Template talk:Decades and years

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I'm considering redoing this multiply-nested template you use fewer nests. Possible improvements:

1. Make it work properly in other namespaces. (It's currently only referenced in mainspace, and by century articles. It used to be used in century categories, but consensus was to replace it by a simple forward-back template, with the millennia and decade links visible by normal Wikipedia methods (millennia by the parent category, and decades by child category).
2. Adjust the links to 0s and 0s BC so that they aren't redlinked.
3. Possibly pipe the links so that "(decade)" is not visible, as in [[100s (decade)|100s]] and [[100s BC (decade)|100s BC]]

— Arthur Rubin (talk) 00:37, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm working on it. The problem here is that the template was originally written when the convention was to name the "first decade of the century" pages as 100–109, but when that was moved to 100s (decade) on 30 November 2011‎, that sort of broke this template. So then GeoffreyT2000 tried to fix it on 11 August 2015, but I'm not sure whether that's the right patch. I'm working on sorting it all out. Instead of linking to 9–1 BC though, it should really link to 0s BC (decade) and that should redirect to 0s BC. Some research links:

• 00s, a disambiguation page I cleaned up-to-date
• Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates)#Decades – old discussion on the matter, from September 2008
• Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates)#First decade of each century revival – followup discussion, from May 2009
• Talk:2000s (decade)/Archive 3#Rename? – proposed renamed to 2000–2009, October 2008
• Talk:2000s (decade)/Archive 3#Proposed move (May 17, 2009) – the result of the proposal was move 2000–2009 → 2000s (decade) – that seems to have settled the matter
• Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates)#First decade of each century revival, May 2009 discussion which ran concurrently with the above requested move
• Technical move requests for 1900–1909 → 1900s (decade) and 2000–2009 → 2000s (decade), which were completed 27 May 2009
• mass-moves of 100–109 through 1800–1809 to "(decade)" titles, 30 November 2011
• mass-moves of 109–100 BC through 1609–1600 BC to "(decade)" titles, 12 December 2011

It would have been better if these were all moved in a planned and coordinated fashion, rather than ad hoc over a period of time. Obviously updates to this template were an afterthought. wbm1058 (talk) 23:47, 12 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

1. Make it work properly in other namespaces.  Done I believe the category space is the only other namespace where we might want to use this. See Template:Decades and years/testcases#Categories. To avoid red links for the first decade of each century, simply create redirects, e.g. redirect Category:100s (decade) to Category:100s. Or perhaps move Category:100s to Category:100s (decade) for consistency with the article 100s (decade). I'm not sure what the best links for the collapsible navbars are, but this edit could be reverted and tweaked to link to Category:Decades and Category:Years rather than Decade and Year.
2. Adjust the links to 0s and 0s BC so that they aren't redlinked.  Done That was simply a matter of creating two new redirects: 0s (decade) and 0s BC (decade). These two 9-year long "decades" are exceptions to the standard naming convention for the first decade of a century AD / last decade of a century BC.
3. Possibly pipe the links so that "(decade)" is not visible, as in [[100s (decade)|100s]] and [[100s BC (decade)|100s BC]]  Done {{Decades and years/decade}} determines whether "(decade)" disambiguation in the link is needed, and then passes a parameter down to {{Decades and years/yearlink}}, which actually builds the links.

– wbm1058 (talk) 14:24, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Following the consensus in Talk:AD 1 RfC to display years AD 1…AD 100 with their prefix, I have applied the necessary changes to this template, essentially to the year generator {{Decades and years/yearlink}}. We now use simpler syntax with invocations of {{dr}} which takes care of the AD/BC display and hyperlinking. Links to decades still uses part of the old code but this may yet evolve. Given that those templates were long unused outside of article space, I have dropped support for other namespaces (parameter {{{1}}} is now marked deprecated all along the template chain). Navigation in categories has recently been improved with the revamped {{Decade category header}}, so I don't think we are losing anything precious here. Courtesy ping to fellow contributors wbm58, Arthur Rubin and Certes. — JFG ^talk 22:47, 5 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I've spent at least half an hour going down the rabbit hole of subtemplates called by this template, and I can't figure them out. Currently, {{dr|y|y|2084|0|y}} returns [[2084]], but 2084 is a disambiguation page. How to make it return [[AD 2084]] instead? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 17:26, 9 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Arthur Rubin, Wbm1058, and JFG: Anyone have an idea how to fix this? --R'n'B (call me Russ) 18:39, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

At the bottom of the rabbit hole is Template:Drep, where the most recent edit expanded the limit from AD 100 to AD 1000 after 666 and 911, etc. stopped being years. At this point I feel that the virus has infected all numbers so that we should assume that all years from the beginning to the end of time need to be prefixed with either "BC" or "AD". This should simplify the template as it will no longer need logic to determine whether a prefix should be added. Even 2020 is ambiguous; it could mean visual acuity. P.S. It takes me half an hour to dive down the hole too, which is totally annoying as I did not design this abomination. – wbm1058 (talk) 22:10, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I've boldly upped the limit to AD 3000, although even that appears not to be enough to avoid all problems (see 3030 for example). --R'n'B (call me Russ) 18:31, 3 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]