Wikipedia:Timeline
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- See also: Wikipedia:Timeline standards.
There are five basic kinds of timelines on Wikipedia, in order of their development:
- Category:Timelines, single page list of chronologically ordered events
- Wikipedia-wide date-based timeline (See any date:44, 738, 1932, etc.)
- Uploaded images of timelines
- m:EasyTimeline, editable code-based timelines using Erik Zachte's extension for MediaWiki, <timeline>
- A heading in biographies summarizing important events in a person's, or a companies life, and arranged chronologically
A timeline describes the events that occurred before another event, leading up to it, causing it, and also those that occurred right afterward that were attributable to it.
[edit] Discussion
Before a widely anticipated or scheduled future event, sometimes, its predicted effects will be in an article of their own. Whether they are or remain in the article anticipating the event, afterwards, they should be moved to the timeline. Any controversies about whether the event caused other events should be in a separate article on the actual effects. This lets them be compared to the predicted effects, helps keep track of any attempts to add new predictions without attribution after the fact from the list of actual effects, and it keeps the timeline neutral.
A decent example is the timeline of the Canadian federal election, 2004 and the main article on the Canadian federal election, 2004. This shows how to divide a "timeline" from the other reporting after the fact. To see how to report the timeline (and everything else) that comes before such an event, compare to Canadian federal election, 2005.
