Put a date on everything -- or else!

I have a pet peeve: people putting out content online without a date on it.

It seems more and more articles show up on the web without a date. I think I understand why those who post choose to omit it. If something is old, people will tend to skip over it in search of something newer. With no date, something old will get more eyeballs, and they will stay around longer. Its shelf life improves.

But a great deal of the time, a date is highly relevant to understanding how relevant a result is. If I'm looking for an answer as to why my Android phone app is behaving bizarrely (which I am), it matters a great deal if an answer was offered two years ago or last week.To some extent, you can customize this with a search engine's date filter, but you shouldn't have to.

Consider <this article>, which I found in service of possible upcoming blog posts. It certainly looks like a journal article. Journal articles always have a year and a date on them. Where did they go here?

If you start reading this paper, you find rather quickly that the data was collected in 1992, but you don't know if it was published later that year or five years later. In any case, you shouldn't have to start reading a paper to find out when it was published. If I had to infer a date on an academic paper, I might scan the references and find the most recent year, and have a strong hunch it was published with a year or two of that.

As with anything involving a competitive marketplace, you can't expect anyone to unilaterally give up a competitive advantage. Therefore government action is required.

Anyone who posts without a date should be shot.

OK, not really.

There are problems with enforcing this. Assuming that something that is being revised and updated can list its latest revision date, you create an incentive for people to frequently make minor changes (perhaps under the control of an automatic script) to justify a more recent date. If we require a creation date, you create an incentive for people to paste the contents from an old document into a new document and then make a few minor revisions to that (perhaps using another script), and it's hard to prove it's not a new document.

So perhaps the only weapon we really have is shame for those who violate the spirit of the would-be law: Put a date on it!