Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26845762-20161029213412/@comment-188432-20161101035322

The problem for me is not that there's any particular concern with the number of categories. We're not running out of space or anything. :)

No the issue with "years visited by..." categories is the inherent inexactitude of it. During most of the classic run, exact years were studiously avoided by writers. Terrance Dicks was particularly opposed. And so some users would likely turn to a "reading the tea leaves" approach. They might well try to argue that because they saw a certain newscaster on TV in a shot, or a certain historical figure was said to be a certain number of years old, that there was "evidence" for a certain year. But such a conclusion would be real world creep. And we'd quickly go down a slippery slope. We know that DW writers don't get their history right, and may in fact deliberately choose to fudge the history.

So I think categories of the kind suggested in this thread would probably be ill-advised, because they would invite poor readings of the primary sources.

Another point: our year pages more or less serve the same function of these categories. Because you can't create a year page without an incident happening in the DWU, they provide an increasingly good picture of what occurred in each year, the more we complete them.