User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-26975268-20130201045831/@comment-188432-20130222042720

User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-26975268-20130201045831/@comment-188432-20130222042720 SmallerOnTheOutside wrote: CzechOut wrote: SmallerOnTheOutside wrote: Also, just to note, I am now adding all DWM release dates. Whoa whoa whoa. Explain what you're doing. On all Doctor Who Magazine pages, from DWM 1 to DWM 456, have a "published on" date in the lead. This is presumably taken from the cover date, hence the day it was published, or printed. I'm adding the information to all those days, which will add a lot to the (releases) pages. Why, are these dates wrong? Again, your focus right now needs to be on in-universe articles. So I'm only telling you the following so that you will understand what to do in the future.

You have no idea what you're messin' with if you believe that DWM dates are "published on" dates. They aren't. A lot of DWM dates have been cleaned up, but I don't fully trust them at all. See Forum:DWM issues: please help (re)write leads.

Most editors have badly misunderstood what the date means on DWM. Since DWM 164, the date on the cover is not the publication date at all, but rather the expiration date. It's the date when newsstands are supposed to remove the magazine from their shelves. So if issue, say, 200 has the cover date of 1 Jan, and issue 199 has the cover date of 7 Dec, then it means that the publication date of issue 200 is 8 Dec — not the 1 Jan that it bears on its cover.

It honestly is gonna take quite a bit of research to get all the DWM comic release dates absolutely correct. I'd rather you just didn't mess with DWM comics for quite a while. It's better for the information not to be there, than for it to be wrongly there.