Board Thread:Policies/@comment-18172179-20170103063927/@comment-1257201-20170110030421

FeRDNYC, I agree that there are two different concepts here: appearances ordered by the comic's cover date, and appearances ordered by in-universe canonical sequence. The former is an objective concept (aside from the fact that dozens of comics share the same cover date); the latter involves decision making that is sometimes objective and based on careful reading, but at other times arbitrary or simply wrong.

I actually value both of these kinds of information. The former is available both on GCD and dcuguide, while the latter is available only on dcuguide. My last post focused on the latter, but if you scroll up you will see I earlier proposed that the "Appearance Lists" be made sortable by cover date, which would produce the former. (Sforhope and Hatebunny explained why this is not possible.)

If someone has the software skills, I would suggest that they write a script that follows all the APP/APN links like a spider-bot. Then arrows themselves could be deleted, and we could generate for each character an "appearances in canon order" list based on what the script had generated. These pages would be incomplete and imperfect, but since this is a wiki, people could then edit them and make them better.

And as you point out, a separate page of this sort would be vastly superior to the current method

I suspect that if this were done, it would simply reveal that 90% of the APP/APN information was taken from dcuguide in the first place. And their chronologies have the extra advantage of dividing up comics into pieces (e.g., Crisis on Infinite Earths #2 takes place between pages 17 and 18 of New Teen Titans v.2 #13).

Of course, the APP and APN arrows are not internally consistent. Neither is dcuguide, by the way -- I have found tons of errors in their chronologies. (Some are inconsistencies, such as a character's chronological page not matching the "before" and "after" statements in an individual comic page; others are errors, such as giving too much creedence to Superman triangle numbers even when they give implausible results.) But in my opinion, once wiki-editors decide that the presence of errors in a mass of information justifies the fullscale deletion of that information, they have adopted a perfectionist philosophy that is fundamentally incompatible with the very concept of a wiki.