On Thursday, May 05, 2005 5:11 AM, Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com wrote:
I mention this only because I've recently learned about {{Succession}}, which can be successfully applied to at least 98% of all imaginable cases -- succession patterns of Roman Emperors, Popes, Presidents, & Internet Kooks of the Month [*]. I've been using it quite happily in writing my contributions of Ethiopian Emperors. And I'm sure there are several other simple, flexible Templates that can be used to replace countless others.
There's also {{succession box}} and all of its cohorts that are used on thousands of pages that I created to be more flexible than {{Succession}} itself, and includes the years of office; you may want to use those, instead.
Once these simple & flexible ones are found & used to replace their competition, then we can start deleting these templates on the basis that they aren't used.
Agreed. But perhaps we're getting there already?
[*] The only case I can think of where {{Succession}} wouldn't work is with Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs -- because not only would the office -- Pharaoh -- need to be included, but also the period of Egyptian history (e.g., Old Kingdom, Second Intermediate, etc.) & the Dynasty. However, I haven't been able to create a consensus about including the Dynasty in such a template, so perhaps even this exception could be subsumed into this template.
The standard way to do that would be to encode it into the office, so (made up):
{{succession box | before=[[Pharaoh of Egypt]]'''<br /><small>''of the [[Old Kingdom]]'''''</small> title=[[Pha]] | years=[[1000 BC]]–[[980 BC]] | after=[[Bar]] }}
Also, when positions change, similar syntax is used on the successor/predecessor (from [[Virginia Bottomley]]):
{{succession box | before=[[Stephen Dorrell]] | title=[[Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport|Secretary of State for National Heritage]] | years=1995–1997 | after=[[Chris Smith (UK politician)|Chris Smith]]'''<br /><small>''Sec. State Culture, Media and Sport'''''</small> }}
It's a little bit of a hack, yes, but it's not that common a problem. I might encode it into a series of sub-templates if people really think it necessary.
Yours,