Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years

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WikiProject Years (Rated NA-class)
WikiProject icon This page is within the scope of WikiProject Years, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Years on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.
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Burma year categories[edit]

Can someone who understands the templates please go through the Burma entries in Category:Wikipedia non-empty soft redirected categories and fix them so that they reflect the country became Myanmar from 1989 onwards? The information on Template:EstcatCountry is very unhelpful for situations where the country's name changes. Timrollpickering (talk) 09:06, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

Done, and done again after user:Johnpacklambert repopulated it. @Timrollpickering: how do you find Template:EstcatCountry and its documentation now? – Fayenatic London 13:08, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Using archives of Portal:Current events for month articles[edit]

We used to redirect specific month articles (like January 2014) to the appropriate section of the year article (for example, 2014#January), but it seems that at some point we started recycling the Portal:Current events archives into actual Wikipedia articles about those months, with pretty much no modification. It even says on the articles that they are just archives of Portal:Current events. This seems problematic for several reason:

  • They are not written according to Wikipedia's guidelines for articles. For example, they use inline external links instead of references.
  • The mentions of Portal:Current events are probably against MOS:SELFREF.
  • If you try to look at them on a mobile device, they are a mess (as the formatting of Portal:Current events is designed for desktop).
  • They divert traffic and editing attention away from the year articles, which are more encyclopedic and written according to our guidelines.

On the other hard, by recycling Portal:Current events, we surface more information about the events of that month than we would by just redirecting to the year article (which is more strictly curated and limited). What are people's thoughts about this trend? Should we keep doing it? Kaldari (talk) 08:31, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

I think our readers would be better served by the former practice of redirection to the appropriate year article. I can only speak for myself, of course, but if I typed "January 2014" into the search box, I'd expect to find a curated list of historically significant events, not a list of every single news story that broke that month. And if consensus is in favour of keeping the month articles, all the external links definitely need converting into fully fleshed-out citations to protect against link rot. DoctorKubla (talk) 15:54, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
The year articles are protected by Cluebot and its fallback team of Huggle and Stiki users. The current event archives are not, so vandalism survives for longer. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:07, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
  • I fully agree with Kaldari, and following John of Reading and DoctorKubla's comments, I have to agree that month articles are a bad idea and part of an unfortunate overall tendency at Wikipedia. We're swamped with stuff like this which is just too much to handle with the few active editors available at the moment. Less is more. FoCuS contribs; talk to me! 00:47, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Category:NA-Class Years articles of NA-importance[edit]

I made a request at Template talk:WikiProject Years but the template is weirdly populating Category:NA-Class Years articles of NA-importance (almost 70k articles) with mostly articles that are categories and thus being called NA-class and thus with NA-importance. Can someone fix this? -- Ricky81682 (talk) 11:59, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

RfC regarding manners and causes of death.[edit]

Some of you may be interested in this question about the "Deaths in 20xx" pages. Some of you may not. InedibleHulk (talk) 21:37, September 28, 2015 (UTC)

RfC: Year articles[edit]

Should year articles, e.g. 1899, use {{Year article header|year}}? GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 00:17, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

  • Yes, of course! Otherwise we would be forever worrying about typos in the various representations of the years in all the articles. Also, it is much easier to update the template (if that is ever necessary) than to go through every year article making some change to that standardised information. --Mirokado (talk) 00:58, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
  • Yes What Mirokado said. Certainly was a lot of trouble for nothing over at PG, no? Since someone's hoped-for outcome ("this is a problem") didn't make it into the close, maybe now we can have some peace. EEng (talk) 02:49, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

BC births and deaths categories[edit]

The categories for births and deaths in years BC were rather small, and a series of CFD decisions resulted in consensus to upmerge them to centuries/decades, and to the year categories. For example, a death in 14 BC was recategorised from Category:14 BC deaths to Category:10s BC deaths and Category:14 BC.

Towards the end of that process, it was pointed out that biographies should not go directly in year categories because of WP:COPSEP. This led to a DRV and RfC, which was closed last week as:

(option 5:) Return to earlier guideline-conforming scheme adding "rollup" categories by decade/century

The "roll-up" on decade categories, as currently seen at Category:0s deaths, is simply done using <categorytree mode=pages>0s deaths</categorytree> on that page. The parameter in the middle has to match the page name. AFAIK this "rollup" code will have to be added manually.

The old categories will have to be undeleted by admins, and either cleaned up manually or listed at WP:CFDWR so that Cydebot will remove the CFD templates from them.

I believe the member pages (biography articles) will also have to be reverted manually. The best help that I can offer as an admin is to provide links to the diffs made by Cydebot or ArmbrustBot when emptying the old categories.

Armbrust has confirmed at Wikipedia:Bot_requests#BC_births_and_deaths_categorizations that he does not mind if we use rollback or undo on his bot's edits. Some articles were edited after the bot, in which case Undo is needed from history, rather than Rollback straight from the list of contribs.

Marcocapelle (talk · contribs), as nominator, and Francis Schonken (talk · contribs), who posted the RfC, may will be willing to share in the work of reversing the upmerges. Assistance from members of this WikiProject would be much appreciated. – Fayenatic London 13:48, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

  • Is there a possibility for appeal against this decision (similarly as DRV before)? Marcocapelle (talk) 18:43, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
  • I don't think so. Although I closed some of the relevant CFDs and found a repeated consensus there to implement your proposals, I was surprised at the strength of the consensus. I wish I had realised that it was against policy. The RfC resulted in a new but clear consensus, and I see neither grounds nor scope to challenge it. – Fayenatic London 21:18, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

The CFDs listing the births/deaths categories to be reinstated are:

Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 May 25#1st to 5th century BC births
Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 May 30#1st to 6th century BC deaths
Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_May_22#6th-century_BC_births and 7th (below that)
Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_May_16#8th_century_BC (just the births and deaths)
Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_May_15#9th_century_BC and 10th (below that)
Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_May_13#11th_century_BC
Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_May_8#12th_century_BC
Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_April_24#13th_century_BC
Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_April_23#14th_century_BC to 16th
Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_April_20#17th_century_BC

See [1] for the instruction at CFDW for deaths from 1 to 599 BC. – Fayenatic London 13:48, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Progress marker

The contribs for the last set of bot edits ended here.

I've undeleted deaths categories back to Category:29 BC deaths, and manually reverted from the bottom of that page of contribs up to: Horace. – Fayenatic London 16:42, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Discussion on which significant people to include in millennia articles[edit]

Hi all, there is an ongoing issue that could use some additional input here: Talk:2nd millennium#Significant people: Three events limit per category? To a lesser degree the discussion is also relevant for the 1st and 3rd millennium articles. Gap9551 (talk) 16:28, 20 October 2015 (UTC)