies : "Also the pages should contain information about their last change". We also need to be careful when writing sentences like "is the latest version of" in any text that is not specifically a news story, yes. Thank you for the observation. We will make sure that the mistake is not repeated in the 2.16 release notes.
Just confirming that this was agreed. See Footer elements at http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/ComponentSelection
Sorry, reviewing past discussions we see that in fact we agreed not to put "Last edit" date since this doesn't provide clear information about a page being updated or outdated. You can have a page 4 years old that still is 100% up to date, and a page 3 months old that is now completely outdated. The solution is to treat as news (with date) any text that is meant to be time specific. In the link provided Nielsen also refers to articles, press releases and date-dependent content. If you find a misleading page in the new site such as http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/ was in the old (well, still current) site then a bug must be filed against the content of that specific page.