User:Lkseitz/Year process

This is my personal method for creating the year pages. I document it to a) help anyone else who wishes to create some needed year pages and b) let someone know where to pick up should I be hit by a bus in the middle of working on one.

1. View source and copy the text of the previous year (or nearest year).
2. Click on a red link for the needed year (there's probably one on the page you just copied) and paste the text from step 1.
3. Remove all bulleted text, leaving only the headers. Except for the context section, where I leave the generic text like "In [year]" and "Notable births in [year] included" as placeholders to add context later.
4. Change all instances of the copied year to the one being created. Don't forget to update the number of years since Birmingham's incorporation, too. This might also require changing the decades in the "Decade box" template.
5. Preview the page and right-click on the year category at the bottom to open it in another tab/window. (You did remember to change the category year, right?)
6. Go through all the births/deaths/establishment/disestablishments/events/works in the year's subcategories and add them to the page. After finishing this step, I usually save the page and call it the 1st pass.
7. Right-click on the "What links here" link on the page being edited and open it in another tab/window.
8. Go through each link of the "What links here" page and add it to the year page. I skip the specific date links (e.g. "June 1"). By default, each page contains 50 links. I save after doing each 50 and call it a pass (starting with the 2nd pass).
9. Repeat previous step for each page of "What links here" links. After each page of links, save the year in progress with a summary of Xth pass.
10. Go back and check all the date links you skipped previously (in steps 8 & 9). Most events will already have been entered, but this acts as a check that the dates are correct and picks up any stragglers. This is the Final pass. (I sometimes combine it with the last occurrence of step 9.)
11. Go through and add images for the year. Typically one for the Births, one for the Deaths, and then whatever you can find and/or will fit. Sometimes more than one image can be squeezed into the Birth/Deaths section. I typically do this twice, once as part of the "1st pass" and again after the final pass.
12. This step can be done at any point: Search the Images section for the specific year for Gallery images. (That means, do a search (not "Go") for the year you're doing, then at the bottom of the results, uncheck "Main" and check the "Images" namespace.) I typically do this during the final pass.
13. This step can be done at any point: Go to the year article on Wikipedia and select significant events/people to add the context. For more recent years, you might also want to click the "year in" links for Film, Literature, Music, and Television to the right. If copying the text, note that Wikipedia uses the present tense while Bhamwiki uses the past tense. I usually either do it as part of the "1st pass" or do it in pieces and label them separately as context passes.

Congratulations, you've now created a page for a year of Birmingham history.

If I disappear with an incomplete year page, you can figure that the last pass I made was the x - 1 page of "What links here." For example, the "2nd pass" means I finished the 1st page of "What links here" links.

I have purposely left most of the formatting of the year pages out of this document, because the format sometimes get tweaked. Also not all years will have the same headers, because sometimes we have no information of events of a certain type for that year. I suggest looking at some of the most recent years to get a feel for the accepted format.

At the time this was written, I'd started in 1790 and worked my way up to 1894. However, you'll see the order of the headers isn't consistent across that 124 year span, because we (by which I mean Dystopos) reversed the order of the Individual and Works headers during that time. Not that I don't endorse the change! But I didn't feel it was worth the effort to go back and change it for all the years I'd done up to that point. The chronologically most recent year I back-filled with the above steps was 1965, which you'll see is probably a little too heavy on context.