Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years/Archive 1

Still active?
I've moved WikiProject Years to the Inactive section of the WikiProject page, as it hasn't been edited since Nov 1st; I wanted to let you all know, and ask if you're still working on it. If so, feel free to move it back up into the active section. JesseW 07:35, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Still working on what?
 * the content of WikiProject Years page?
 * the content of the year pages?
 * something else?
 * -- Smjg 10:42, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I've joined and am active (see below for new discussionTrevor MacInnis

Format problems
I am seeing too many bits like this:


 * July 27 - Shea Hillenbrand, baseball player
 * July 27  - Alex Rodriguez, baseball star

which comes out a mess for any user whose date format pref is set to little-endian. It is necessary to linkify all instances of the date for it to be formatted properly. How can we get this message across to everyone? -- Smjg 10:42, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Looking now, some of them are being formatted like this: and sometimes with ":" or " -" following the date, while others remain as separate first-level bullet points. This applies to both year and day-of-year pages. We ought to decide on one format and stick to it. -- Smjg 17:06, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
 * July 27
 * Shea Hillenbrand, baseball player
 * Alex Rodriguez, baseball star

Now the survey has produced a consensus. We shall make them look like this:


 * July 27 - Shea Hillenbrand, baseball player
 * July 27 - Alex Rodriguez, baseball star

-- Smjg 17:24, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Numbers and Years
There have been a few sporadic discussions of this recently. I'd like to see all of the digits at the default artucle/redirect for 0 through 9; and we should rethink how we redirect people to year articles. The primary reason for leaving years at the default NNNN artielc is to make linking of dates easy. We can still consider whether we want that to be the article proper, or a redirect from NNNN --> NNNN AD, AD NNNN, or NNNN (year). +sj +  19:28, 12 May 2005 (UTC)


 * There are some NPOV reasons to specify what is meant by a given year-number, aside from simple parity with numbers themselves. For instance people who date things according to other calendars -- lunar calendars, or dated from some other epoch -- will have to make do with something like 3824 (Mnpxjr Calendar), or just 3824 MC...  that said, the most frequent reference to many four-digit numbers will of course be to that year AD.  +sj  +

Yearbot
People who are working on year articles may be interested in User:Gdr/Yearbot, a program I've written that assists with the updating of "Births" and "Deaths" sections of year articles, by gathering entries from the birth and death categories for the year and examining the articles to try to discover descriptions, dates, and sort keys. I've used it to update all the years in the range 1500–1600 and it works well if used by a careful operator. I'm making the source code available in case someone else wants to use the program. Gdr 21:50, 2005 May 23 (UTC)


 * People_by_year/Reports/Stats : shows how many articles of a given year in the categories for year of birth/death are also linked from the year pages.
 * I updated the list today with data from May 16. -- User:Docu

Yes, you can see quite clearly from the stats that by May 16 I had covered 1500–1509! Yearbot won't quite bring the counts up to 100% for all years, because articles about people whose dates are uncertain (and therefore not appropriate for inclusion on the year articles) nonetheless often belong to a category anyway. A typical example is Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli who is in Category:1507 births even though it is not known whether he was born in that year. Gdr 17:33, 2005 Jun 17 (UTC)


 * Hmm, working on year articles is a good way of finding duplicates. Just today I found John Hale and John P. Hale; Charles Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp and Karl Friedrich, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp; Geert Groote and Gerhard Groot; Felim O'Conor and Felim mac Aedh Ua Conchobair; Claude Perrin and Claude Victor-Perrin, duc de Belluno; Eleanor of Aragón and Leonora of Aragon... Gdr 23:54, 2005 Jun 17 (UTC)


 * Good point! Here is a report that identifies some of them: People by year/Reports/People with same birth and death year. It currently matches year of birth, death and part of the sortkey. It seems to dig up a lot of 1911 articles imported twice. -- User:Docu

Discussion
I think that the section "this year in art, culture, and fashion" should be left out. I prefer the frame that has links to those pages. LittleDan 16:48 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)


 * Yep. It is redundant and takes up unnecessary space (I hate having to list things twice). I vote for just having the box links and leaving out the actual section. Oh and each other heading should be a real heading (==) instead of just being bolded. --mav


 * No, I like the bolded look. It cleans up the page. We don't want giant headings everywhere. But there is one problem with deleting the art, culture, and fashion section. Parts of it might not be listed in the individual pages, so we'd have to check each one. I've deleted the 'art, culture, and fashion' section from the template. LittleDan 15:22 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)


 * I would also prefer having actual headings as it makes editing (especially for long articles) easier. If it can be done automatically (some script) for all pages then it would be great, otherwise might as well leave them as they are. Dori 01:29, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * I'd also like to add my support to the idea of headings being real headings and not just bolded. It's best (especially in the long run) to use proper mark-up not just a lower-level description of what it looks like. If headings appear too big on some browsers (they don't on mine), then that can be fixed by CSS markup. Furthermore, the Guide to Layout recommends this. -- Cabalamat 02:29, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * I also agree with the headings. It looks like we are close to a consensus here. olivier 17:38, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * I'm involved in the current project for the year in science pages, and have been adding links to them from the general year pages as they are built. I much prefer the See also boxes rather than art, culture, and fashon heading, as the year in science doesn't seem to fit there, yet it seems clunky to add another section just for the year in science link. Additionally, I agree with using headings over bolded headlines, and have been editing pages to use headings whenever I'm adding the "year in science" link.  Hope I didn't step on anyone's toes.  Gentgeen 09:52, 1 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Regarding specific dates, there are a lot of Wikipedia pages that refer to a specific date (day, month and year) on which an event occurred. These are not automatically put on the page for that year. Wouldn't it be nice if they were, in a semi-automated way (this could be done on a batch process running perhaps once per day or once per week). As an example of what I mean, consider the Eurofighter Typhoon site.

This contains the sentence:


 * The maiden flight of the Typhoon prototype took place on March 27,1994 (then just known as the Eurofighter EF 2000).

The automatic process could insert this entry in the appropriate place in the 1994 page:


 * March 27 - AUTOMATED ENTRY from Eurofighter Typhoon: The maiden flight of the Typhoon prototype took place on March 27,1994 (then just known as the Eurofighter EF 2000).

I expect there are a few things in this proposal that need to be ironed out.

-- Cabalamat 02:39, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * The main problem is that it gets so many bad entries. Most of these should simply be deleted again, the rest would probably need editing. If you do this at all, I'd propose to use to create some 1994/Temp page, and then create entries from there. I have the feeling that getting a list of them is the only useful thing here; rewriting might well be easier than editing. Andre Engels 11:16, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * I would suggest to have an additional paragraph: Monarchs/Presidents. The idea being to know who was in office where during that year. For instance, when I would read: "The Seven Years' War (1756 - 1763) pitted Great Britain, Prussia and Hanover against France, Austria, Russia, Sweden, and Saxony." I could click on the dates and see who were the guys in power during that period. See my embryonic proposal at: 1756. olivier 00:29, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * I love that. It only makes boring year pages more attractive! -- Taku


 * Along the same line, I suggest adding an Ongoing events paragraph. (see 1757 for an example). The idea being to give a snapshot of the state of the world at the time. olivier 01:18, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * Can we put practical rulers as well? Like Monarchs/Presidents/Practical rules or something. For example, in 1756 Japan was ruled by shogun. -- Taku


 * Same situation for Prime Ministers of the UK, Chancellors of Germany, various Governors... I agree that we should find a satisfying title for the paragraph that would include all of them. Monarchs/Presidents/Practical rulers is a bit bulky... olivier 01:40, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * I know it doesn't sound good. Simply rulers or national leaders? -- Taku


 * I think that's a good term, yes. Andre Engels 11:18, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * Sounds good. Another option would be "Heads of states". olivier 17:38, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * I like Heads of states. If no objection is seen, I am going to change the heading. -- Taku 23:21, Oct 3, 2003 (UTC)


 * Popes, antipopes, some important ministers and leaders of breakaway or important dependent territories could also usefully find their way in the list. Does "heads of states" cover these guys adequately? I would say it does, but I would be happy to have other opinions. olivier 08:38, 4 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I'm definitely coming in late to this discussion (which I only found out because of Olivier's edit to AD 680), but I do have a couple of reservations:
 * 1) Won't this overwhelm entries of earlier years where outside of the "Heads of states" section there might only be one or two entries? (Hopefully this will not always be the case, but as one person who is trying to add content to entries before AD 1000, there are far more years that would be overwhelmed than not.)
 * 2) Where do we draw the line on inclusion of "Heads of states"? For example, currently there are about 170 sovereign countries in the World -- which ones do we include & exclude? The problem only gets more entangled the further back we go, & we lay ourselves open to charges of being selective. (For example, including every king of Sparta while omitting any mention of the kings of Nubia, or various client kingdoms of China or the current Indian Empire.)

Until these points are addressed, could the addition of this section be kept to the entries after AD 1000 -- & preferably after 1500? Those entries tend to be quite verbose, & a section like this would be of most benefit. -- llywrch 20:47, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * Interesting. I would almost be tempted to say that having all the lists of the all the heads of states pre-1000 or pre-15000 would be a good problem to have. Basically, we are talking about a problem that we do not have yet, but that we will have sometime down the road, after the "heads of states" lists become overpopulated (It is far from being the case at this point). 3 points come to my mind to tentatively address these issues:


 * 1- Let us go back to the reason why we want (or don't want) to have the list of "heads of states" in the years' pages. I have started to include this section in order to generate a discussion, and also because I felt the need to have this information at some point. As I said before, having a page detailing what the world looked like in 680 would be interesting - to me, at least, and slightly more useful than knowing, for instance, who was born this year. Figuring out why we want these lists might help us figure out who should be in the lists. (I know I am not solving the problem here...)


 * 2- Regarding the overwhelming issue. IF you intend to add the births/death and changes of power of all the rulers you are mentioning, then the list of heads of states should not be longer than the other lists on the page. I agree that this would make these pages VERY long. Now, the question is also whether we want to include all these events in the years' pages, and we arrive at a broader question: which granularity do we want to have on these pages? The question has been raised by User:Mazzy at Wikipedia talk:Timeline standards, but no agreement has been reached yet, as far as I know.


 * 3- Wikipedia dynamics. In my Wikipedia experience, problems are best solved when they actually arise. Here is my suggestion: if some people feel enthusiatic about filling such huge lists as detailed "Heads of states" lists, then let us let them do it. It is a work that we probably want to see being done, and if we impose restrictions at this early stage, then these contributions might be postponed for a very long time. If we eventually figure out that some lists have grown out of control, then we could for instance simply create a separate page "Heads of states in 680".


 * Bottom line. My suggestion is to continue populating these lists, and if they grow too big, let us create separate pages. That reminds me a bit of a discussion we had at Talk:East Germany (see 29 Jun 2003). In this case, I belive that the presence of the template has generated more contributions than if it had not been applied. Of course, these are my suggestions, and I am glad to read others' opinions. olivier 23:42, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I would suggest to reduce the 'this year in...' box to only those years where at least one of these actually exist, and then still only those that actually do exist. Having an empty link to 1001 in sports on 1001 is just silliness, in my opinion. Andre Engels 11:16, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * Your voice and the voice of reason seem to be pretty close... olivier 17:38, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)

See my suggestion for The world in at 1220. olivier 03:46, 5 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I'd like to suggest the following addition to the template for year pages, at e.g. 80:


 * Alternate uses: see Number 80

in wikimarkup:



at the beginning of the pages. Number 80 is a redirect to eighty.

This would replace notes such as (on 10): or (on 24):
 * For the number 10, see ten
 * There are quite a few albums called 10, including recordings by LL Cool J and Pearl Jam. For a complete list, see Ten.
 * For the number 24, see twenty-four.
 * For the television series, see 24 (television).

--User:Docu


 * I added it. -- User:Docu

Formatting change: Following the introduction of the TOC feature, recent years (e.g. 2002, 2003) use section headers instead of the three ' .. I'd suggest to update the template this way and use section headers for Events Births Deaths Nobel Prizes. --User:Docu


 * Fully agree with section headers in years' articles. olivier 15:45, Dec 21, 2003 (UTC)


 * Ok then, I added the result to Timeline standards. -- User:Docu

 I'm having trouble with Docu here. Will people agree with me that, given that the number articles are, for example, at one hundred two, not Number 102, it makes sense that the links from the year pages to the number pages point to one hundred two and not to the redirect Number 102? Also, since any "third" uses of numbers besides the numbers itself and the years are to be listed at the number pages, that there is no point in duplicating those at the year pages, hence we don't need "alternate uses", only the link to the number page? --Wik 10:58, Feb 15, 2004 (UTC)


 * I agree with Docu that it looks better to have the number in digits rather than spelt out, would you be happy with something like;


 * For the number, see the article on the number 102.
 * -- Ams80 11:04, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)


 * No, not really. Maybe we can have some more opinions. --Wik 11:25, Feb 15, 2004 (UTC)
 * Do you have any suggestions for compromise? -- Ams80 11:35, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)
 * I don't mind if wick changes the links from Number 102 to Number 102. BTW according to some of the notes, changes to the template are being discussed on Wikiproject Years, until then, we should leave the template as it had been, and not make any unilateral changes. -- User:Docu

102 (number) seems to have the vast majority of votes on Talk:List of numbers/Deletion

 - I suggest changing
 * Alternate uses: see Number 80

to
 * For the number, see eighty.

Direct links are to be preferred. This way the reader sees right away that the number articles are at the spelled out word. The redirect here is a pointless confusion. --Wik 03:08, Feb 17, 2004 (UTC)

Per majority vote, it should be changed to 80 (number) in anticipation of the move to this format.
 * I agree, not much use to change the template to the old format. If a direcly link is perferred, we could just use
 * Alternate uses: see Number 80 -- User:Docu

page layout
Just has this page pointed out to me. This template may have been used to set up a large number of the year pages but perhaps 50% of the more recent hundred years or so no longer conform to it (not me I've only talked about it). In particular in many pages the year in topic has been replaced by a "see also" box in the TRH of the page with the same information in it, in many pages the box has been added and just duplicates the paragraph. A few pages have neither. Furthermore the year in topic paragraph has started growing virtually all of the referred page (especially in television) as bullets carried over.

For this reason I have proposed on my talk pages and the year talks 1700-2000 that we get everything onto a standard format and suggested we go for the "see also" boxes not the paragraph (to avoid carry over of sub-bullets and reduce page length). I gave a month's notice and have just had this page pointed out to me. So I will not change them yet and ask you to consider (bearing in mind that the status quo described above is already heavily broken by someone else). --(talk)BozMo 17:32, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

I will also copy over reactions of several other people to this proposal on my talk page here:

I think the page layout for years is inconsistent and a bit messy. The perfect year in my view is 1896 1921 etc. where the year by topic only appears as a box in the top right of the page. Some years instead have year by topic as a paragraph 1801. Some have both. In some cases the paragraph duplicates a lot of info under the link 1945 especially for year-television. Clearly people have gone to a lot of trouble putting these things in as part of organic growth and I do not want to upset people by pruning them out without discussion. So I have marked on some of the year pages (running very slowly today) and referred it here for comments. --BozMo

If no one comments in a month I will change the pages I have marked in the way I have proposed and mark a load more pages. But I'll have to find a sensible time of day to do it: --BozMo

1850-1950 now all flagged for change --BozMo 19:22, 6 May 2004 (UTC)


 * Looks good in principle. I've been copying snippets from a few selected years for the fledgling Maori Wikipedia. Not standardised yet. I'd be pleased to see more standardisation of the English version before adding many more years to Maori. No hurry! Robin Patterson 20:26, 6 May 2004 (UTC)


 * Looks good. I think many of the pages already conform to that format. But one thing to keep in mind is we are in the process of removing all "Heads of State" portions and adding links to List of state leaders in 1850 (or whatever year). These state leaders pages are by no means complete yet, but are being worked on, and will continue to be for quite some time, I imagine. -R. fiend 21:21, 6 May 2004 (UTC)


 * --BozMo 10:07, 7 May 2004 (UTC)Thanks. Compliance is about 50% currently but post 1950 compliance is zero. I will do the earlier pages first.


 * If I remember correctly the extra info in the 1950-onward pages was put there before the separate "Year in" pages were developed. So my personal preference is to move the info to the subpages. However I think it would be good to have a poll on it (post-1950 I mean, I notice 1945 is the same too), but I'm unsure where to put a poll where it would get found by those interested. Anyway I'm definitely willing to help out with the changes. - Hephaestos|§ 14:02, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, particualrly for the offer to help! Agree a poll is a good idea. The size of proposed deletion gets much worse once TV gets going, which is why I am being careful as I don't want to upset them. Anyway lets wait a month as promised and them fix pre 1950s which will make sorting the later pages look less personal. --BozMo 14:12, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

Bozmo, there is already a standard for timeline pages. See Timeline standards for more information. If you wish to make everything conform to the already agreed upon standard, please do so, otherwise, dont arbitrarily start changing pages to what you would like to see. Submit what you want to change to WikiProject Years, and if there is a consensus, you can start making the changes you want to. Thanks! Theon 16:55, May 11, 2004 (UTC)

BozMo- I just looked over a couple of the pages you referred to as being good pages, and they are pages that are already standards compliant. I think that if you want to go in and standardize pages to the already agreed to standard, thats perfectly fine. I was worried you were going to create a completely new standard (as some people have tried to do) and go start changing things arbitrarily (which incidentally, is part of the reason why everything is so messy now). Just so long as you dont go about deleting things, and try to categorize everything within the agreed to standard, we should be ok.

Theon 18:21, May 11, 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps I am being unclear. What I am proposing exactly is deleting the "year in topic" paragraph from all pages which still have it including all the sub bullets and replacing it, where one does not already exist, with a "see also" box. Effectively turning 1849 into 1850. But post 1950 this involves deleting a significant sub-bullets (which are repeated on other pages but not in the see also box). You'll appreciate this is a number of days work and I would prefer a very good agreement before starting... I am being ultra cautious!--BozMo 19:09, 11 May 2004 (UTC)


 * I dont have a problem with that proposal, but see if you cant clean up the box in 1850 so that the text within the box is justified to the left, right now the text is touching the right hand side fo the box, which looks unclean. Theon 20:47, May 11, 2004 (UTC)


 * Tried a few things and cannot manage it. I will try in the sandbox when I have time unless anyone has a good idea?--BozMo 10:18, 12 May 2004 (UTC)


 * Ive formatted the 1850 box, the trick is you have to get rid of the bullets, they screw it up. Border should be 1px, cell padding should be 10px and you need a   tag after each entry, that centers everything, and if you want to put - in front of each entry, that still looks nice. Theon 15:50, May 12, 2004 (UTC)


 * agree 1850 now looks loads better, well done--BozMo 21:26, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Year Navbox
I've always thought that the navigational elements at the top of the year pages were rather unattractive, so I've worked up a template for a navbox and implemented it on 2000 through 2005 for now. The 2002 box is located at right. Comments/thoughts? -- Seth Ilys 23:46, 24 May 2004 (UTC)


 * Did you implement this as a MediaWiki page? It looks good, maybe you should talk to BozMo.  Hes trying to standardize the infobox for years from about 1700 on (see above discussion) Theon 02:04, May 25, 2004 (UTC)


 * Thanks both for drawing me here. Yes I like the box display but (1)I strongly prefer it if you could get rid of the "year in topic" paragrapgs at the same time (2) it would be nice to have a family of variations for different time periods since what is available for these boxes varies a lot (3) I wonder if we can do something better with the content box. However, I think that (1) at least is a debate we'll have to have. As mentioned if you get the 1950s onward agreed (which is where the contraversy is I and others will happily sort the other few thousand years). It took me a while to find this page I think we need to identify other people likely to argue and bring them here too --BozMo|talk 18:42, 26 May 2004 (UTC)

Inter-Language Links
Is there an automated way/bot that can add inter-language links to the years? The Chinese Wiki now has a page for every year after 28BC, and a smattering of pages before that. The links are all quite regular. The AD years are like this: "1002年", or "34年", the BC years are like this: "前1002年","前34年". I'm guessing some of the other languages follow their own patterns as well. --Vina 06:13, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Year in (Nations)
I've been trying to standardize all the year pages generally along the lines of this newer format. I think 1700-1920 basically follow that pattern now. The main difference between this format and the other prevalent one is that the "Heads of states" are deleted and instead there is a link to a separate page below the "year in topic" box. My new concern is that there are alot of "(year) in India", "Germany", "UK", etc. popping up. It used to just be Canada, which just seemed kind of random, but now its getting too cluttered. We could soon easily have a couple dozen more links under the other year in topic links. Is there a way we can streamline this? Maybe have one link to an index of all the counties covered for that year? I'd like to finish up the 20th century soon, but this is sort of in the way. Any suggestions? -R. fiend 20:58, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Days of the week
Some years have days of the week on every event (eg 1985) and some don't (eg 1991). I think it would be better if we removed the days of the week from every year because they are not necessary. I think we need to make it uniform. 132.205.47.180 zh:Wikipedia:WikiProject年