On 12/31/07, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:

Although I don't know how feasible this is on a large scale, doing all that for each year. It might be easier to start with the decade articles?

I doubt it. Mostly because to write a decent "decade" article, one ought to have as a starting point roughly ten passable (i.e. non-empty) "year" articles from which to select the most interesting or (cough cough) "notable" events.

The latter pages would have, for the most part, been populated by editors who get bored enough to Google for various internet texts which refer to an exact year.

Conversely, Googling for a decade (e.g. "1340s" with or without an apostrophe) would probably find a significant number of pages discussing events for which the exact year is unknown or disputed.

These would help round out a needy "decade" article, but not likely be useful in any of the underlying "year" articles.

—C.W.

Looks really good. It actually looks like an encyclopedia article now!

On Dec 31, 2007 10:20 AM, Jonathan (Wikipedia) jonathan.wiki@gmail.com wrote:

Andrew Gray wrote:

...

Some time ago, we discussed the various articles on years, which are invariably bald timelines of births, deaths and events; the possibility of fleshing them out into prose was tossed around.

I've just been told someone finally did one of them :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1345

with the old content at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1345_timeline

Thoughts?

Wow. I think it looks much better, but it looks like it will take longer to read.

~Jonathan

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I think the timeline articles should in no case be removed--they are enormously easier for navigation. Perhaps some people want text articles for subjects of this sort--fine with me, if people are willing to write them. I wonder though how a criterion for suitable content can ever be found. consider the events listed under "the Americas" thi swill presumably be repeated for dozens of other years identically. It will be interesting to compare this article with 1346--many of the events are continuous. I question which should be the main article. 1345 might be 1345 events for example, while the main article might be the timeline.

The extremely large number of links to years make this of particular concern--what will people expect to find when the click on one? a list of possibly related happenings, or a long diversion?

On Jan 1, 2008 8:08 AM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

On 12/31/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:

...

Some time ago, we discussed the various articles on years, which are invariably bald timelines of births, deaths and events; the possibility of fleshing them out into prose was tossed around.

I've just been told someone finally did one of them :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1345

with the old content at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1345_timeline

Thoughts?

Interesting. IMHO, it's a bit *too* specific. Most of the interesting things in history don't happen in one year, they take a few. So I'd expect to find lots of little boxes like this:

War of blah: |1290.........1345...1360|

or something.

An article that lists all the events that happened in one year strikes me as almost like trivia. It also doesn't really work as a navigational aid, because you can't readily click to find out what happened next n whatever sequnce of events.

I'm also thinking that if we have so much manpower that we can afford to produce articles as detailed as this on the years, why not just spend that manpower on the historic event articles themselves?

Steve

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On 2008.01.02 00:08:43 +1100, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com scribbled 1.1K characters:

On 12/31/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:

...

Some time ago, we discussed the various articles on years, which are invariably bald timelines of births, deaths and events; the possibility of fleshing them out into prose was tossed around.

I've just been told someone finally did one of them :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1345

with the old content at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1345_timeline

Thoughts?

Interesting. IMHO, it's a bit *too* specific. Most of the interesting things in history don't happen in one year, they take a few. So I'd expect to find lots of little boxes like this:

War of blah: |1290.........1345...1360|

or something.

An article that lists all the events that happened in one year strikes me as almost like trivia. It also doesn't really work as a navigational aid, because you can't readily click to find out what happened next n whatever sequnce of events.

I'm also thinking that if we have so much manpower that we can afford to produce articles as detailed as this on the years, why not just spend that manpower on the historic event articles themselves?

Steve

A brilliant idea. The logical next step is to start deleting all the video game and pop culture articles like Pokemon - we can then channel all the spare editor energy into sprucing up the year articles once the events are all cleaned up.

It's a win-win situation.

-- gwern OIR man transfer Meade ADIU Team VGPL DST plutonium MD5

On 07/01/2008, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

Really though, good decade articles would be far more useful than good individual year articles. Articles like [[1650s in fashion]] or whatever are pretty cool.

That's what actually sprang to mind with this article. What made 1345 so very different from 1344 or 1346? Not much, I suspect. Decade articles with ten associated timeline articles would be an excellent format. And give historians with time on their hands a chance to get some experience writing for a popular audience.

But that's detail, really. The overview articles are IMO better because they include a lot of the *why*, not just bare facts. Which of course is what people want to know.

- d.