Hello Steven,
Entering the all of the data at once into an Info box will store the information and you will be able to see that information when you generate reports. The disadvantage to this approach is when you wish to identify items from a particular day or month. To be able to identify items based on this type of data you would want to have the dates as selectable answers in your coding tool. This would allow you to run frequency reports or cross-tabs.
Unfortunately there are too many dates in history for each to be a possible answer so I would suggest breaking them down into ranges. You could have a 'What was the year' question and the possible answers could 1900-1909, 1910-1919, etc. The range would depend on the spread of your possible years. I would probably also enter the actual year in the info box corresponding to the answer selected. If you were only looking at articles from the last 20 years you could have an answer for each year.
You could create a similar breakdown for months and days if that was information you wanted to examine independently.
I would still have a question and answer where you would enter the full date as you probably would want to see that in any report you might be running.
When setting this up I would make sure I followed the question and answer format. By this I mean you would have a question such as 'What was the date' and below that you would have a selected answer such as 'Please enter date'. The date would be entered in the info box at the answer level rather than the question level. This will make it much easier to run reports later that mixed the various components of your date.
As for recording page numbers, having ranges might not be so useful so I would use the question and answer format and record that information in the answer info box.
Best regards,
Jeff