Template:WaPoCheckDates/doc

This is a (probably-temporary) template used by @ (aka 'BHG') to mark some bare URL references to The Washington Post newspaper (WaPo) which have been filled by BHG's custom WaPoFill tool, but where the dates need to be manually checked.

Explanation
The reason is that the tool extracts dates from the metadata of the linked article, and in some cases the dates in the metadata do not fully match those displayed to the reader.

For example, in the article Clifton, Virginia, the tool made this edit to fill two bare URL refs:

When manually checked against the displayed article text, it turned out that in both cases the article displayed only one date, rather than a date plus a second "update on" date:
 * In ref #1 the correct date was that which the tool had added to 2020-07-10
 * In ref #2, the correct date was the one which had been added as 2020-07-21

Those dates were cleaned up in this edit, when the  tags were removed.

Sometimes, the correct date is neither of the two dates (such as this edit to Nucla, Colorado), or the double "updated on" date is correct (such as this edit to Action (Italian political party)).

Usage
Please do not use this template. It should only be added by the WaPoFill tool.

Removal
If you see the template displayed, it would be great if you could take a moment to check the dates in the reference... and then when the dates have been fixed (or verified as accurate), just remove

But please do not remove the  tag unless you have verified that the dates displayed in the reference match those displayed in the article

Why use a custom tool?
Because @Citation bot can never fill refs to The Washington Post (WaPo). It is a widely-used source: there are links to www.washingtonpost.com from over 70,000 articles.

By June 2022 there were over 900 bare URL refs to https://www.washingtonpost.com, with several more being added every day.

Filling them manually would have been a huge job, and WP:REFLINKS does only a mediocre job with WaPo, so the easiest way to fill them was to write a Perl script which is used with AutoWikiBrowser (AWB). The backlog was cleared in a few days in June 2002, and the script is still run regularly to fill new bare URL refs.