Forgotten Realms Wiki:Help-Writing an article about a year

This is a how-to style guide that attempts to demonstrate the easiest way of writing an article about a particular year.

Naming
The article should be named with the number of the year in Dale Reckoning, followed by a single space, followed by "DR" in upper case. For example, "1332 DR" rather than "1332dr" or "1332DR". If the year's number is negative, it should be preceded by a single, standard hyphen-minus symbol (next to the zero key on most keyboards). For example, "-200 DR" rather than "−200 DR". These two look very similar on the screen, but the former uses the hyphen-minus symbol, and the latter uses the unicode minus sign (U+2212) and will be recognised as a separate article by the wiki. The hyphen-minus is easier for the majority of users to type.

Roll of years template
At the top of the page, place a Roll of years template. For example:

The first parameter is the numerical year. It is used by the wiki to automatically calculate the years in other reckonings, and this will fail if it contains letters or symbols. There is no need to put the "DR" after the year here, and indeed it will fail if it is included. The numerical year can be automatically included with:

The second parameter is the year's name, and will be automatically prefixed by "Year of" so there is no need to enter this. Be wary of whether the year's name has the word "the" in it. For example, for "Year of Bane's Brood" you would enter "Bane's Brood", but for "Year of the Spouting Fish", you would type "the Spouting Fish". The word "the" should not have a capital letter here because it will be joined mid-sentence.

The earlier years do not all have names, so you can omit the name for a year such as this. For example: or

If you are not sure what name was given to any particular numerical year, it is easy to find. Brian R. James's A Grand History of the Realms contains a list of year names towards the end. Names are given to the years after -700 DR.

Yearbox template
The Yearbox template produces quick access to the years immediately before and after the current article's year, and also the age in which the year occurred. It is used in its simplest form as follows:

This will produce a box that contains links to the five years immediately before 1372 DR and the five years immediately after 1372 DR. For a lot of the earlier years, there is no reason to link to the five years either side, because no notable events occurred and therefore they don't need their own articles. You can specify the five closest notable years in either direction as follows:

If preferred, you can use the same details but put them in date order inside the template, like this:

The overall resulting template on the page will look the same using either method.

The "age" parameter must be one of a set of ages in Forgotten Realms history. You can see the ages and which years they represent on the history portal. If your article's year falls exactly on a boundary (-3000 DR, for example), place it in the age that begins on that year, rather than the age that ends on that year.

Writing the year's events
The events are split into rough categories according to topic, with each topic being started with a yearbox subtemplate, such as Yearbox/deaths or Yearbox/in-politics. Below this, simply write a bullet point list of summaries for the events. They do not need to contain an excessive amount of detail, because they should link to the article or articles in question. They do need to contain references however, so that it is easy to verify their accuracy. For example: Mulhorand.
 * The Battle of Thazalhar confirms the independence of Thay from

If you are using references in this style, please remember to put a references section at the bottom of the article: ==References== or: ==References==

There are no hard and fast rules about how to categorize the year's events, and you can add new categories if you think a suitable one does not exist. These categories are currently in use:
 * Yearbox/in-novels
 * Yearbox/in-conflicts
 * Yearbox/in-deities
 * Yearbox/migrations
 * Yearbox/deaths
 * Yearbox/births
 * Yearbox/in-people
 * Yearbox/in-organizations
 * Yearbox/in-politics
 * Yearbox/in-environment
 * Yearbox/in-wildlife
 * Yearbox/in-magic
 * Yearbox/misc
 * Yearbox/in-games

The above list is in very rough order of importance, on the basis that the majority of people who have contact with the Forgotten Realms do so by reading the novels, so these events will be of most interest.

Category
The article should be placed in the Years category and other categories for specific ages and eras, which will also be listed in the Years category.

However, the category sort keys will need to be changed to ensure the years are listed in numerical order. There is a policy on the matter. First, take the year (converting to Dale Reckoning if necessary) and add 35,000 to it. Bear in mind that if the year is negative, the result will be less than 35,000. Then use this number as the category sort key, with a space in front of it.

For example, for -988 DR, -988 + 35000 = 34012.

For 1274 DR, 1274 + 35000 = 36274.

The calculation can be made automatically with: