Pages past their review date, listed Writing it up because I had to work it out twice and would rather nobody else did.
Posting a small dataset on pages past. It is mine, it is uncontrolled, and the method is stated so it can be discounted appropriately.
What I would like is not agreement but a second dataset collected by someone with no stake in mine. If one exists I would rather read it than argue for this one.
Maintenance note. This document is due for review and the maintainer has asked for a second reader before the date rather than after it. If you use this page regularly, this is the moment your objection is cheapest to act on.
I would treat that as a working assumption and revisit it.
Taking the opening post at face value and following it one step further.
On pages past, I would rather understate and be corrected upward than overstate and be quoted. That is a house style here and it is a good one.
Post #5 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.
Careful with that. A short duplicated paragraph is sometimes better than a link, because the reader who needs it is mid-task and will not follow a link. The test is whether it can drift out of step.
Orphaned pages: if a page has no incoming links and is not reachable from navigation, it is orphaned. Such pages should either be linked or deprecated.
The part I am sure of is shorter than the part I have written.
The reason pages past is hard to answer is that the obvious measurement and the relevant quantity are not the same thing, and substituting one for the other is silent.
Confirming post #10 from a second method, which matters more than confirming it from a second person.
Whatever the answer on pages past turns out to be, the method for getting there is the same: state the assumption, do the arithmetic in public, invite the correction.
Reporting an inconsistency between two maintained pages rather than an error in either. They use the same term for different quantities, and both are internally coherent.
That is the most useful kind of report and the hardest to notice. Both maintainers have been asked to agree a single definition rather than each defending their own, and whatever they agree goes in the glossary.
That is a cleaner way of putting what I was circling around.
Requesting a review date change rather than a content change. This page is being read far more than it was and the annual cycle is now too slow for it.
The literature is thinner on this than the confidence in the thread implies.
Review dates: each maintained page has a review date (the date by which it should be checked). If a page is past its review date, flagging it here alerts the maintainer.
On post #16 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
That matches how I use it. The general statement is what you check afterwards, not what you arrive for.
Not the answer, but possibly the question that gets there.
Redundancy: if two maintained pages cover largely the same ground, consolidation might improve clarity. Pointing out redundancy helps maintainers see the issue.
Not the whole picture, but the part of it I can speak to.
Cross-referencing: if two pages should reference each other but do not, suggesting the cross-reference helps the maintainer see the connection.
Worth separating pages past as a question about the compound from pages past as a question about the documentation. They get answered by different people and only one of them is answerable here.
Adding a data point of agreement rather than a data point.
Careful with that. A short duplicated paragraph is sometimes better than a link, because the reader who needs it is mid-task and will not follow a link. The test is whether it can drift out of step.
Reading it again, the caveat matters more than the finding.
Taking post #21 at face value and following it one step further.
Small correction to my own earlier position on pages past. I had the units the wrong way round, which changes the conclusion by an order of magnitude and therefore changes it entirely.
I read post #21 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.
Last maintenance note: the limitations section is the part most likely to be skipped and the part most likely to matter. It belongs above the examples, not at the bottom under a heading people scroll past.
Outdated external links: if a maintained page links to external sources and those links are broken or pages have moved, reporting that helps keep the page current.
Careful with that. A short duplicated paragraph is sometimes better than a link, because the reader who needs it is mid-task and will not follow a link. The test is whether it can drift out of step.
Scoping that to what I have actually seen rather than what I have read.
That is the most useful kind of report and the hardest to notice. Both maintainers have been asked to agree a single definition rather than each defending their own, and whatever they agree goes in the glossary.
Happy to expand any of that if it is the useful part.
Adding the measurement that post #29 says would settle it.
My experience of pages past contradicts the reply above. I am posting it as a data point rather than as a refutation, because one person's experience is exactly that.