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Use Timestamps

jankremer.eu

1–10 of 163 posts

Re: Use Timestamps

#4
I ran into this the first time I tried to cite an essay that was dependent on many internet sources. A shocking amount of it was 'date unknown'.

Re: Use Timestamps

#5
Amen to that! It's really frustrating when a date is not put there, especially on tech topics. If no tech version is written explicitly either, you are left wondering "will this still apply to my case or is it something super-old?"

But beside selfish use-cases like looking for an answer to a problem, it is something that was already solved in the previous form of knowledge distribution: books. Why do we always take one step back when moving forward?

Re: Use Timestamps

#6
post #3

I don't understand how people can accept the browser hiding the URL.

People with technical skills can't accept that, but the ones without them that make up the majority couldn't care less. The vast majority of people don't know how to read or utilize anything past the domain name, hence why you constantly see people copy paste 300 characters long URLs of images from Google. Hell, a good amount of people don't even look at the domain name which is why phishing is so common.

Re: Use Timestamps

#8
It's something that I agree with and increasingly I add dates in my notes. In addition to that, using one single format is really important. if the article was published on say November 2nd. I wouldn't know if it was 11th February or 2nd November. DD MMM YYYY is safest. The 3Ms being Jan, Feb, Mar....

Re: Use Timestamps

#9
>should include a timestamp. In fact, this extends to almost anything online and even offline.

This was one of the ideas in the General Semantics philisophy. You don't much hear about it nowadays, it's a pre-war thing. One of the tenants was that you should date expressions. For example, if referring to a person, you'd write "Roosevelt, 1930" because a year later, Roosevelt may behave like a different person altogether.

Re: Use Timestamps

#10
post #3

I don't understand how people can accept the browser hiding the URL.

Phones have small screens, and most browsers only show the URL on demand when you do a gesture. Also, you generally can't fit the whole URL while in landscape on a phone. You need to scroll it sideways if you want to find something in it.

I don't think we can expect URLs to be read in full by people on phones :(.

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