This page is an archive of a community-wide discussion. This page is no longer live. Further comments or questions on this topic should be made in a new Senate Hall page rather than here so that this page is preserved as a historic record. —spookywillowwtalk 00:54, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
Forums > Senate Hall archive > SH:Revisiting the prev, next and conc fields
Alrighty, so I know I promised no more CTs for a while, but.... sorry? Lol. Anyways, I expressed dissatisfaction with the policy implemented by Forum:CT:Infobox-exclusivity of prev, conc, and next fields for conflicts/battles, Part 2, which requires that all events listed in the prev/conc/next fields be relevant to the article's topic and be listed in the body. I find this to be unnecessarily restrictive and detracts from the information we are able to present to our readers, and a number of editors in Discord agreed with me, leading to an hour-long conversation where we've hammered out the following expanded policy that would replace the line in the Wookieepedia:Layout Guide/In-universe#Infobox section. Special thanks to Editor for the Second Occupation Amendment (patent pending).
Without further ado...
The "prev", "conc", and "next" fields for event, battle, and other conflict infoboxes are subject to the following restrictions:
- The "prev" and "next" fields are to be used only for the immediate previous or subsequent chronological events.
- When an article's subject is immediately prior to or subsequent to an event with multiple sub-events, only the high-level event should be listed in the infobox field. (example: Mission to Coruscant (Desolator crisis) should list the Flesh Raider uprising in its "prev" field, rather than the Battle of the Forge)
- The "conc" field is to be used with events that are concurrent to the article's subject, with the exception of the parent campaign or conflict of the subject, which should be listed in the "conflict" field instead.
- When an article's subject is concurrent to another event with multiple sub-events, only the high-level event should be listed in the infobox. (example: Nihil conflict should list the Drengir crisis in its conc field, rather than listing all of the individual battles of the Drengir crisis)
- Multi-year battles, campaigns, or similar events, such as the second occupation of Geonosis should only be listed in the fields if they are directly relevant to the article's subject.
- Events with no relevance to the article's subject may optionally be listed in the infobox, but do not have to be mentioned in the body.
- Conversely, events that can be reasonably proven to be related to the subject should be detailed in the body as well as the infobox.
- All listings should be researched and correctly referenced, with a logic citation explaining the reasoning if the relation cannot be directly cited to a specific source.
- If no more-immediate optional event is present in the "prev" or "next" field, the most immediate relevant event should be listed instead.
Discuss! Cade 
Calrayn 02:39, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
Discussion
- Looks great and no qualms for me, though the last point may benefit from a "unless there is no relevant event for the respective field" at the end, as not all events have a clear-cut relevant preluding or succeeding event. - Thannus (DFaceG) (he/him) (talk) 02:43, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- As for my opinion on the changes and why I think this is beneficial, these provide a decent compromise between the two major groups on the previous CT these fields were subject to: It ensures the fields are held to the quality standards of the wiki and does not require irrelevant events be added for, say, status articles, BUT it also satisfies individuals who felt having even the irrelevant events in the infobox provided a benefit to readers who enjoyed seeing a chronology of events in some form, even if the events were not directly related to one another. Furthermore, this helps to resolve a long-standing issue present both before AND after the previous CT regarding the proper sourcing of relative chronology regarding events listed in the infobox; there both were and are events listed in these fields of the infoboxes without any reasoning for their placement beyond just a source. - Thannus (DFaceG) (he/him) (talk) 02:48, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- The main reason the original CT to remove them was because this was a feature that was so relentlessly abused. It also almost never had any actual logic to prove events' relations to each other timeline-wise; it was essentially, 95% of the time, citing to one source that the event was in and being like "yep, it's same year so it's concurrent"! which resulted in miles-long speculative bloat. Or even if it wasn't spec, the old rules allowed for infinite bloat due to no guidelines for funsies, if someone so such decided to be stubborn. These new rules do require that any and all speculation as such isn't allowed anymore, which suits fine. But mainly echoing my points on Discord, though it may seem legalistic, these rules do have to be this strict or people will abuse it yet again; so I'd understand if people looked at this text wall and wanted to reduce how much policy points are being added, but, they really are needed. It's not common for me to usually so blatantly assume bad faith, but this particular feature has been abused so badly in the past that it's absolutely necessary for people actually, you know, prove events' timeline relation to each other in the canon and not rely on speculative headcanon ordering, just as any other canon information needs adequate referencing, and to ensure we're doing it for reader-service truly, rather than filling it out for our own whims.—spookywillowwtalk 02:55, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- OK, so I don't really get this. The abovementioned CTs were indeed meant to alleviate the workload on editors who brought Wookieepedia's articles to status, helping showcase the best of what Wookieepedia has to offer. Most of the time, it's significant enough work on its own without basically having to research the subjects of other, unrelated articles. (In other words, in the long run I do believe this is discouraging people from even attempting to bring event articles to quality status, which, as much as we are focused on reader benefit, should still not be a low-priority concern for us.) So I don't quite understand why we are so super willing to muddy the waters of what a quality status article is by mixing in irrelevant information with relevant one, and are not exploring alternative options. We could be presenting this information as separate from the status article, like we do with index pages - so essentially allow an avenue for editors enthusiastic about presenting the reader with an overarching chronology of events to add this info without, again, making it insanely burdensome for the person researching the specific event itself. I'll also quote myself from the original SH on this: "I think there other avenues which can facilitate this functionality - namely, our legendary "Timeline of ..." pages, conflict navboxes, timelines on our IU year/period articles, and Category:Conflicts by period (there has also been some discussion on the Discord about potentially introducing categories of the format "Events of 19 BBY" etc.)." — the people truly interested in cleaning up the chronology could indeed be working on improving any and all of these, though unfortunately I get the impression these same people for some reason aren't as motivated to do this. Imperators II(Talk) 07:12, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- The primary reason for this is, that quite simply, readers are first and foremost simple creatures, and it's best to present the information on the page that they're actually reading rather than relegating it to other, harder-to-find pages like the timelines. Honestly, it's pretty much the same reason why we require context to given when an article refers to a planet or the like, because a reader doesn't necessarily known that Metellos is a planet if it's just mentioned offhand. And yeah, the timelines are woefully incomplete, but they're also ill-suited for the complexities of the chronological relationships between most events where we don't have a perfect sequence of events that we can line them up in. See the timeline of the Galactic Civil War for example; even all my work there doesn't illustrate all of the battles and events that we only have partial placement for. Secondly, trying to relegate this to a page like an Index does our readers an even greater disservice, because frankly, as much as we editors love the Indexes, they're a luxury designed exclusively for our use, and I would be extremely surprised if the average reader ever glanced at a single one. I understand the status article concerns, but the wording above was workshopped by almost a dozen users with the express purpose of avoiding requiring status article editors (who, again, are the minority and should not be exclusively catered to) to have to research and justify completely unrelated events unless they wish to do so. The new policy will allow any additions with unsatisfactory evidence to be reverted under policy, and the onus for proving the correlation will fall upon the person who wishes to add it, which the status article nominators don't have to. Cade
Calrayn 15:29, 13 September 2024 (UTC) - I am all for making things easier for editors and nominators, but at the end of the day our priority is the reader experience. And simply put, the readers enjoy(ed) scrolling through events chronologically to see how galactic history panned out. The entire reason behind the irrelevant events being optional is so some of that workload is alleviated from nominators—by and large researching the evidence of the placement will fall upon whoever adds it to the page, and to boot these policy changes would ensure that’s more tightly regulated. - Thannus (DFaceG) (he/him) (talk) 16:33, 13 September 2024 (UTC)
- The primary reason for this is, that quite simply, readers are first and foremost simple creatures, and it's best to present the information on the page that they're actually reading rather than relegating it to other, harder-to-find pages like the timelines. Honestly, it's pretty much the same reason why we require context to given when an article refers to a planet or the like, because a reader doesn't necessarily known that Metellos is a planet if it's just mentioned offhand. And yeah, the timelines are woefully incomplete, but they're also ill-suited for the complexities of the chronological relationships between most events where we don't have a perfect sequence of events that we can line them up in. See the timeline of the Galactic Civil War for example; even all my work there doesn't illustrate all of the battles and events that we only have partial placement for. Secondly, trying to relegate this to a page like an Index does our readers an even greater disservice, because frankly, as much as we editors love the Indexes, they're a luxury designed exclusively for our use, and I would be extremely surprised if the average reader ever glanced at a single one. I understand the status article concerns, but the wording above was workshopped by almost a dozen users with the express purpose of avoiding requiring status article editors (who, again, are the minority and should not be exclusively catered to) to have to research and justify completely unrelated events unless they wish to do so. The new policy will allow any additions with unsatisfactory evidence to be reverted under policy, and the onus for proving the correlation will fall upon the person who wishes to add it, which the status article nominators don't have to. Cade
- In the name of reader experience, I support bringing them back Editoronthewiki (talk) 22:45, 15 September 2024 (UTC)