Template talk:As of

Template is both cool and horrifying
Hi SPage, this template is both a cool introduction to this wiki, as well as something that is potentially horrifying. In particular, I arrived at it after trying to figure out why Development policy was in redlinked category Category:Articles containing potentially dated statements from September 2015. That process took way too long to figure out. Is there something you can do to make it so that the next poor soul who gets curious doesn't have to go on the odyssey that I did? -- RobLa-WMF (talk) 20:40, 26 September 2015 (UTC)


 * I wish, sorry, I imported w:en:Template:As of because it's so important not to have decade-only pages saying "MediaWiki will...", "Parser currently...".  It was completely broken until I imported more stuff, specifically DMCA (stands for "dated maintenance category - articles"), then later I realized all the unwanted categorization that DMCA does to buildthe massive category structure of w:Category:Articles_containing_potentially_dated_statements. 'DMCA is a metatemplate with highly circumscribed use, and not intended to be "editor facing".'  Damn right. I made Category:Articles containing potentially dated statements from September 2015 a hidden category, but that's an endless job. There seems two approaches:
 * make DMCA a no-op. Con: it's hard to find potentially-dated statements by date, searching insource:" {{ as of" doesn't work well
 * simplify DMCA's convoluted categorization to only categorize by year.
 * Hmmm. I tried the latter but DMCA isn't aware of year :-(., I replaced the invocation of it in this template with the one hidden category Category:All articles containing potentially dated statements, I think that helped. -- SPage (WMF) (talk) 01:03, 28 September 2015 (UTC)