Forgotten Realms Wiki:Past-tense policy

The Remove wiki from the timeline policy, commonly known as the Past Tense policy, addresses the use of tense, particularly past tense, in in-universe articles on the Forgotten Realms Wiki.

Reasoning
The Forgotten Realms campaign setting has always been, and still is an evolving creation. The timeline is forever advancing and with it, events in the Realms. As such, keeping articles in the scope of an established 'present day' would be both time-consuming and mostly irrelevant. For example, a town may be thriving in one century, destroyed the next, then rebuilt, so changing from present tense to past tense and back to present tense would be very difficult. Therefore, when writing articles, the events referred to should always be written in the past tense, whether the information is taken from a newly published and up-to-date product or not.

Exceptions
The Years pages are written in present tense to match the tone and style of The Grand History of the Realms, and other timeline resources.

Timeline
Especially with 4th edition, due to the 100-year advancement of the timeline, some statements are not accurate for all times, so a distinction should be made. You can use timescale to indicate that a more accurate date or time is required. As an example:


 * Azoun IV is the King of Cormyr.

This would be better written as:


 * Azoun IV was the King of Cormyr between 1336 DR and 1371 DR.