User:The Duke of Waltham/SBS

Welcome to my Succession Box Standardisation Workshop, the place where the future development of the Succession Box Standardization WikiProject is planned.

Currently, this page houses the following:


 * Guidelines regulating succession boxes
 * The long list of things that need to be done with regards to succession boxes and SBS
 * The neglected draft for the Offices page

Succession boxes in the guidelines
Succession boxes receive minimal coverage in Wikipedia's guideline structure. This is a list of the few mentions of succession boxes in the guidelines. If you find anything else that you think ought to be here, please add it to the list.

Guidelines

 * Guide to Layout – All succession boxes and navigational footers should go at the very end of the article, following the last appendix section, but preceding the "categories and interwiki links".
 * Manual of Style, writing about fiction – Another common type of template, succession boxes, should not be used to describe in-universe relationships in articles about fictional entities. Succession boxes assume continuity, which may not exist. Furthermore, they may invite the creation of non notable articles that fall under the fictional succession. For articles about works of fiction themselves, the story that each work of fiction depicts does not change despite the continuation of stories across serial works or sequels, and as a consequence, the events within one work of fiction are always in the present whenever it is read, watched, or listened to. In-universe temporal designations such as "current" or "previous" are therefore inappropriate. For character articles (which cannot be bound temporally), it may be acceptable to use customized templates to summarize information from the perspective of the real world, such as connections between articles describing the same fictional world. Such templates should not invite the creation of articles about non-notable subjects.

SBS checklist

 * Adoption of policy and/or creation of template for acting holders of offices
 * Finalisation of guidelines about dates (and relation to the Manual of Style)
 * Decision on use of dashes in plain years (spaced or not)
 * Standardisation of uncertain date-writing methods and abbreviations (ca., bef., etc.)
 * Decision on close date ranges (in the same month or year)
 * Peerage
 * Introduction of definite guidelines on the order of peerage headers
 * Finalisation of guidelines for usage of "lords" label in peerages
 * Finalisation of guidelines for usage of "creation" label in peerages
 * Adoption of style guideline and/or creation of template for Writs of Acceleration
 * Decision on use of peers' children's titles in predecessor/successor cells
 * Precedence
 * Introduction of format for orders of precedence in the United Kingdom and the home nations
 * Introduction of format for orders of precedence in the United States of America
 * Assemblies
 * Introduction of format for Australian Members of Parliament
 * Introduction of revised format for English and British Members of Parliament
 * Adoption of guideline for United States House of Representatives Leaders
 * Adoption of guideline for British House of Commons Whips and Leaders
 * Introduction of format for seats in the United States Congress
 * Resolution of the link problem for United States Representatives
 * Other political
 * Evaluation of the character of shadow-cabinet members (political or party?)
 * Military
 * Evaluation of the character of military offices
 * Evaluation of the use of military prefixes in predecessor/successor cells
 * Other
 * Formulation of provisions for succession boxes for royal houses, history of offices, box office records, music charts, actors in specific roles, electoral constituencies, evolution of states
 * Final decision on the termination of the Canadian boxes' template incompatibility
 * Resolution of the royal titles' header ambiguity
 * Resolution of the unofficial titles' header classification ambiguity
 * Introduction of definite guidelines on the order of succession lines under headers
 * Adoption of guideline for office header transitions
 * Evaluation of the use of the "Bt/Btss" post-nominal letters in predecessor/successor cells
 * Project affairs
 * Decision on form of banner for usage in succession template talk pages
 * Decision on the format of the "Offices" subpage and work towards its development
 * Decision on the handling of navigation boxes and their relationship with succession boxes
 * Actions for the recognition of succession boxes (and navboxes) in Wikipedia's guidelines
 * Actions for the acquisition of guideline status for SBS's style conventions

= Offices page draft =

(Feel free to edit this draft, although if you think that major changes ought to be made, you should probably propose those in this page's talk page. Any comments are welcome and your input is important, given that this is intended to be the main directory of the titles and offices tracked by succession boxes.)

The following list of offices gives basic information about the titles tracked by succession boxes. Such information includes the years of the offices' existence and the categories to which they belong. Succession boxes are navigational tools that work as chains, each of which spans numerous articles; the purpose of this page is to help with the better organisation and standardisation of succession chains and to make the system's expansion and maintenance easier and more straightforward.''

For a description of the way in which succession boxes ought to be used and details on their content and its format, see the SBS Guidelines page. For instructions on the creation of succession boxes and information about the internal code, please see their Documentation page. For a list of the succession templates in the scope of this project, see the Templates page.

Using the list
Although the page is called "Offices", its purpose is to list all the different titles, awards, trophies, records, championships, dynasties, peerages, and any other chains that are, or ought to be, tracked by succession boxes.

At first, the succession chains are classified into three major sections: offices, hereditary titles, and achievements, a categorisation scheme similar to that of the Guidelines page. Each section is broken up by country, and for each country a table exists, listing the chains.

The table for offices has eight columns:


 * Title – The name of the title
 * Original type – The type of the office at the time of its creation
 * Date of creation – The date from which the title started being used
 * Honorary since – The date at which the title became from substantial honorary, if any
 * Date of abolition – The date at which the title stopped being used, if any
 * Current/Last type – The type of the office now or, if abolished, at the time of its abolition
 * Category – The category of offices (within a type) to which the title belongs
 * Notes – Special status or limited usage of title, or other notes

The tables have a feature that enables one to automatically sort their items alphabetically by any column one wishes. One only has to click on the little box at the header of that column; clicking multiple times on the box will change the order from ascending to descending and back.

There are several abbreviations in the table. The most common is "ext.", which means extant and signifies that a title is still in existence. Others are: "c." (circa), "bef." (before), "aft." (after), "bet." (between), and "cent." (century). They are all used for dates. An m-dash (—) signifies that there is no date to be filled in a specific field, while a question mark (?) declares that a date is unknown.

Updating the list
This list is incomplete, and is unlikely to ever be completed. New titles will continue to be created or discovered, and titles for which there used to be no Wikipedia articles will acquire them in the future. And even without these concerns, the number of titles fulfilling the notability and successiveness criteria for having their own succession boxes is simply enormous, and their listing is no easy task, especially for the small number of people that comprise Succession Box Standardization.

For this reason, everyone's help is needed in order to keep this list as complete and up-to-date as possible. If you find a series of articles that is tracked by succession boxes but is not listed here, please enter it. If you locate an important enough title that forms a succession and many holders of which have or should have Wikipedia articles, then by all means insert it into the list; this way you ensure that the succession box for that series will eventually be created even if you do not do that yourself.

Creating a new line for a table is easy; all one needs to do is copy this line and fill in the new data:


 * name || orig. type || date creat. || date hon. || date abol. || cur. type || category || notes

You should not forget to separate it from both the previous and the next line with a |-.

If you are certain about the dates of the title or any other subsidiary information you may freely enter it; if you are not sure, however, you may want to discuss it with us at our talk page. Any other question is welcome there as well. Any field in the table may be left empty except for the title field and the date of creation; since there has to be a creation date for every title, even if unknown, this field must always be filled, even if only with a question mark.

Distinctions
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