Forum:Years - Separate pages or Century pages

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Should we have large collected articles like the Early human history and the 12th century, 14th century, 15th century articles, or should we have specific year-based articles for information.

The way we follow information generally is 'if it's mentioned then it gets a page', so if a year is mentioned then shouldn't it get a page?

Alternatively, if information is to be gathered on these century articles where is the threshold of information between having it all on one page and moving it away to an individual year, is it more than one entry, more than three?

Or, should the century pages just be used for information that mentions the century but it vague about a specific year and everything that actually mentions a year gets a page? --Tangerineduel / talk 15:35, June 30, 2011 (UTC)

My stance is that the year pages are different in that if we had some year pages for a certain time period, than we'd have to have pages for every year of that time period because otherwise we'd have a huge number of red links. This is justified for the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries (and maybe the 18th), but if we had individual year pages for earlier periods, we'd have large numbers of year pages which would have no information in them (since they've never been mentioned in context of the DWU - only a few years of each century have any data on them). Therefore, I favor the large collected articles. Doug86 15:44, June 30, 2011 (UTC)
Well, no. We don't need to have pages where we have no content. (We did at one point, but that was when the wiki was being setup and a lot of pages were created with nothing on them) We just have pages for where we do have content, where they are mentioned specifically. The template would show them as red links, but that doesn't mean we have to create them. --Tangerineduel / talk 15:58, June 30, 2011 (UTC)
If an event has happened in either 1602, 4567 or 2009, we should create the relevent date page. Conbinding these events into a century page is a ridiculous idea? Do we merge all the minor characters from Series 5? No. Do we merge all pages that are a couple of sentences long? No. We have made a different page for everything. This should therefore mean we create a page for a date that has either 1, 2 or 100 odd events in it. The main century pages (i.e 12th century, 16th century, 21st century) should be kep with the dates listed and any key events that happened mention there.
If a date as no event, no page will be created, but if we don't create a page for say, 1234, something could have already happened in a past adventure, say with the Fifth Doctor, and this is recorded on the 13th century page. No what happens when a television adventure or another adventure takes place during this time? A page for 1234 will be created, and we will have information for 1234 all over the place. But if we were to created a page for 1234 and had the formation about the fifth Doctor's adventure already there, it means we can easily add information recording a new adventure in that year instead of having it in two places.
Thirdly, the length of the article should have nothing to do with regards to if it stays as a date or a century page. If we have one adventure in the year 1514, then we make a page for 1514 and fill in what that adventure was. Even if it's a sentence long, so length should have nothing to do with it, as decided in the Howling Halls talk page.
So basically, create a page for the year no matter how many adventures take place during that year, and link the century page to it. If no adventure takes place during a year, create no page for it and don't create a link for it on the century page.Mini-mitch\talk 16:15, June 30, 2011 (UTC)

A year doesn't need to have an adventure to have a page. As long as it's mentioned it should be created.----Skittles the hog--Talk 16:57, June 30, 2011 (UTC)

I think that we should have individual year pages for any years mentioned or referenced and the century pages should just have general trends or events of an unknown date. It's a show about time-travel; I think it's important to have these sorts of pages. -<Azes13 17:01, June 30, 2011 (UTC)
While all this sounds fine in theory, the problem with it is that we'd end up having a huge number of red links for every year of a certain century which is not mentioned, or a huge number of pages with almost no content. For example, only 15 of the 100 years of the 15th century have been specifically referred to in the DWU, which means we'd have either 85 red links cluttering up the Wanted Pages section, or 85 pages in which the entire content would be "nothing yet". This is why I favor having all the years of one century on that century's page (with individual years being redirects as necessary) up until the point where that would be impractical. The best cut-off point would probably be the 18th century. Doug86 22:48, June 30, 2011 (UTC)
Red links are not a problem, as one day the pages will be created. We can even try to alter the timeline template, so it only shows links to pages that are created? Or it does no link to a year unless we edit it so? (i.e once we create a year, for say, 1383, we can edit it template do it now links to 1383. But if we don't have a page for 1283, there would be no link.) Also, the "Wanted Pages" is current filled with red links to talk pages for templates. Mini-mitch\talk 11:51, July 1, 2011 (UTC)
I agree the red links shouldn't really be an issue, given that as a by-product of some templates (such as the Template:DayNav) redlinks happen.
The pages are only created when we create them, the template merely shows the pages created or not.
I also don't think that 'almost no content' is a reason for removal, as long as it's got some content it should exist, plenty of individual pages are a sentence long.
I don't think the cluttering of the Wanted Pages is a valid reason for deleting valid content pages. The Wanted Pages special page is a product of the wiki, it's a specialpage it displays all the redlinked pages on the wiki. These can be filtered to exclude titles. But it is extremely unlikely we will ever totally clear the redlinks in the wanted page, due to as I've said the various templates we now use and other issues like that.
I think we are loosing out by having all the information on century pages, it means we're being less specific with our information because we're cluttering everything onto one page. As Azes13 says the century pages should be for trends and other more vague stuff that happens during that century.
If the issue is with redlinks for years that have no content and were just to be added pages then those could be redirected to the century page, with the other pages that have content being full year articles with their content on their own pages. This way that would remove the issue of redlinks but preserve the single year articles that do have content. --Tangerineduel / talk 16:05, July 1, 2011 (UTC)
One possibility is to create year pages for events mentioned or actually happening, and then for years with nothing going on, redirect those to the century pages. With something like the Star Trek universe, it is feasible to have pages for every year (Memory Alpha has year pages from ~1890-2500, and century or decade pages for the rest, depending on number of events), but in the Doctor Who universe, with stuff happening from the beginning of time right through to the end, having year pages for everything is... unfeasible. The biggest issue is really that you end up with huge amounts of data on the 21st century page, which would be better suited on separate pages for 2005-2011 (for example), with the rest of the data on the century page. -- sulfur 17:45, July 1, 2011 (UTC)
I like the idea of creating pages with events and that have been mentioned and also for redirecting dates that have not been mentions or have no events to be their century page. To me, I see this as the best solution because it got a part of something we all want. Mini-mitch\talk 23:10, July 5, 2011 (UTC)
My understanding is that if it's been mentioned, it gets a page. While this is potentially an issue when it comes to years -- as we have dates in posse and in esse ranging from the creation of the universe to one hundred Trillion AD, it's not an issue so far.
That said, using a century mark is a rather arbitrary means of rounding off collections of time and doesn't really mark eras effectively. That, I believe, is often the issue with marking items by centuries. Still, until someone comes up with a system that is both more accurate and at least as equally obvious, the current system strikes me as adequate. Don't eliminate it until you have a replacement.
That replacement is, I would guess, an obvious goal of this discussion. Good luck.Boblipton 15:01, July 6, 2011 (UTC)
I'm not sure I'm understanding all that this page is asking, cause it's sorta late, and I'm sorta tired. But to chip in with a technical point, the current {{timeline}} doesn't at all contemplate any other epoch but AD. Since the term "BC" is mentioned in the series, that can be our organiser for those few BC dates we encounter. Everything prior to 1AD can go on a page called BC, as far as I'm concerned. (I've never liked "early human history" as everything prior to the 13th century, or whatever it is, cause that term and that definition isn't in-universe.) It's not like we have a lot of BC dates anyway. I'm sure I'm missing the actual point of this discussion, but it does need to be pointed out that making pages for 1000 BC poses a technical problem that's honestly not worth the effort to resolve.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">08:25:27 Sat 09 Jul 2011 

Revived discussion

Okay, so it's a month late, but it's taken me a while to sift through the rubble of category:Timeline and figure out what happened. Now that I've seen the massive destruction, let me just say that:

  • Individual AD year pages are perfectly valid, regardless of length, so long as they are actually mentioned in a DWU source. Many year pages have been inappropriately deleted.
  • Where BC years are specifically mentioned, the in-universe article should redirect to BC, simply because a) there aren't that many BC years specifically mentioned in DWU fiction and b) it would cause a technical problem with {{timeline}} were we to use "negative" years. (And, again, that technical problem could be fixed, but I don't think it's worth the effort since the number of BC years is just a handful.) Since BC is an in-universe term, it's fine to have this handful of pages going to BC.
  • The article early human history should be destroyed. I've always hated it, because it has no in-universe or commonly-accepted out-of-universe meaning that matches our definition. "Early human history" is not"everything prior to the 14th century", by anyone's common-sense definition.

I wholly reject Doug86's notion that redlinks are problematic. It follows, then, that I disagree with his drive to reduce redlinks by destroying perfectly valid pages about years that are unfortunately located in sparsely-populated centuries. For instance, look at what's happened to 1492. It used to be a page to its own. And it should be, since it's the explicit setting for The Masque of Mandragora. But now Doug has converted 1492 to a redirect to 15th century, which means that a) our page count on the front page (which casual users see as a measure of our "size" or "completeness") has gone down. Redirects don't count in the main-page article stats. Where we used to have 16 pages, we now only have one. But worse, we've lost category data. Where before 1492 would have been in categories like category:15th century years — whose members could have been manipulated through advanced coding — we have nothing anymore. And, now that he's deleted that category, I've lost the ability to create a dynamic list of the categories underneath category:years. Whereas before this was a beautiful list with tons of entries, now it's stripped bare:

That's it. On a wiki dedicated to the most famous time travel show on the planet, we appear to only cover the 18th-21st centuries. And for some reason the 26th. Wow. The destruction that has been done to our database is . . . staggering.

Because we, luckily, still have category:20th century years, we can do this:

. . . but we can't generate a list of years in the 17th cenury, or 15th, or 1st or 23rd. And we used to have that ability. And, frankly, we need that ability more with the sparsely-populated centuries than the ones that are fully-populated. We can well expect that there's going to be a page on most years of the 19th and 20th centuries, Where we need the software to help us is in generating lists of the years in the 16th. Or the 3rd. With that ability you can say to the {{timeline}} template, "Okay, I'm at 1492. Show me the 5 pages before this in the category 15th century years. Show me the 5 pages after that. And then you won't have redlinks anymore, but just the pages that do exist.

I'm truly saddened by how much has been destroyed. It's like we've amputated our hand because it got a twinge of pain one morning. Just getting back to where we were a year ago — not improving our coverage, but merely getting back to par — we've now got to do a ton of work. And it all makes no sense, to me. We've sacrificed the ability to leverage our information through advanced coding for what, exactly? Just because we don't like red-links? That's . . . not very sensible.

I'll take some of the responsibility for this bloody great cock-up, because I did promise a year ago that I would alter {{timeline}} to exclude redlinks and I never got around to it. But, honestly, it just never occurred to me that someone might hate red-links so much that they weould destroy perfectly valid blue-links to hide the red-links. Read that sentence again, folks, cause I just can't get my mind around it. Hundreds of blue links were destroyed to hide redlinks on a template. Wow. So if it'll stop the destruction of perfectly valid pages, I'll get to work on "fixing" {{timeline}}. If, on the other hand, there are other objections besides hatred of redlinks, then list them below.

In the meantime, I would ask that no one should delete years that have been specifically mentioned by a DWU source, nor create pages for years that haven't been.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">06:54:55 Tue 02 Aug 2011  

      
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