Forum:CT:Removing eras from infoboxes

Forums > Consensus track archive > CT:Removing eras from infoboxes
This page is an archive of a community-wide discussion. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made in the Senate Hall or new Consensus Track pages rather than here so that this page is preserved as a historic record.
The result of the debate was Support proposal. Tommy Imperial Emblem Macaroni 07:13, May 14, 2019 (UTC)

Star Wars Legends employed a system of publishing eras to organize different stories from that continuity. Up to now, it has been Wookieepedia's practice to list these eras in infoboxes. See Template:Character as an example. This forum proposes to end this practice and remove the "era" field from all infoboxes.

The benefits of doing so are:

  • While Legends employed these publishing eras, Canon has thus far not followed suit. Removing eras from infoboxes will allow articles from both continuities to be more uniform in presentation.
  • For Legends articles, publishing eras are already presented in the Eras template at the top of the page, so no information is being lost.
  • These publishing eras are considered out-of-universe (OOU), while all other content in our infoboxes is in-universe (IU). This creates a disparity in infoboxes.
  • For whatever reason, not all of our infoboxes include the "era" field to begin with. It's not in Template:Battle, for example. Nor is it in some of our OOU infoboxes, ironically enough, such as Template:Reference book. And we haven't seemed to miss them. Removing them will allow all of our infoboxes to be uniform in presentation.
  • Removing eras will allow all infoboxes that currently use them to be shorter in length as they run down the right side of the page. While this won't make a huge difference in most articles, infobox length is nonetheless an important aesthetic concern with regard to the narrow margins of Wikia skin, and any improvement here helps.
  • We have never really properly referenced eras. This article is a nice illustration of the ridiculous lengths it takes to technically reference them correctly. Removing eras will eliminate this unnecessary burden.

Historically, this issue was voted on once before here, which ended in a no-consensus split decision (obviously, I've changed my mind since then). Toprawa and Ralltiir (talk) 00:47, May 8, 2019 (UTC)

Voting

Support removing eras from infoboxes

  1. Toprawa and Ralltiir (talk) 00:47, May 8, 2019 (UTC)
  2. TanDivoInsignia-SenateMurders Anıl Şerifoğlu (talk) 00:49, May 8, 2019 (UTC)
  3. --DarthRuiz30 (talk) 00:50, May 8, 2019 (UTC)
  4. Cwedin(talk) 00:51, May 8, 2019 (UTC)
  5. Clonehunter(Report your W.M.D.) 01:17, May 8, 2019 (UTC)
  6. Exiled Jedi (talk) 01:59, May 8, 2019 (UTC)
  7. AV-6R7Crew Pit 02:32, May 8, 2019 (UTC)
  8. Fan26 (Talk) 03:16, May 8, 2019 (UTC)
  9. Imperators II(Talk) 03:43, May 8, 2019 (UTC)
  10. I've been hoping for this for sometime but never brought it up. MasterFredCommerce Guild(Whatever) 05:06, May 8, 2019 (UTC)
  11. We should have made that decision a long time ago. --Lelal Mekha The Uprising crest (Audience Room) 06:19, May 8, 2019 (UTC)
  12. Tommy Imperial Emblem Macaroni 06:30, May 8, 2019 (UTC)
  13. Zed42 (talk) 06:46, May 8, 2019 (UTC)
  14. Ayrehead02 (talk) 09:39, May 9, 2019 (UTC)
  15. grunny@wookieepedia:~$ 09:55, May 9, 2019 (UTC)
  16. Sir Cavalier of OneFarStar(Squadron channel) 11:28, May 9, 2019 (UTC)
  17. Green Tentacle (Talk) 19:12, May 9, 2019 (UTC)
  18. —spookywillowwtalk 19:58, May 13, 2019 (UTC)
  19. Rakhsh (talk) 19:59, May 13, 2019 (UTC)
  20. Brules Brules signature Talk 20:02, May 13, 2019 (UTC)
  21. Per Cav below. 1358 (Talk) 20:04, May 13, 2019 (UTC)

Oppose proposal

Discussion

  • I'm supporting this proposal but I do want to be sure that we will be careful in removing them from all articles since, in some cases, the referencing for the eras field might be the first use of a ref tag. If we just remove them using a bot process without checking, I am concerned that we might end up breaking ref tags in articles. - Sir Cavalier of OneFarStar(Squadron channel) 11:28, May 9, 2019 (UTC)
  • Will all character infoboxes have the "Chronological" removed from the "Chronological and Political Information" section? Other than the eras field, there's no chronological info in that section-just affiliations, masters, and apprentices, all 'political' info. Fan26 (Talk) 21:18, May 12, 2019 (UTC)