Is it up to date?

Second Life is a continuously innovating service (aka forever beta.) Something appropriate yesturday may not today. Although the Second Life official web site is maintained by paid Linden employees in timely mannar, this Second Life wiki is maintained by the community primarily as a voluntary activity. As a result, some pages of this wiki carry out-of-date information.

What should we do, then?

Checking Maintenance Tags

Many categories exist for classifying pages in need of updating or improvement. As of July 5th, 2008, this list covered:

Checking last modified date

On the bottom of every page, there is a foot bar highlighted with two orange lines. Contained there is the last modified date of the page. It is automatically generated by the system and is reliable.

You can get a brief idea how old the page is, hence the information contained is. For example, a page says something like "this will be fixed very soon", and the last modified date is March 2007, the best bet is "it is already fixed."

Checking other readers' comments

On the top of each page, there will be a discussion tab. If the word "discussion" is in blue, there are some comments and discussions regarding the content of the page. You can read it by clicking on it. The discussion page may contain something related to freshness of the content. (As a convention, each comment on the discussion page has a timestamp, so you should not worry about when a comment was made. If you find some important comment without the timestamp, you can even check the history of the discussion page. See below.)

Checking page history

On the top of every page, there is a history tab. Clicking it shows you the recent page editing history. The important part of this page, in this context, is the date of each edit. Clicking on a date in the list shows you the past page of the date, so you can see what the page said on the particular date.

If something on the page was not in a particular older day, that means the part is added more recently than the date. If it was, the part is older than the date. You can get more detailed idea how old some particular information on the page is.

A typical pattern of the page edit is something like: several edits in a short period of time (say, five edits in two days), then some long pause (say, two months), then several edits, ... Mediawiki allows you to compare versions of a page in two particular dates, giving you an idea what changes are made in a series of edits. You can use radio buttons on the list to specify two particular versions of the page and Compare selected versions button to see the changes between two dates. (The UI to do this seems somewhat complicated, IMHO, so you need to try and see how it works...)

Leaving comments

When you find whole or parts of a page is out-of-date, it is a good idea to leave your findings as a comment for future readers. (Remember, this is a community supported wiki, and wiki contents are maintained this way.)

If you are sure something on this wiki is out-of-date and is inappropriate for the latest Second Life, you can add a comment to say so. For example, "(this is fixed before June 2008)" or "(this is not applicable to the Second Life 2008 or later.)" If you feel that particular out-of-date part has no value to be there, you can update the text to reflect the latest condition or even delete the applicable sentences/paragraph as a whole.

Alternatively, you can leave a comment on a discussion page. This is a better way when you are not very sure.

Marking a page as out-of-date

If you find entire contents of a page is out-of-date and no value to be there, there are several ways you can do.

You can add something to say "This page is out-of-date" on the top of a page, keeping the page content as-is.
You can add Template:Delete to request a deletion of the page. (Non Linden residents are not allowed to delete an existing page on this wiki.)
You can erase entire content of the page.

Unless there are special circumstances, the first method is recommended. You can use Template:Old-info for the purpose.