Feature Proposal: Age Sensitive Dates on Topics

Motivation

A co-worker was talking about a wiki hs used at a previous job. Pages are date-stamped, as with TWiki. But when a page becomes "old" the date is highlighted in yellow. When a page is "very old" it's highlighted in red. This way it's possible to tel at a glance if a page has been updated frequently or rarely.

This seemed like a cute idea. It should have preferences: how old is "old"? How old is "ancient"?

Description and Documentation

(see above)

Examples

Impact

Implementation

-- Contributors: VickiBrown - 04 Dec 2007

Discussion

Good idea. This requires you to be able to compare dates, but that isn't much of a trial. Could be done in a plugin, I think.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 04 Dec 2007

Right. The plugin can "override" DATE and wrap the result in span, styled with the corresponding (with age) color style.

-- ArthurClemens - 04 Dec 2007

Wikipedia:Featuritis. The age of content doesn't tell much about its quality.

-- FranzJosefGigler - 04 Dec 2007

Who says it is about quality? You could tell how long ago users have updated their personal pages, when a project page has been changed. I have no problem with such a feature as long as it can be done in a plugin.

-- ArthurClemens - 04 Dec 2007

Related to this problem is Codev.ManageStaleContent and IRC discussions like this one.

In our community we already have a plugin that can apply a specific template to a topic, dependent on what Form is used in the topic. This plugin could probably be expanded to look after a date for choosing a template instead of a form name. A plugin like FindElsewherePlugin already touches links in a topic and could probably be tweaked to do the link styling part.

Specifying more of your use case up front could assist in figuring out the best technical solution (i.e. do you want =%SEARCH% to apply the styling, the whole TWiki engine (including references etc), or just the pages themselves, etc?).

While this is definitely a "cute" problem to solve (as you put it :-)) - I think also the overall problem of how to keep your wiki live and relevant at all times is an interesting one.

-- SteffenPoulsen - 04 Dec 2007

Interesting that we were having the exact same discussion today ... but about attachments. Someone wanted to know how to figure out how old an attachment was and wondered if we could have a %AGE{/path/to/attachment}% tag.

-- PankajPant - 05 Dec 2007

On one of the wiki-reseach mailing lists I'm subscribed to, there was mention of a topic age visualisation for wikipedia - Does anyone want to look into porting it to TWiki?

-- SvenDowideit - 29 Dec 2007