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It is important for a genealogical website to have a separate page for each year its readers are likely to be interested in. They should not have to go to Wikipedia to find out most things that were affecting their ancestors at specific times.

Most of the last millennium, and many earlier years, will deserve such a separate page eventually. (If we want to minimise the number of red links, we should create year pages sooner rather than later!) By early 2009 we had quite a number, in varying styles. It is perhaps time to make a mini-project out of completing a few hundred years' worth, as we seem to have done with various year-related categories.

A year page should ideally:

  • be in the category for its year and possibly those of its decade and its century
  • link to existing or envisaged categories for births, marriages, and deaths in that year
  • link to at least the preceding year page and the following year page
  • link to at least the English Wikipedia year page and possibly to the English WP "xxxx Births" etc if any, and to any other pages in any language that users wish to add
  • contain a calendar and lists of events of relevance, eg:
    • calendar changes (e.g.1582 and 1751) - which may remind some of us that we should consider having year pages for the quarter-years between those two where the British generally used the "previous" year number
    • census
    • county creation or boundary change
    • opening or destruction of a public record office
    • start of colonisation or annexation
    • major disaster such as war, the Potato Famine, or the 1918 TB pandemic

Some of the items listed above may also be on the category page in brief form (the briefer the better, because the primary purpose of a category page is an automatically updated ordered listing of subcategories and pages).

Basic structure, calendar, etc, can be copied direct from Wikipedia with the standard ({{t|usedwp}) acknowledgment. Items listed above should then be added as required, partly by using "What links here".

A detailed incomplete example is at 1967, with model at /model.


Much of it will be a job for a bot, such as User:Phloxbot, after we agree on the basic format.

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