Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years

Years vs establishments categories

We currently have an inconsistency in the sense that the years and the establishments categories are not existing in tandem in the 7 most recent centuries BC. Establishments by decade categories only start by 400 BC, and establishment by year categories start at the beginning of the Common Era. Consequently, for example Gela, which still exists as a medium-sized city in Italy, is both in Category:7th-century BC establishments in Italy which makes perfect sense, and in Category:688 BC which is odd. Should we fix this? @Fayenatic london and Smasongarrison: your opinions are appreciated too. Marcocapelle (talk) 21:25, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Seems OK to me. – Fayenatic London 21:34, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm happy to defer to marco's judgement on this one. ^SMason_Garrison 22:37, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

CfD nomination at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2025 January 6 § States and territories (dis)established in YYYY

Categories in this WikiProject's scope have been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2025 January 6 § States and territories (dis)established in YYYY on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. harrz ^talk 22:21, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Merging years into decades

I see a lot of decade articles like 110s and 1710s are simply concatenating year articles. It seems like it would make things simpler to just merge early year articles into decade articles, given that apparently length is not an issue. -- Beland (talk) 09:04, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Looking at Template:Years in Spain, the problem seems even worse, where many years don't have any information at all. Perhaps everything pre-1900 in Spain should be merged into decades? If the same is done for other European countries, that could make link and category alignment easier. -- Beland (talk) 09:12, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Well, merging a vast amount of articles without notifying a larger section of the readerbase would seem like improper conduct. AD 1 has the highest amount of pageviews for any year in the 1st millenium, so perhaps a little test could be carried out by proposing to merge AD 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 into 0s with a WP:SIZE justification. If a majority of editors would be in favour of such a merge, it would be safe to say years can also be merged into decade pages for many other articles. Koopinator (talk) 18:39, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Done; see discussion at Talk:0s#Merging year articles. -- Beland (talk) 19:51, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

This first merge appears to have caused problems at {{Births and deaths by year for decade}}, which may assume the existence of pages in the form of "AD XX" with specific content and formatting. Further merges should probably be avoided until that template/module can be modified. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:52, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

That template is parameterized, and as far as I can tell, no article uses it for the affected decade. The article 0s used it, but I removed it because that's exactly what the merged content was replacing. The page Template:Births and deaths by year for decade itself is affected, but that's because it defaults to the affected decade. Changing the default to a different decade would fix that (I recommend a recent one, since we'll probably be merging all the year articles at least up to 1000 CE?), or changing the template so that it complains if it doesn't get a parameter might make more sense. -- Beland (talk) 02:01, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

I've done this in the past with Bulgaria where all of the pages were nearly empty, creating decade pages like 1940s in Bulgaria. With things like this, I figure it makes more sense to keep them all together. And then they can be split off from the main article if anyone ever puts the work in to flesh them out. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:32, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Template:Births and deaths by year for decade misbehaves when Births is the last section

I spotted a DEFAULSORT conflict at 320 BC that was caused by {{Births and deaths by year for decade}} transcluding the DEFAULTSORT and category from 326 BC. This was because there was no section header after Births. I added an empty References section as a workaround, but this issue should be adressed. This problem will reoccur whenever a page has no appendices, and therefore no level 2 section headers following Births. Paradoctor (talk) 15:22, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Proposal for change for Common.css purposes

Made a proposal at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Millenniumbox#Proposed_Change, if anyone has any comments I welcome them, if not I'll switch over in a few days. Froglegseternal (talk) 10:30, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Lists of Births on "Year in music" articles

Hi. I'm raising this issue here because this is something that affects a large number of articles. I'm talking about articles like 1980 in music and 2000 in music. These articles commonly have a "Births" section that I believe to be nothing more than listcruft. The problems with these sections are threefold.

• There is no criteria established for limiting whose births should be listed. There are thousands of musical artists who were born in any given year and we cannot list them all. The articles start by saying it includes notable events. But who decides whose birth is notable? It seems it is entirely up to the opinion of the contributing editor. Consequently the list fills with relative nobodies and those whose relationship to music is tenuous.

• The significance of their births to the specified year in music is zero. None of the people listed in these sections had any impact on music during the year, and their birth tells the reader nothing about music in the year. As "notable events", they passed totally unnoticed by all except their families.

• The usefulness of the list is highly questionable. Does anyone care that these people are similar age? Does it tell the reader anything useful? The fact that there aren't similar categories tells us just how significant or useful such a list is.

I would like to suggest these sections are either removed from the articles, or how they are made up is radically rethought. Escape Orbit ^(Talk) 15:31, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

I would raise this at a village pump, as the same applies to "year in" articles for many other topics. Apart from royalty / nobility, no births are important for that year. Fram (talk) 15:37, 4 April 2025 (UTC)