As a general rule, I get really annoyed when I come across a web page and I can't tell how old it is, especially if it is information that is likely to age rapidly. I don't care if putting a date on the page makes it less "evergreen", hurts someones SEO stats or makes the flowers wilt, I just want to know if I can trust what I'm reading.
The evergreen no date thing is fine with me - provided the content itself is actually evergreen. That's the bit people seem to forget. Not dating content doesn't magically make it last forever. If the information is unlikely to expire then I don't need a date. If there is a chance that the information will go out of date, especially if the dated information will not be useful to the reader, then it should be dated.
I have no idea why this is downvoted at all, let alone downvoted so heavily. It's correct. The content will be out of date in five years, so it's not evergreen and should be dated.
A thousand up-votes for you. Date of information is one of the most important contexts in IT. I can't count the times somebody has said "This says this and that about such and such", and I have to say "Yeah bro, when was that written? Oh, three years ago? What's the story now?".
Agreed. FWIW I basically don't read articles where I can't find the date, unless it's clearly something that doesn't need one (which is rare). Especially anything technology related, truth turns to myth in no time at all.
If anybody thinks, readers will skip their article, if the date is too easy to find, why don't you sign the article with the authors name and then let the author decide, if a date has to be added. Like "joe - Nov. 1, 2014" or just "joe".
When I'm reading articles about tech, I almost always skip the ones without a date, unless they're the last or only source of knowledge on the topic I'm looking for.
An article without a date is about as trustworthy as a scribble on a bathroom stall.
I agree. I actually submitted a bug report to DuckDuckGo based on this. Perhaps a slight abuse of the reporting system, but I feel one of the primary reasons I end up typing !google at the end of my searches is that I don't see dates on searches by default in ddg.
