Talk:U.S. foreign policy/Timelines

Title

The titling of history articles has to have the key words on the left. The Key words are Diplomacy and U.S. We can expect to have articles like:

• Diplomacy, China, Timeline
• Diplomacy, Britain, Timeline, etc Richard Jensen 15:15, 14 April 2007 (CDT)

I must confess I still don't understand what this buys us. The abc= field in the metadata ensures that in automatically alphabetized lists, it is alphabetized in the order that field specifies (so that, e.g. 'Michael Faraday' is ordered as if it had been titled 'Faraday, Michael'. So where exactly is it that it shows up in non-manually-ordered lists where it's not alphabetized in that way? J. Noel Chiappa 07:12, 25 May 2008 (CDT)

It shows up in the proper place in "See also" links. Richard Jensen 12:27, 25 May 2008 (CDT)

See Also link lists are manually ordered, no? So you could just stick "Battle of Guadalcanal" in under G, no? And we could define a template "ShowABC", which took an argument of the article name, and created a piped link with the ABC version as what shows up, to alert less-alert authors that in fact it was in the right place in the list... (In fact, that's such a good idea I think I'll suggest it anyway, for things like Michael Faraday on See Also pages...) J. Noel Chiappa 15:34, 27 May 2008 (CDT)

On a closely related issue I'm not sure how the CZ search engine handles its searches--the articles I want do not show up at the top. Solution is more "see also" links. At a deeper level indexing is about how we think about an issue, how we decide what is the most important component of a title. Automatic systems don't think. Richard Jensen 16:07, 27 May 2008 (CDT)

Don't get me started on MediaWiki search - it's horrible!

Good point about the indexing, and how we think about things. I'll try and think of even more ways to use the abc= field of the metadata, which is there precisely to allow humans to indicate what is "the most important component of the title" (I love that phrase). J. Noel Chiappa 18:42, 27 May 2008 (CDT)

Subpage home

This belongs on a subpage about U.S. diplomacy. --Larry Sanger 21:56, 24 May 2008 (CDT)

good point. I've started U.S. Foreign Policy where it can be a subpage. Richard Jensen 22:46, 24 May 2008 (CDT)

What page would it go on? U.S. foreign policy/Timelines or would there be more than one for such an article? If so, then U.S. foreign policy/Timelines/Diplomacy should be the home.

What will this do to the sorting issue discussed above though? Will it become a problem, and if so, we probably need to figure out a solution sooner than later. Noel discussed using the abc field but diplomacy would not be a term in the abc field for such an article. Do we need a seperate sorting field that can be added manually, possibly in this case, using the format of {{Subpages|Diplomacy, U.S., Timeline}} at the top of the timeline, rather than just the regular {{subpages}} template. Using such an option would allow every subpage to have unique sorting terms unrelated to the article name (if needed). Chris Day 01:10, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

I think the best title is U.S. foreign policy/Timeline (timeline singular) Note that this article is not confined to diplomacy, but covers other aspects of foreign policy (like wars). Richard Jensen 01:18, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

The current subpage is plural by default, whether to change that is an separate issue. But, there would not be more than one timeline in the future for the US foreign policy article? US Wars seems like an obvious one. Possibly Trade agreements? Would that not mean the long term home at U.S. foreign policy/Timelines/Diplomacy is more appropriate?

Just out of interest, would you find it useful to be able to assign specific key words to individual subpages for indexing purposes? Chris Day 01:25, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

Just one timeline....I think multiple timelines would be too confusing. People want to know what happened circa 1925-29, say, and all the events should be close together. I don't understand "assign specific key words to individual subpages for indexing purposes" ?? Richard Jensen

Why would multiple timelines be more confusing if they are also related to subsets of information related to the US foreign policy article?

With regard to key words. Above you indicate you would prefer the timeline to sort under "Diplomacy, US" so that it will be together with other related timelines such as "Diplomacy, China" in an index. After the move to the timelines subpage it will sort under U for "U.S. foreign policy" whereas the China timeline would probably sort under C for "China foreign policy". If you could designate sorting terms for each timeline subpage they could be forced to sort using "Diplomacy, US" and "Diplomacy, China" for the respective sort terms. Thus, US foreign policy/Timelines and China foreign policy/Timelines would be together under D in the timelines category. Chris Day 02:21, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

we should have only one timeline per history article, because its purpose is to show how many different things were happening at the same time. As for index titles, I thik these timelines should be all indexed under foreign policy (ie, Foreign policy, Afghanistan; Foreign policy, Bulgaria; Foreign policy, Canada; Foreign policy, Eduador; Foreign policy, France etc. Note that "Foreign policy" is a more general term than "diplomacy" (which is quite narrow). For example, controversies over the Olympic Torch are foreign policy but not diplomacy. So just don't use "diplomacy" (that was the wikipedia title and no longer works)Richard Jensen 02:30, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

So, this should get moved to U.S. Foreign Policy/Timelines (plural since that's the subpage standard)? J. Noel Chiappa 11:22, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

reset indentation

In that case the abc field will work for sorting since they will likely be "Foreign policy, US" or "Foreign policy, China". I see what you mean now with regard to the name, these are not diplomacy timelines, per se, but foreign policy timelines. Chris Day 02:37, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

well I think I'm mixed up. The main article will be China, foreign policy; U.S. foreign policy etc (the first word = country). then we get: China, foreign policy/timeline, U.S. foreign policy/timeline etc (I expect only the major countries will get this treatment --it's a lot of work!) But we want somehow to have a listing of all the foreign policy timelines (abd by country name). Richard Jensen 03:00, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

Right. So if the ABC field has the format "Foreign policy, country" for the respective "country foreign policy" articles they will all sort under F in the Timelines category and be viewed as:

Sort order in Timelines category	abc fields
Food/Timelines Chinese foreign policy/Timelines French foreign policy/Timelines Japanese foreign policy/Timelines U.S. foreign policy/Timelines U.S. forest service/Timelines Forestry/Timelines	Food Foreign policy, Chinese Foreign policy, French Foreign policy, Japanese Foreign policy, U.S. Forest service, U.S. Forestry

Does this make more sense? And is that desirable? Chris Day 03:18, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

yes, perfect. Can we change the software to make it "Timeline" (someday an article might have more than one bit that will be rare.Richard Jensen 12:14, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

I like the idea of having per-article keywords - sort of the way journal articles have keywords in them (at the head). We could store them in the metadata too (another field). Not sure exactly what we'd use them for (yet), but I'm sure they'd come in handy. But that's a whole separate discussion, I think.

For now, it sounds like the abc= field does all we need (at least in terms of indexing)? What did you think of my idea for an {{R}} variant which did a piped link with the abc= field as the text shown? J. Noel Chiappa 11:22, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

I like the idea. :) Richard Jensen 12:14, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

reset indentation

A few things.

1) If you had more than one timeline you would create a sub-subpage In such a scenario the sub-subpages would also be listed in the Category:Timelines. As the number of articles increases remember there is a Category:History Timelines too that will give you the subset of interest to you. Likewise if you wish to broaden the index to include all subpage types you could view Category:History Subpages

Thus the table above might change to the hypothetical examples below:

Sort order in History Timelines category	abc fields
Chinese foreign policy/Timelines Chinese foreign policy/Timelines/Diplomacy Chinese foreign policy/Timelines/Trade French foreign policy/Timelines Japanese foreign policy/Timelines U.S. foreign policy/Timelines U.S. foreign policy/Timelines/Diplomacy U.S. foreign policy/Timelines/Trade U.S. foreign policy/Timelines/Wars	Foreign policy, Chinese Foreign policy, Chinese Foreign policy, Chinese Foreign policy, French Foreign policy, Japanese Foreign policy, U.S. Foreign policy, U.S. Foreign policy, U.S. Foreign policy, U.S.

I'm a little unsure how the ones with the same abc will sort, I suspect by time added to the database rather than alphabetical, which would be a pain. That is when we would need some kind of sub-subpage specific keyword, i.e. as I mentioned above, adding to the subpage template at the top of the sub-subpage as {{Subpages|Diplomacy}} or {{Subpages|Trade}}

2) Keywords would allow a relational database type network to exist. This is being done with gene ontologies in biology as a way to categorizes and build concept maps based on functional domains or physical interactions. not sure if it could work here but a new wiki is trying to do this very thing based on the data mined from the published literature and then getting the biological community to annotate these maps manually. See my recent forum post for more info.

3) Having a template that uses the abc field as an output would be very easy to do. Does the {{abc}} template sound right?

I probably should have broken this into three different sections, I hope this does not get too confusing. Some of these points are unrelated to this article too, maybe we should take this to the forum of our talk pages? Chris Day 13:13, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

the new table (in gray) look just right. I have serious doubts about sub-subpages--I think few people will find them. Richard Jensen 13:33, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

There would be links and summaries on the Timelines subpage. They can also be linked from the Related Articles pages of many different articles. Even from within articles. If they are hyperlinked in the relevant places they should be easy to find. Chris Day 13:44, 28 May 2008 (CDT)