"Last month I wrote..."
That was the begining of a technical article I was just reading. The problem is that there was no indication anywhere of when the article was written. Working in IT, the difference between an article written this month and last month, much less several years ago can be extreme.
It's common practice in journalism (at least it's supposed to be) to include the date at the beginning of your article or in a page header. Back when news might take days to reach an audience, it was so you knew that the fire reported in the next town over actually occurred last weekend, not last night. Now the issue isn't so much about knowing when something occurred, but whether or not the information is still valid.
Everyone knows IT changes quickly, so it's very important to know whether the technical article is based on the current version, the previous version or a version written 10 years ago. When you don't include a date, we can't know whether we should listen or not and sometimes that makes an otherwise very useful article a complete piece of trash.
