User talk:84.250.15.152

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Maintenance templates

Because that's how maintenance templates work: they are dated to when the template is added, not backdated to the original age of the page, which means that if you're adding the template in August 2024 then it gets dated August 2024.

Even more importantly, backdating the template caused the article to become filed in a redlinked nonexistent category for Category:Articles with limited geographic scope from May 2006 — but pages cannot be filed in redlinked categories, so the category absolutely had to go away, but backdated maintenance categories cannot be created, so the only way to make the category go away was to date the template to the current month and year. Which is one of the reasons why we don't backdate maintenance templates to 15 or 20 years ago, because they generate dated categories that can't be left sitting there if they don't exist.

The date on the maintenance template isn't tracking "how long has the content in question been in the article historically", it's tracking "how long has it been since somebody actively noticed the problem". Ergo, August 2024, because that's when you noticed that the section had a geographic scope problem. Bearcat (talk) 20:04, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Context for readers: This discussion is about Special:Diff/1241670911.

But I wasn't the editor who actively noticed the problem (in the first place), it was the editor from 2006. I've only transformed it into a template that can be tracked with a category. I'm not backdating it to text when the problems were introduced, only when they were noticed. Have we understood each other? 84.250.15.152 (talk) 20:45, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Again, maintenance templates automatically generate a dated maintenance category. Do you see in my first comment above where I linked Category:Articles with limited geographic scope from May 2006? That's a category that the template automatically adds to the page — but it can't stay on the page as a redlink, and it can't be created now because it's 2024 and not 2006. So the redlinked category has to come off the page, because the page cannot stay in redlinked categories, but since the category is uncreatable that means the only way to get it off the page is to redate the template to a month and year whose dated maintenance category exists.

But also, there's no maintenance template present anywhere in the diff you cited as your "support" for backdating the maintenance template, meaning that the issue was not tagged with that maintenance template at that time. And going back over the article's history, it has never been tagged with that maintenance template at any other time in the intervening 19 years either — you adding the template in August 2024 is the first time the page has ever had that template on it.

Again, the template automatically generates and transcludes a category for the date you specify in the template. But the "May 2006" category does not exist, cannot be created now, and cannot be left on the page as a red link. So we simply do not backdate maintenance templates like that: if you're adding a template on August 21, 2024, that wasn't already in the article on August 20, 2024, or August 2023, or August 2022, or August 2015, or August 2010, then the correct date for the template is August 2024 because that's when you're adding a new template that wasn't already on the article before.

Maintenance templates on Wikipedia are simply never backdated earlier than the month and year in which the template is being added to the article. Not the date of the original content, not the date of a prior dispute that wasn't tagged with that template at the time: the date that you're adding a template that wasn't already in the page. Bearcat (talk) 21:16, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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