[Wikipedia-l] order of lists of works & prizes

[lcrocker at nupedia.com]

> Of the 5 Nobel prize pages, 3 start from the present day,
> 2 go forward from 1901.
> IMO lists of prize awards or works are in a sense timelines,
> and as such should go forwards.  What are your opinions?

When I created "World Series of Poker", I did it from
present-day backwards, because that seemed to me easiest
from the reader's point of view--the latest, most relevant
stuff up front, followed by historical stuff that can be
easily skipped.  As a user, I'd like to see things like
Nobel prizes and Academy awards in that same order, most
recent to as far back as we care to document.  But maybe
that's just a personal preference of mine.

Timelines of /a single event/ should go forward--even if
that event is something that lasts over many years like a
war or a human life (i.e., a biography); that seems natural,
because it follows the way the event unfolds.  And there's
no clear separation of units of time to reverse.

But /recurring multiple events/ seem to be a different beast
to me: people generally want to know mainly about the recent
ones, and a reverse order doesn't seem at all "unnatural"
because the events are seen as separate and individual, and
only vaguely related as a sequence.  And there's certainly
no sense of later events having dependencies on earlier ones
as there would be in a biography or war timeline.