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Bug 348010 - Pages should have dates (published, last edited)
Pages should have dates (published, last edited)
Status: RESOLVED NOTABUG
Product: website
Classification: Infrastructure
Component: www.gnome.org
beta
Other All
: Normal enhancement
: 2.20
Assigned To: Quim Gil
GNOME Web maintainers
Depends on:
Blocks: 461606
 
 
Reported: 2006-07-19 12:45 UTC by Tero Tilus
Modified: 2007-07-30 10:02 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Tero Tilus 2006-07-19 12:45:35 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.  :)
Comment 1 Quim Gil 2006-08-28 08:21:09 UTC
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.
Comment 2 Quim Gil 2007-07-29 20:18:48 UTC
Just confirming that this was agreed. See Footer elements at http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/ComponentSelection
Comment 3 Quim Gil 2007-07-30 10:02:38 UTC
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fact we agreed not to put "Last edit" date since this doesn't provide clear information about a page being updated or outdated. 

You can have a page 4 years old that still is 100% up to date, and a page 3 months old that is now completely outdated.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.