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". If the year's number is negative, it should be preceded by a single, standard 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 minus symbol, and the latter uses the unicode horizontal bar (U+2015) and will be recognised as a separate article by the wiki.

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 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 Sprouting Fish", you would type "the Sprouting 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:

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.

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. If you are not sure which years have notable events and which can most likely be omitted, you can use Brian R. James's A Grand History of the Realms to see which years have been given entries.

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==

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-politics
 * Yearbox/in-environment
 * Yearbox/in-wildlife

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, but the category sort key will need to be changed to ensure the years are listed in numerical order. There is a proposal about this.