Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Archive/Correct wrong tenure lengths

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Correct wrong tenure lengths

NoN Outside the scope of Community Tech

  • Problem: Whenever an Age module template is used to find the length of time that someone currently in post has been in that post, the length of time stated in the article quickly becomes incorrect. This error happens a lot. For example, on the page wikipedia:First Minister of Wales, right now the term of office (in the table) for the incumbent Drakeford is given as '1 year, 337 days', even though the time between his appointment (13 Dec 18) and today (21 Nov 20) is actually 1 year, 344 days. Second example: wikipedia:List of justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. The tenure length for incumbent Coney Barrett is currently showing as 7 days, even though it's now 25 days. (Though there is a note stating the 7 days is 'As of 3 Nov', but I'm guessing most people won't read that, and anyway most articles with this problem don't have any such warning.)
  • Why the problem occurs: My understanding of the way Wikipedia works is that whenever any editor saves any change to the wikitext for an article, Wikipedia converts the whole article into HTML, and caches this HTML. Whenever any reader requests that article, this cached HTML is sent to them. The tenure length is therefore fixed until the next re-caching of the article, which is either at the next edit, or at the refreshing of cached copies which Wikipedia does randomly.
  • Who would benefit: Every reader of any article that uses any of the Age module templates for an incumbent.
  • Proposed solution: Every midnight, Wikipedia automatically re-caches into HTML any article that uses any of the Age module templates with only one date in the arguments. Alternative solution: Someone writes a bot to force those articles to re-cache (by saving those articles without making any changes or leaving any edit summary).
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Mmitchell10 (talk) 20:51, 21 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

This is related to Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Categories/Set maximum delay in updating category membership. Jonesey95 (talk) 19:13, 22 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

To illustrate how wide-spread this problem is, here's a few more examples of completely different types of article that also suffer this problem: wikipedia:List of popes, wikipedia:National parks of the United Kingdom, wikipedia:Ministry of Defense (Turkmenistan), wikipedia:List of prime ministers of the United Kingdom by length of tenure, wikipedia:Spouse of the prime minister of New Zealand, wikipedia:List of judges of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, wikipedia:List of presidents of France by tenure. Mmitchell10 (talk) 21:25, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • We agree this is a major issue that needs to be addressed, however the engineering challenges unfortunately are beyond the scope of our team. The short-term solution might be to create a bot to purge effected articles (there are several similar bots on English Wikipedia already, I think), but you can really only go so far before running into the same performance issues. The age module is used on over a million articles, and it's not the only module/template that suffers from this same issue. So as much as we'd like to, I don't think our team can help here :( Sorry! Thanks for participating in the survey, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 00:55, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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