User:Mill 1/Project Illustrate the Years

Project Illustrate the Years

Motivation

Working on a private project seems to always provoke a new one; another thing I noticed working on project All Who Are Born Must Die was the clumsiness of the use of images in the Year-pages. Some years would have pictures and some not. If present, pictures were sometimes scattered all over the place. Thumnails linking to a person's bio would have different sizes between Years and even between sections. It was a mess.

Although the 5th pillar of Wikipedia is that it has no firm rules I deemed it necessary to introduce some kind of standardization to the use of images in Year-pages.

As a preliminary starting point I chose 1500 AD. Before that Year-pages very often just do not have sufficient entries to warrant decoration.

Solution

Based on how images were mostly used I established a set of simple rules to make the look & feel of the Year-pages more consistent and appealing. As I was progressing I discovered one final thing: when you insert a thumnail at the top of the article (above the first section) it will be displayed better in the Wikipedia app on a mobile device/tablet. The image is shown as you are searching for a specific year and it is also displayed nicely at the top of the article. Requirement seems to be that the thumnail may not be resized (f.i.110px); if omitted the default thumbnail width is used (tested on Android only).
Here are the rules I apply when illustrating a year:

• Every section should have at least one thumbnail
• Within a section the thumbnails should be ordered based on date of Event/Birth/Death
• Section Events:
  • Per image use this template: [[File:A|thumb|right|[[B]]: [[C]]]]
    • A = filename, B = date (if known), C = linked article
  • The first thumbnail only should be inserted directly after {{C1* year in topic}}
    • Note that size is not explicitely set
  • If more Event images are added insert them directly after the section header == Events ==. F.i. see 1631.
• Section Births and Deaths:
  • Use this template: [[File:A|thumb|right|110px|[[B]]]]
    • A = filename, B = linked bio
  • Add thumnails directly after the section header f.i. == Births ==. From 1800 onwards this rule does not apply.

Bio-images should placed at the top of the Births- and Deaths- (sub)sections. Exception: period 1700 – 1789. Reason: this period already has a lot of Births- and Deaths entries but it does not contain any subsections yet like January–March.

Results

Following picture shows my progress.

On 29 September 2018 I declared the project as completed. Great success!