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.