Category talk:Year page placeholders

Pages for years
originally posted to WQ:VP

I know I've mentioned this somewhere before (though I can't recall where), but we should probably consider coming up with some standard format we can use to create "dummy" pages for individual years. (I say "dummy" pages because it's not not likely that we'd ever use such pages for anything except avoiding red links). It seems that more and more, dates are being wikilinked (which is good, because then they display in a user's selected date format preference) but currently leaves unsightly red links for the years, since no year pages exist. Using a link to the Wikipedia page for the year eliminated the redlink, but also means that the date won't be converted. For the years we have "Quote of the Day" archives for (2003 onward), we could have the corresponding year page redirect to that page, and for others, perhaps have each year page redirect to a single, short page that explains that we don't have a page for most individual years. —LrdChaos (talk) 18:57, 1 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm rather anxious to finish this part of our new date-article system as well. I'd be happy to work on this, shepherding a discussion and decision, then doing the mass article creation to establish whatever we decide. However, I'm far too preoccupied with existing maintenance issues (like VfD closures) and unfinished policy issues (finalizing the WQ:SD trial, completing the move of WQ:VFDA into the new log system), not to mention stuff I've done practically nothing on (Sourcing draft, copying old QotD's into their date articles [no, Kalki, I hadn't forgotten that]).


 * I'd like to ask our newer (and older but less active) sysops to consider doing some VfD closures and archiving, so LrdChaos and I (who do virtually all of them) might spend some more time on these other pressing issues. As always, I would also like to encourage everyone in the community to participate more on these maintenance issues. Most of the work doesn't require a sysop, and the more community participation we have, the stronger and more useful the project will be. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:24, 1 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Is it posible to have the dummy pages forward to the Wikipedia year pages. In that way, the user sees the data formated as their settings request, and the year page linked is still useful.  Downside to this is if we wanted to have year pages for quotes alone.  At that point, it becomes an upkeep issue. LeVirus Watts 19:18, 17 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, there's no way to make a Wikiquote page automatically redirect to a Wikipedia page. Trying to do something like #REDIRECT 2001, for example, will just leave you with the page you get for broken redirects; that is, a page with the "redirect" arrow and a link to the target page. Clicking the link in this case will take you to the Wikipedia page, but it's not automatic and it can appear as though something is broken when you end up at the 'redirect' page. Even if it did work, though, while it'd be an easy solution to the problem, I'm not sure that we'd necessarily want to transport people to Wikipedia with no warning (Wikipedia and other interwiki links appear in a slightly different color, and you can see the URL in the status bar to know where it's taking you; an automatic redirect from a Wikiquote page offers no such clues). —LrdChaos (talk) 19:29, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

We could do a mass copy-over of Wikipedia's "Years in poetry" pages, then amplify them.--Poetlister 22:32, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Links to date
originally posted to WQ:VP

We have a policy about linking a date? I found some pages have linked dates which lead us to QoTD corresponding page ... I am not sure if it is good/recommended or we are better to surpress that...--Aphaia 20:47, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I redirected the pages for 2003, 2004 and 2005 to the corresponding "Quote of the year" pages since it seemed to me to be a reasonable target for those years, and would eliminate redlinks for any uses of those. Since there's been something of push lately to wikilink dates, I figure that since we didn't have any other system for handling years (it's something we ought to discuss), this was a good way to get rid of some of the redlinks. —LrdChaos (talk) 22:23, 10 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't yet sense a "push" for wiki-linking all dates, only a growing questioning of whether or not we should do it. When we get enough interest from regular editors (i.e., folks showing a sustained interest in Wikiquote editing) to address this issue, we may be able to decide what to do with year articles. Once this is done, converting dates can be done en masse over time. Unless someone has a better idea, I'd suggest a discussion on this could take place at Wikiquote talk:Manual of style. We haven't had much enthusiasm for debating basic style issues to date, but this will change as we gain more editors. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:07, 11 December 2006 (UTC)


 * The case I found was ... perhaps 1950-07-11 alike. As you know, we get one red link and one date link (blue). I have no opinion about date link for now, but not happy with year red links. For preventing this, we have no way except avoiding this format and remove all link from date-year couplings? Or we are better to disable this feature? Aphaia 08:19, 12 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Or just create year articles like Wikipedia. The issue is, what should they contain in Wikiquote? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:22, 12 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Some newspapers and magazines, when doing their annual summaries, include a 'Quotes of the Year' section, most of which tends to relate to news stories and celebrity happenings of the year. It might be possible to go back and research such an article for Wikiquote, using the Wikipedia page to identify the main happenings and then going to likely sources of quotes. To this could be added literary and poetic gems first published in that year. Is this a possibility? It would be a lot of work to do, but I suppose a single 'test' year could be written to demonstrate the style quite quickly. Fys. &#147;Ta fys aym&#148;. 09:59, 12 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I had a quick go and picked 1921 as an example to work on (no particular reason). See Year pages/1921. Fys. &#147;Ta fys aym&#148;. 11:14, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Great work, Fys! I love it. Now another question arose me (and perhaps it sometimes fell upon you too), "if the current technical environment is the best to collect quotations?" Atomic collection of individual quotations with tagging seems to fit more to synthesize such quotations by xxxx. Wiki doesn't allow us not such a way easily, but it would be worthy to think what kind of software is the best choice for our collaborative works. --Aphaia 19:47, 12 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Whoa, Aphaia! That's a whole new topic, and far more challenging. Let's discuss this in another section. I have some ideas on this. &#9786; ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:00, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Since I (apparently) haven't said it yet, good work on that, Fys. It seems like it would be a lot of work to do that for every year (especially as you get past the 20th and 21st centuries, though a majority of the year links so far are mostly 19xx and 200x years), but it would be great to have pages like that for all the years. —LrdChaos (talk) 18:50, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Placeholders for year pages
originally posted to WQ:VP

Someone recently created, and then someone else blanked, a page for 1946. Since it would probably have been deleted anyway, I took the opportunity to add a placeholder message instead:


 * This page is a placeholder. The Wikiquote community has not yet come to a consensus on what the 1946 page, and calendar-year pages generally, ought to say. Please discuss any suggestions for the contents of year pages at the Village pump.

We really ought to come to some consensus about what to do here, but in the mean time, I propose creating a template with this message that we can put on redlinked year pages until something is decided. 121a0012 03:56, 30 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I love the idea. --Aphaia 16:16, 1 February 2007 (UTC)


 * I have to agree that it would solve our immediate date-formatting problem (if we created articles for each year we need, some going back to BCE). On the other hand, it would reduce the pressure to actually do something with these pages, which I concede is probably not enough to put a priority on the current community for a better solution. On the third hand, I've always been a little uncomfortable about creating 1000+ article pages for years while we have only 9000 articles total (actually only 8600 or so if you don't count month-date, dab, and list/index pages). A peculiar side benefit of this oddity would be that we would very quickly reach our next official milestone of 10,000 articles. But I'd feel a little embarrased if our 10,000th article was a placeholder page. (I'm getting dizzy from flip-flopping, so I'll stop now.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:07, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

I've made some changes to our de facto prototype year article 1946. Here is the updated version:

This page is a placeholder for a year page. The Wikiquote community has not yet come to a consensus on what the 1946 page, and calendar-year pages generally, ought to say. Please discuss any suggestions for the contents of year pages at the Village pump.

In the meantime, Wikipedia's 1946 article offers a list of noteworthy events of this year.

This makes it clear that we intend it to be a year article, regardless of the undecided content details, and provides a link to the matching Wikipedia article. Only 2 clicks would be needed to go from a Wikiquote year link to the WP article, which is no worse than any other mechanism we currently have that still allows for proper date formatting.

I'm not very good at the moment for heavy thinking, but I can still do relatively mindless automated stuff. Despite my concerns above, if we decide we want to do it, I offer to create the entire set of articles with this template in a fairly short time using AWB. (Actual time will depend on server response, which has been problematic lately.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 20:19, 1 February 2007 (UTC)


 * I went ahead and created the top 10 most wanted year pages using the new Year page placeholder. Feel free to go through and initialize the rest.  121a0012 06:27, 3 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Normally I'm quite bold, but I'd prefer to get more community input on this before I skew our article count by adding a thousand placeholders articles to Wikiquote, even if it seems inevitable. Thoughts, everyone? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 15:30, 3 February 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm not quite sure where your number comes from, Jeff. I certainly wasn't contemplating creating more than 150—all the years of the 20th century and only the "most wanted" years before that.  This reflects the years we are most likely to be able to write once we do reach a consensus on what should be included.  If we actually get somewhere with that subset, we can consider expanding it to other years (but I would not expand it to years that are not presently linked to—no sense creating orphan pages).  121a0012 16:25, 3 February 2007 (UTC)


 * My main desire for these year pages is to provide proper date formatting. The implication is that whenever someone wants to format a date, they should expect to see the year as a blue link, suggesting that all years that might be used in a full date citation (month, day, year, in whatever order) should have year articles. But of course your approach, using Special:Wantedpages, is much more practical, at least for the short term. I believe most of our date-formatting needs come from (A) source dates and (B) birth and death dates. The former will be very heavily weighted toward the most recent 50 years, and the latter will probably only include a sparse set of years prior to, say, 1700.


 * We'll get another boost in wanted year pages if we restore links to the "accessdate" parameter in our cite templates. Also, many users of these templates haven't bothered to manually link the "date" parameters (per Wikipedia practice) because we haven't had this formatting completely functional. Changing this would also increase the demand for year pages. If the community thinks this is a good idea, I can probably tackle that with AWB as well. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:00, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

If these placeholders do proliferate, please make them long enough so they don't show up in Special:Shortpages. Do we have even one really usable year page, save for Fys's example Year pages/1921? jni 12:20, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Year page placeholders
Is there any way to remove the Year Pages from the Random Page link? The sparseness of content diminishes the spice of discovering something new.