Board Thread:Policies/@comment-18172179-20170103063927/@comment-3361105-20170110045651

Lawrence, I agree that there should be some way of knowing things like that Shaman takes place in the same year as Year One. That said, a tiny right/left arrow may lead you to that conclusion, but doesn't so much convey that information. That said, information like that would serve us best on a page like Batman: Year One which does not currently contain that information, and is primarily focused on the Frank Miller story. Though it would be a vastly difficult project, arranging the New Earth Batman page in the same way as the Prime Earth page (with character history arranged in an in-universe chronological way), would probably be of some use as well.

Re: "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."

I don't mean to be dismissive when I say that you are exactly right. The "Old West" era of this wiki ended the better part of a decade ago. For years, the administrative team has been working to make this website one with curated, quality, and accurate content. And that has meant doing away with things that didn't work, and creating a lot of new content, and focusing really heavily on filling empty pages, rather than making empty pages (which is still a fight that we are losing). As I said above, there are better ways to convey the information you want to maintain here. Sorting appearances by release date is not particularly useful in any case. Storlylines from book to book rarely play nice in terms of timeline. Editorial does not keep the reigns that tight. Inconsistently using APN to do in-universe next appearances versus publication date next appearances is a huge problem. The subjectivity/internal inconsistency of the former makes it impossible to categorically apply across the wiki, and the near uselessness of a publication-sorted chronology (not to mention the sheer amount of work we still need to do on this wiki to make it remotely accurate) makes the latter pointless.

Blindly copying our information from dcuguide isn't a good practice for a wiki that wants to be reliable, consistent, accurate, and informative. Inconsistency throws accuracy into question, and kills information. Being able to rely on us to have another websites' information duplicated here isn't really the kind of reliable we'd like to be, besides.