Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-188432-20130515224647

 1 May in the DWU • production history • vital statistics

As discussed earlier, our days of the year pages could be more useful if they were split into one of four types of article:
 * 1 January — the article about things that happened in-universe on 1 January
 * 1 January (people) - the article about real world births and deaths on 1 January
 * 1 January (production) - the article about events in production history
 * 1 January (releases) - the article about stories that were released on 1 January

This would then allow us to link to the right day in the right kind of article. On story infoboxes, we'd use 1 January (releases). On real world biography pages, we'd use 1 January (people). In discussions about production history, we'd use 1 January (production). And within in-universe pages, we'd use just plain ol' 1 January.

By separating the information, not only would we give people more precisely what they're most likely looking for, but we'd have the ability to dump discrete amounts of information on various navigation pages within the newly created "Transmat" namespace.

So on the as-yet-uncreated Transmat:Stories we could very easily create a dynamic "released on this day" box. Or at Transmat:Behind the scenes we could, with one command, chronicle "this day in production history".

We really wouldn't have that kind of flexibility if we continued on with the one-size-fits-all approach that we're now using.

Note that this is an extremely practicable idea. A lot of the heavy lifting here can be done by bot, and SmallerOnTheOutside has enthusiastically offered his assistance in any manual cleanup required.

So, whaddya say? Good idea? Bad idea? Not sure? Give your thoughts below — but, please, limit your responses to this subject. This thread isn't about whether we'll do the same with year pages, or about the visual design of any element of the project. It's just about whether it's a good idea to perform the split.  