Forum:Relative index of timelines

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The "Category:Eras" page talks about an attempt to place various eras and timelines into a coherent stream with a numeric reference on various other articles. However, none of those articles seem to have such numbers. Was this attempt abandoned? If not, I'd love to see an article that still has the numbering. If so, then the Category page should be rewritten to remove that system. -- Gousha 04:57, January 21, 2011 (UTC)

I think you've only skimmed the text, because that's a fairly fundamental misread of it. As a category page, the text is referring to the way the category is set up; not the way the articles within the category are written. The attempt hasn't, therefore, been abandoned. It's been finished. You'll note that the category isn't alphabetized for the most part; rather, it's organized by the numerical system described.  czechout ☎ ✍  16:47, January 21, 2011 (UTC)

Is that Sort Number accessible by the creators/editors? I see two outside the number system already, and I'm about to create a third. -- Gousha 19:57, January 23, 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm. Because I wrote the text on category:Eras, it makes total sense to me. Which gets me precisely one cup of coffee.  :) I'm having a problem understanding what you're not understanding about the text on the page. It addresses everything you've asked so far.

As the text says, the category divides between those eras for which a start date can be stated or approximated, and those that can't. If you have no idea when an era started, like the Sumaran Era, then the only thing you can do is alphabetize the page. We literally have no idea how the Sumaran Era might fit into the history of the Earth, so we can only chuck it off to the side.

But, if you can have at least a rough idea of when the era began, then you put it in one of the five numerical categories, so that a rough timeline emerges. Thus, because you say in your article on the Sensorian Era that it seemed to run parallel to the Humanian Era, I'd sort it this way: [[category:Eras|401]], which will put it just after Humanian Era. The 401 sort key will place it immediately after the Humanian Era's sort key of 4. (Alternately, you could give Sensorian a sort key of 4, too, and it would still come after Humanian, because it'll just alphabetize articles with the same sort key.) If you ever need to check the sort number on something, just edit an era page and look at it the code view. It'll show you. But the thing is, you shouldn't really need to do that, because the category page gives you a rough idea of the numbers by telling you that the Renaissance is 450 and Edwardian era is 477. If you know that the 14th-16th centuries are at 450, and the 20th are at 477, that should allow you to make reasonable guesses as to where to put new eras.

I hope that helped. Feel free to ask more questions if you're still confused. czechout ☎ ✍  22:14 Sunday 23 Jan 2011 

Aha! The thing that stumped me was trying to figure out where the sorting numbers are physically entered, since I've been working with the "Visual view" for my category marks. Switching the categories to Code View eliminated all the confusion. Thanks for the clarification! -- Gousha 23:02, January 24, 2011 (UTC)