Forum:For people working on year/decade/century pages . . .

Please be sure to read the documenation at Template:Timeline for the latest information on how the new template is progressing. Because the template is heavily dependent upon the PAGENAME and upon assumptions about the range of dates we cover on the site, it's important that we have good communication about what we're all doing. I'm basing my maintenance of the template on things that I observe about the actuality of our pages. So if you go and create a page which is outside the pattern of things that exist as of 11:47, April 1, 2010 (UTC), the template won't necessarily work on it. For instance, if you were suddenly to create a page named 143 BC, the template wouldn't work on it, because we have no pages currently formatted like that.

Also, some special requests:
 * Please remember that all these pages are articles. They're not placeholders.  Thus, they should all have proper lead paragraphs in which you summarize some of the key events of the year/date/century in question.
 * Because these are articles, they must obey the same rules as any other article. Principally, there must be a reference in the DWU in order to justify their creation.  Please do NOT create pages that are blank.  If nothing in the DWU happened in the year 2106, then don't create the page.  I quite understand why there are so many blank year pages — you want navigability from one year to the next — but I'm working on a solution that will still allow navigability without violating the general rules for article creation on this wiki.  If you create blank pages, you prevent this solution from being implemented, because it is based upon sensing uncreated pages.
 * The general format of article pages is that any wikipediainfo boxes are on the bottom. Yet, for some reason, I'm encountering a lot of year pages where template:wikipediainfo is the first thing on the page.  Now that we've actually got a proper way to navigate between pages on our own wiki, Template:Timeline should be on top, like any other infobox.  Indeed, this is being built as an infobox not a nav template.  Czech Out   ☎ | ✍  11:47, April 1, 2010 (UTC)

Tenses, OOU perspective
I've noticed that only a very few of the year/decade/century pages obey the standard Manual of style rules. Few have leads, most aren't written in the past tense, and a heck of a lot of 'em create one section labelled "DWU" and, if a 20/21st century year, another labelled "Real World". The general "format", if you can call it that, is:

but Template:wikipediainfo
 * Doctor Who Universe
 * This happens in this year.
 * This other thing occurs.
 * And this person dies.
 * Real World
 * This episode is broadcast
 * This actor is born.
 * This director dies.

Any particular reason for that? I mean these are in-universe articles, right? I know the Tardis:Manual of style does say that "all in-universe articles, with the exception of Timeline articles are written in the past tense", but why? Tardis:Point of view is silent on the issue of timeline pages, so that's no help.

Surely it's precisely the timeline pages that would most need to be written in the past tense, and the fact that they're not would confuse not just readers, but new editors. After all, if an article about 1567 can be written in the present tense, why would an article about a character from the year 1567 need to be in past tense?

I thought the deal was that we were saying that we editors were to place ourselves at some infinite point in the far future, after the death of the DWU, so that everything about that universe was in the past. If we're going to actively disobey that rule on the very pages that chronicle the history of the DWU, what's the point of having the rule at all?

Moreover, I don't understand why these pages aren't following the standard of having a proper lead, and why the ones for "real" years immediately divide the page into DWU and RW. Surely the article should just be written from the DWU perspective, and then "RW" should be in a section labeled "Behind the scenes", like every other article in the DWU super-category.

Are these somehow not seen as "real" articles, but something more akin to a disambig page?  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍  20:35, April 2, 2010 (UTC)


 * That is a good question. (I can only vaguely answer your last question, back somewhere in the past there was a discussion about the Timeline articles and at one point we did have 1963 and 1963 (Real World), basically it was going to be a massive job and somewhat doubling up to have two versions of every year, so the decision was made to wrap both articles into one.)
 * I'm all for changing the MoS so that everything's in the past tense.
 * The same goes for changing Real World to Behind the Scenes. That would definitely help to keep things consistent. --Tangerineduel 14:27, April 8, 2010 (UTC)


 * Returning to this topic once more.
 * I think we should go for 'everything in the past tense', the timeline pages included, unless there are any real concerns I'll go ahead and edit the Manual of Style to reflect this. --Tangerineduel 15:10, April 17, 2010 (UTC)
 * Cool. That's obviously how I'd go.   Czech Out   ☎ | ✍  14:12, April 20, 2010 (UTC)


 * Done. --Tangerineduel 14:37, April 20, 2010 (UTC)

Comment re: real world tenses
As (I think it's safe to say) the main contributor to the real world sections of these pages, I wanted to include a few comments here; I haven't been following the discussion because due to real-world workload I've just been jumping in and out when I find something to update. First, I was going to at one point suggest the "Real World" sections be split off in their own. That was before I noticed Tangerineduel's comments saying this was tried before, so never mind.

I do feel the Real World section needs to stay in present tense. These are not in-universe sections, and therefore shouldn't follow the same rule as in-universe Timelines. (A point in favor of splitting them off). I interpret one of the comments above as suggesting there might even be a little confusion in this area.

I also should underline something I've been doing since I started editing the timeline pages, and that is events that have yet to occur should be marked with some variation of "is scheduled" or "is planned". A reason for this is, as we know, dates change. The Runaway Train was scheduled for release June 3. Then it was pushed back to February 2011, except for the special Telegraph issue coming out on Saturday. It's a bit of CYA when things change. An episode announced for next week might get preempted by a news report, etc.

I think the idea of splitting off Real World from DWU timelines should be revisited, at least with regards to the revival series. Between the Internet and everything else, it's pretty evident that the Real World events far outweight the in-universe ones! 23skidoo 22:08, April 22, 2010 (UTC)


 * Isn't anything real world and present tense very reliant on keeping everything very up to date, it just seems it's creating a lot of work to keep things in present tense, when they're going to become past tense at some point.
 * I do understand the scheduling statements would need to be in the present tense as it's a malleable sort of thing. But after the event has passed it would need to be changed to X was scheduled for...etc.
 * It is debateable whether the real world events on this wiki outweigh the in-universe events (it depends what a reader / editor is coming here looking for).
 * I do commend your efforts at keeping everything up to date, but we also need to look at the future development and consistency of the wiki.
 * With regards to separate pages...real world sub-pages could be a way to go for separate (yet linked) real world pages linked off from the year pages. But I still think for ease use and linking having the real world under behind the scenes section keeps more tidy. --Tangerineduel 15:18, April 23, 2010 (UTC)

Automated replacement begun
The automated replacement of the old timeline HTML code has now begun. It may take several days, even though automated, as the bot takes about several seconds to make every change (so as not to flood the database). The replacement process will take several passes, so you may encounter particular pages at several different states. Don't panic; it'll all get put back together with just Template:Timeline and, where applicable, Template:Wikipediainfo, all at a standard place on each page.  Czech Out  ☎ | ✍  20:14, April 22, 2010 (UTC)