Wikipedia talk:How to archive Current Events

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Archive: 1

[edit] On reverse chronological order and whether to remove events of lesser importance

'Events by month' pages exist for months since January 1999, and since January 2002 they have apparently been automatically generated by moving the page at Current events after the end of the month. The problem is that the events are thus in reverse chronlogical order. This is entirely appropriate at Current events, because it puts the most current events at the top, the forefront of the page. However it makes no sense for historical entries, so to speak, to follow this convention, and the order of the original, hand-typed entries (those up to and including December 2001) are correctly written in forward order. April 2005 is apparently an exception as someone took the time to manually reverse the events.

I contend that all pages should look like that one -- at least in regards to the "forward" chronological order of the entries. It appears that in the process of reversing the events (or maybe before) somebody removed the events of lesser importance, resulting in a smaller, more manageable page. Trevor macinnis made some comments earlier on this talk page, now archived, regarding that issue and that is something that should be discussed too. But either way the reverse chronological order has to go. GT 10:33, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree; it should be in forward chronological order. joturner 03:56, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Needs to be updated to reflect various changes

As part of the migration to the portal namespace, I attempted to follow the process listed here, modulo the issues related to the namespace change. I encountered some issues unrelated to the change in namespace, which I am documenting here:

  • I wasn't able to move Current events; I use the default skin, and I didn't have a move tab for the article at my disposal. This contradicts what the instructions say is required for preseving edit history. I've never had a move tab go missing like that before so there could have been pilot error or some other bug involved (inspite of my repeated refleshes, restarts, etc. to try to work around this).
  • When you archive, you must also create a {{Mmm YYYY events}} (e.g. {{May 2006 events}}, containing that month's calendar-like browser (i.e. the array of links laid out like a month from a calendar).
  • Current items from the current {{Current events}} template get copied into June 2006 (or its equivalent). This applies to deaths, recent and ongoing events, ongoing armed conflicts, elections, and trials.
  • Some guidance needs to be provided about what carries over into the new month. For example, when archiving June 2006 should the new current events list include any events from June after the archival process is complete? I ended up guessing that just a day's worth should be carried over but I heard at least one complaint about that. Likewise for deaths — do we wipe the slate clean or should a few deaths from the previous month still be listed? I chose to list deaths from the second half of last month in current events, expecting them to be trimmed back each week that passed in the new month. For all other sections, I kept ongoing items and items labeled recent, dropping the rest.
  • The list of months supplied at the top (sort of a calendar browsebar) includes links to currentmonth currentyear in front of the links for each month of the current year. It seems redundant to have that there but if it's supposed to be there, it should be specified in these instructions.
  • The {{Events by month links}} template must also be updated and is not mentioned.

Kayaker 02:57, 1 July 2006 (UTC) (added another bullet item 05:17, 1 July 2006 (UTC)).