Category talk:Memory Alpha old featured articles

from Memory Alpha:Category suggestions
Category:Memory Alpha old featured articles, a maintenance category to go with the existing category for FA. This category would be a HIDDENCAT maintenance category, and Template:Featured would be enhanced to add this category to an article if it has been "featured" more than X months/years ago (to be determined). This maintenance category could then be used to find "outdated" FA where this status needs to be removed. -- Cid Highwind 13:42, November 13, 2010 (UTC)
 * Support - that'd be a handy category.– Cleanse ( talk 02:01, November 14, 2010 (UTC)
 * Support. - 06:20, November 15, 2010 (UTC)
 * In fact, if we can do this, can it also be done to templates like incite? That would be very helpful. - 13:31, February 4, 2011 (UTC)

Both a "date" and an "id" tag have now been added to all calls to featured - so it would be possible to add a comparison with either of these values to the template, and add this category if the template call refers to a page revision older than some X. The same would of course be possible for any other template, but I think the administrative overhead of making sure that a date is manually added with each template is far too big to use it everywhere. -- Cid Highwind 13:57, February 4, 2011 (UTC)


 * Regarding incites/pna-cites - When you say administrative overhead - do you mean ensuring compliance? Or is it a load on the database? 'Cos if it's the former, I'm happy to keep an eye on how new tags are formatted. If the end result is just a few variables (like on featured), I don't think it's too onerous on users. Not really different to reminding users to use the eplink, bginfo and wikipedia templates etc. properly.


 * If you're concerned about the effort of updating hundreds of old incite tags (there's usually around 300 or so), it wouldn't be necessary to update them (I'm assuming the date option would be technically "optional"). Most of these are years old and should be flat-out removed (along with the dubious info, of course). This is something I'm trying to (slowly) do in any case.


 * As a supplement, I've rigged up something to help with identifying the oldest citation requests on my sandbox page. Something similar could be used to help with identifying the oldest Featured Articles, alongside your original idea.–Cleanse ( talk 23:50, February 4, 2011 (UTC)

I've now created daysago as a small helper template, and added a clause to featured that adds this category (plus a small explaining note) if the "featured revision" of the article is older than two years. Further discussion about the exact age we check for could continue on the category talk page, although I think it shouldn't be much more than that.

Regarding the use of this feature on other template - yes, "ensuring compliance" is the "administrative overhead" I was thinking of. I actually think that incite would be a good place to make use of this - but, generally speaking, we shouldn't place it everywhere just because we now have it, unless we can be sure that it actually can be maintained. -- Cid Highwind 12:36, February 5, 2011 (UTC)