The Self-Dating "Recently" Problem

Does it sound like a bad idea for me to start a discussion on whether or not we should ban this word? I once saw it used for a six-year old comic, for Pete's sake!

Go ahead and clean up times where it's used, citing Examples Are Not Recent. However, I think banning the word would be a very bad idea.

Agreed.

Banning is far too major of a step, and banning "recently" alone won't clear up the whole problem. There's also "the latest" "the new", "most recent", "the last", and dozens of other ways to fuzzily indicate date.

edited 12th Oct '12 10:32:59 AM by Madrugada

Why do people even do this anyway? Do they seriously expect readers to look at page history to find out the date an example was written?

Because too many people treat this wiki like a forum.

So we're just going to have to start treating this forum as a wiki?

Another note on this: phrasings like "more recent" are generally understandable since they're in relative terms between two examples as opposed to talking about the absolute time of when an example came into existence, so those would get messed up if we went after the words themselves.

But yeah, if you see a straight-up "a recent example of", kill it with fire.

I've seen legitimate instances of more recent. Things along the lines of "An early episode of Alice and Bob had Alice as a Dumb Blonde, but in more recent episodes she's been a Brainy Brunette." The rest of it can die in a fire though.

edited 14th Oct '12 1:38:37 PM by shimaspawn

Even that could be worded just as well as "later episodes", though.

Which also is less ambiguous. "More recent" can still imply it's actually recent, even if it isn't technically. It's sort of like saying Jesus is less evil than Satan. Some people will infer it to mean that he is at least a little evil.

If I need to indicate relative date and don't have an absolute date reference, I prefer to use early, earlier, late, and later. For works that definitely aren't going to continue, last may be appropriate.

But latest and new are just as bad as recent.

Agreed; "more recently" is still "recently" and in most cases you can simply replace it with "later in the series".

Found another thing for people to keep an eye open for: a mention of an "ongoing" series that actually finished a couple of years ago.

I've also seen references to "upcoming" series/seasons/episodes that have already come and gone. Even Wikipedia has that problem a lot on pages that don't get as much editor attention.

I occasionally use "as of <year>" (though I avoid it if at all possible), as Wikipedia does. Is it acceptable?

Might help to keep a record of when I do so.

That's still problematic. We don't want "As of 2010" examples floating around four years later.

Say "In 2010" instead.

edited 30th Jan '13 12:14:30 PM by troacctid

Wikipedia also uses that formatting, mainly I think as a disclaimer that they can keep things up-to-date continuously.