Board Thread:Planning/@comment-1743498-20131214024110/@comment-1743498-20131215054749

SupcommMonroee wrote: If there's no baseline date for any informative articles, how is anyone supposed to identify what time periods two things exist together, or what settings stories exist in? Stories aren't limited to time frame. Informative articles would be. Imagine if Wikipedia's article on Iran was Xerxes' Persia, the article on Russia was Stalin-era USSR, and the article on Britain had the construction of Hadrian's Wall as a recent event?

I'm not sure how many other people are doing it, but I've adopted a format of my own that could solve this issue. If two regimes are different from each other to such a drastic degree, they would warrant separate articles. For example, although the Kingdom of New Karalia is little more than a reformation of the Karalian Empire, the two received separate articles because of how different they were. Likewise, it would make sense if Xerxes' Persia was a separate article from Iran.

Any mention of time progression or any relativity to a present date should be reserved to history articles. That is, a regime would be described how it was then up until a date of dissolution was labelled (if it doesn't have one, it can just be labelled N/A or unknown). Then, the separate history articles would connect it together to other regime articles. If the history articles are labelled with dates (and more conveniently, have an accompanying timeline page), then it should be fairly easy to sync them up with other history pages.

Technically, it would be most correct if all of these articles would be written in past tense, although I would say it should only be loosely enforced given the current amount of articles in present date. Ultimately though, it's most important if authors maintain a sense of internal consistency within their own creations at the very least.