Forum:Help with Era templates

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Hi, so I've got a bunch of questions regarding Template:Era and Halopedia:Projects/Timeline/Eras, as Halopedia:Layout guide doesn't give much information about it. From what date do we consider that the Human-Covenant War is finished? It is currently vaguely established at 2553 on the Halopedia:Projects/Timeline/Eras page. On the Human-Covenant War page, the official cessation of hostilities is established on March 3, 2553, which seems correct to me. However, the Raid on High Charity displays the post-war template (I guess it's simply an error, it seems to consider that Truth's death meant the end of the war). The UNSC Point of No Return also has the post-war template, despite its last appearance being in December 2552. Furthermore, Codename: SURGEON only has the "Human-Covenant War" template. The Eleventh Hour reports are post-war (as it implies Jul is gathering the Covenant remnant), so SURGEON is post-war too I guess? On the other side, Codename: COALMINER displays the "Colonial and Insurrection Era" template, despite his earlier appearance being in 2532. I know that persons and objects do exist before or after an era, but should we really mention every possible eras? Requiem and Installation 04 are limited to those in which they appear in known Halo media, and I think it's what we should do, as there's virtually no appearance of those in other eras. On the opposite side, Installation 00 has all the "middle" eras. Though it did exist during these periods, do we really need to keep all those templates? If the answer is yes, then we must also add a bunch of templates to several articles, and sometimes we may not even have enough information to know if someone or something really was there during a certain era. Plus if there's no known information on someone during an era, it would be irrelevant to mention it. And it continues with pages like Sparta which (I think) should display the "Rise of the Covenant" era instead of the current one, Thel Vadam who should have the "Insurrection" era (because we have information on him as early as 2485, his birthdate), etc. If I have any other questions regarding this subject, I'll probably use this page instead of using the talk page of each articles. Thanks for your answers. Imrane-117 (talk) 16:25, 2 July 2013 (EDT)

You bring up a lot of good points. I'll try to answer to my best ability. Truth is, all of these haven't really been thought of that much when creating the current era system. However, now is as good time as any to correct that.

First, the transition to the post-war era could definitely use some reworking. Even though the memorial service was held in March 2553, it would be more in line with the actual events to consider the post-war era to have begun after the events at Installation 00, that is, following December 11, 2552. The Raid on High Charity and Raid on Installation 04B would still be considered to be part of the war, since even though the Covenant was in effect destroyed, they were very intrinsically tied to the same chain of events which only ended after those two. Everything after that - SURGEON's report, William Arthur Iqbal's letter and Glasslands - has been shown to be firmly imbued with the post-war zeitgeist, the lack of an official cessation of war notwithstanding, so it would be rather forced to list them as part of the war era.

Second, it makes sense to me that we should only mention the eras during which the subject has appeared or been mentioned in media; this, I believe, is the whole point of the template. This means that more persistent subjects like Installation 00 or planets, for example, definitely shouldn't have all the eras in between. There have been a lot of mix-ups regarding the use of the "Covenant" era in Earth-related articles and vice versa, mainly because a lot of people didn't apparently get the memo that this means the "Rise of the Covenant era" as opposed to "Covenant-related article". Personally I'm not convinced that our current system is the best one - I believe there was a proposal a while ago to change it so that we'd have separate timelines for human and Covenant history up until the Human-Covenant War, but I don't think that's happening anytime soon. --Jugus (Talk | Contribs) 02:52, 7 July 2013 (EDT)

Apologies for changing the topic a little but would it be best for the wiki to retire the Era template project? The project is no longer kept up to date with the development of the Halo Universe (due to its ever changing nature under 343i's stewardship) and much of the events that took place are interlinked with other eras. — subtank 00:05, 20 July 2013 (EDT)

I was thinking that it could be changed to be a little more "neutral". I'd avoid using the "Rise of the Covenant" name for example, as it could confuse some people and doesn't really describe human history. It was mainly about establishing different names and dates, etc. But yeah eventually it's becoming harder with the new war, etc. Not sure what would be the best. Imrane-117 (talk) 06:18, 20 July 2013 (EDT)