autordate

Autordate is a metadata concept used in digital publishing and collaborative writing to record a date associated with an individual author’s contribution to a document. It denotes the date at which the author contributed content, or the date of the most recent author-initiated change, and is distinct from the document’s general publish date or from the overall last-modified date.

The purpose of autordate is to support attribution, editorial workflows, and author-specific activity tracking. By capturing when an author added or revised material, it can help editors assess contribution timing, enable sorting or filtering by author activity, and assist in drafting revision histories for multi-author works. Autordate may be stored as a dedicated metadata field named “autordate” or as part of the author’s metadata block, and systems may set or update it automatically or require manual entry depending on configuration.

In practice, autordate is typically used in environments that emphasize precise attribution or granular collaboration records, such as academic or technical documentation platforms, wikis with enhanced metadata, or content management systems with customizable schemas. It is not universally implemented across all platforms, and implementations vary in what the date represents (creation versus latest author edit) and how it interacts with other timestamps like publish date or last-modified date.

Relation to other concepts includes the publish date, last-modified date, and an author timestamp. Potential considerations include clarity about what the date signifies, possible privacy or transparency concerns, and the need for consistent policy to avoid reader confusion. See also: timestamps, attribution, version history, last modified.