Forum:Timeline Layout

Forums: Helping Hand > Timeline Layout

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Hello there fellows,

I have been having mixed feelings lately about the way the timelines are presented lately in the Roll of Years (1372 DR for example).

Although I quite like the style and layout, I find it very unintutive for presenting, looking for and adding events. Decoding which events fall into deaths, conflicts, politics or people etc is quite confusing and at times...arbitrary. I would like to see a much more orderly and sequential list of events - akin to The Grand History of the Realms, perhaps with a list of named battles, births and deaths at the end.

I'm not a fan of the protracted layout in Wookiepedia though, but a simple list of events can surely be brockered without the seeming confusion we get at the moment.

What think you? Am I the only one who finds this?

--Eli the Tanner 01:43, April 13, 2012 (UTC)

Anyone had a chance to consider this idea much yet?

--Eli the Tanner (talk) 14:42, March 7, 2013 (UTC)

I rarely use the Roll of Years but organization is generally a good thing :) The main problems I see are

• Preventing it from becoming a copy of The Grand History
• 1000's of pages is a lot of work

I suppose you could add a Summary section at the top of the long pages with links to the headings down below. The shorter pages don't really need it. I leave the decision up to those who use the Roll of Years regularly.

—Moviesign (talk) 13:18, March 8, 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the Years pages are a copy of The Grand History of the Realms. Many of those thousands of pages are copied from GHotR. Some of us have marked or rewritten a relative few of those pages, but it's a huge and tedious effort to go through them all. :( I've been unwilling to add new information to years pages that may well need to be deleted and rewritten.

I agree with Eli, the current arrangement is unnecessary or confusing. But I'm not sure how best to arrange the events otherwise; most don't get months and days to order them more finely. Perhaps arranging them by region or topic or sequence of events would be better?

— BadCatMan (talk) 13:57, March 8, 2013 (UTC)

I still have a tonne of years that we don't have already to write (it's all in a Word file - Funnily enough organized solely by date (Y-M(or season)-D). I just need to get online and have access to my books at the same time (which will be tricky). Hopefully, we can decide what new organization we would like to implement before I go creating more work for us.

Many years have only one event that separates them from an uneventful year and similarly many years have absolutely no reference to what month those events occured in. So like BatCatMan said, debatably, organizing them by date is futile. I do agree though that the current system is overly confusing and arbitrary. Again though, what options do we have? As per usual I have a very limited amount of time (2 minutes to be precise) so I'll have to get back to you if I have any sudden inspiration.

hash^talk 17:15, March 11, 2013 (UTC)

I've recently begun going over them again, either to fill in already deleted years, and continue rewriting them. I found that -33800 DR was difficult to choose a heading for: was it a conflict, a migration, or an environmental catastrophe? Should I do all three? And, for one entry, it didn't really matter. I think single-event years like this don't really need such arrangement. But for, a particularly busy year, such as 1370 DR, some system of headings can be quite useful, as so much is going on it needs arrangement. So, for a compromise at least, we might only save the sections for busy years, particularly present years of the setting (1356 DR – 1385 DR, 1479 DR).

— BadCatMan (talk) 03:59, March 12, 2013 (UTC)