Board Thread:Policies/@comment-18172179-20170103063927/@comment-3020860-20170110023812

SeanWheeler wrote: Why not just look up the publication dates of each appearance of the character? That should be a good way to verify the chronology. Most comics are released in chronological order. Just because some people are using it wrong shouldn't make us remove apn. That is useful when following a character and don't want to miss his/her guest appearances.

But how is that any different from just looking at the character's Appearances list? That would show you all of their guest appearances.

Lawrence King wrote: The "appearance lists" would not have shown this information, even if they could be sorted by cover date (which they can't), because the cover dates of these comics are long after the cover dates of Batman: Year One.

Well, see, right here we have exactly the problem with APN: We can't even agree on a definition for how it should be used. Lawrence King values it for information that, were we to follow SeanWheeler's suggestion (to connect appearances in publication order), it would no longer provide. But to maintain that information that Lawrence King values, we can't set any (straightforward, well-defined, concrete) rules for how APN should be used, and it has to remain largely subjective and left up to individual editors' judgement.

If people want to keep appearance-ordered lists for certain characters, for their timelines within a given crossover Event or whatever, I personally think there's a place for that on this wiki. But even then, the place (IMHO) should be a single listing subpage underneath their Character page (and perhaps linked to from the Event page as well, for those lists that represent Event chronology). This connecting-up of individual issue pages, with no way to view the linked chronology other than by stepping through individual entries (and hoping nobody misconnected any of them along the way, breaking the chain and either sending you spinning off on a nearly impossible-to-detect — from an editorial/maintenance standpoint — tangent, or getting you stuck in a navigational loop) seems like just about the worst conceivable (least convenient, least consumable, least maintainable, most bandwidth-wasteful) way to present the information being discussed. And that's even in the unlikely event there are no errors across all of the template calls so that what's presented is accurate to the editor's intent... and that editor's intent matches the wiki reader's expectation.