[WikiEN-l] Year articles

[gwern0 at gmail.com]

On 2008.01.02 00:08:43 +1100, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> scribbled 1.1K characters:
> On 12/31/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at 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
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