Talk:World of Greyhawk Timeline

Establishing a Working Plan for the Timeline

I think we (being as many wiki users as possible) ought to get together and decide exactly what the Portal and the Timeline are going to be.

There's certainly a need for a "Timeline" page, beginning with that word, for search engine optimization reasons. When a user makes a search looking for a "timeline", something starting with "World of ..." isn't going to pop up automatically, and they'll have to sift through all the pages mentioning the word "timeline" to find what they're looking for.
Honestly, I think we ought to move "Timeline (Greyhawk)" to just "Timeline" so the page will direct to that page when they enter it, just like "typing "Procan" in a search goes directly to that page without the need to look for results. The word "timeline" is in the top two search words on the wiki. #1 being gods/deities. It *really* needs to have a page of its own.
Either that, or delete it altogether, and put in a page simply called "Timeline".

I think, however, that page needs to have its Redirect go to Portal:History to give readers options about what exactly it is they want to look at. We can include different sections for timelines from published sources, GH authors, LG, Dragon, and OJ sources all separately in various places, if we like. And this page can be linked from there like the other varieties of pages. If this is done, though, we ought to work on a plan to make them uniform, rather than changing details or information on one page and letting the others languish with different versions or information.

When we began working on these pages, it was with the intent of merging all the various timeline pages that had cropped up over the years on the wiki. But it was not to move all the information which had been pooled into Portal:History away from that page and subsume it all into a separate project. If we prefer to separate the timelines, and we're interested in not including some work, due to an "Apocryphal" status, maybe we can find time or way to have a conversation about it. This talk page isn't a bad place to do that kind of thing. We should define what is and isn't aprocryphal.

But, most importantly information needs to be moved, rather than deleted. We definitely do not want to be deletive.
If we decide some of the material shouldn't be on one timeline or another, it can have its own. And we can build out several versions, like Age of Worms Timeline has its own. --Icarus (talk) 01:44, 3 July 2020 (CDT)

First, sorry for overwriting your article to World of Greyhawk Timeline just now; I had been adding events from Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk, and had to either overwrite or lose these edits.

However, I'm also of the opinion that the "Source required" notices are important. Every entry should reference a primary source so that readers can be confident that the information is reliable and accurate; in the absence of this, "source required" informs editors that they have a duty to research the topic and find a source, and I've added sources for several "source required" entries so far as I've managed to find sources.

My assumption is that the wiki exists as a reference to official Greyhawk material only. Recently, I removed several timeline entries which had no source other than Oerth Journal #1, a fan work, on the basis that this is not official content.

At current, "World of Greyhawk Timeline" contains all entries from all timeline articles, including the timeline at Portal:History (except non-canon entries). This is why I removed the timeline from Portal:History, since it's outdated duplicate content. Additionally, according to Wikipedia:Portal, portals should be indexes to articles on a topic; the Fandom wiki may have moved its "Timeline" article to Portal:History, but this is not what the Portal namespace is intended for.

I'm not certain whether "World of Greyhawk Timeline" or "Timeline" would be superior SEO. I redirected "Timeline (Greyhawk)" to "World of Greyhawk Timeline" on the assumption that the reader wants the timeline when they go to the timeline, and "Timeline (Greyhawk)" was just a redirect page which nothing else on the wiki links to. I've also set up Timeline as a redirect to "World of Greyhawk Timeline" for now, so that if someone types Timeline they'll get the timeline. Rexidos (talk) 03:11, 3 July 2020 (CDT)