Board Thread:Suggestions/@comment-4368470-20191027203538

Hi there! I was wondering if it would be possible to start a project to add chronologies for different characters? In the same way that every character has an associated /Gallery page, we could perhaps create some sort of Chronology page for them as well. In my head I am imagining it as looking similar to the Comic book disambiguation pages with each issue having its own image, in order, for every comic book the character appears in in-canon (i.e. would have an image and a link, then, then , etc, etc).

"Woah, woah, woah, with all the crazy time-displacement stuff that happens in Marvel comics, I can see this getting really convoluted and full of problems really fast", you might be thinking. I agree that is a possible implementation pitfall, but what I am proposing is a bit more of a broad chronological list, where an issue only gets placed earlier in the character's chronology if the majority of the main story was created specifically to be a sort of prequel/re-telling of events. That means issues containing a brief flashback to something that happened early in the character's history would not be put back in the ultra-specific time that those five panels happened, rather a book would only get placed somewhere earlier if the entire thing was dedicatedly created to tell a story that happened during an earlier time, like Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

Why have this?
For the wiki, this could help clear up a lot of the confusion and trouble that we have with template usage. Many times "next appearance" templates don't get added at all, or when they do people forget to update the ones linking backward, or various other mistakes. Straightening out these templates so that they all point to the correct things can be convoluted and time-consuming, so having a master list for characters could really help. Users would simply have to refer back to it to know exactly which issues the next/prev links should point to.

Another benefit of having chronology pages is that these would be far more readable than the Character Appearances pages, they would be in chronological order (which Appearance pages aren't), and they would be able to contain more than 500 issues.

Additionally, I think it is safe to say that it has been the goal of plenty of comic readers over the years to want to read all the comics of a specific character in chronological order. Unfortunately, this can often be a very difficult task that involves searching through random websites of fans who have made their own lists, most of which are incomplete or outdated. Having easy-to-understand, comprehensive lists would be extremely beneficial to many readers and users alike.

Also, one final thing to consider is that (at least in my opinion) this fits in very nicely with the wiki's philosophy and its goal to "create the largest online database of information on the Marvel Comics Universe". Adding these pages would be a great encyclopedic resource that many people would appreciate and benefit from and it complements the rest of our articles extremely well.

It's too big of a project
"Yikes, that is a lot of characters to create chronologies for, that is too big of a project to actually be worth the effort" might be a knee-jerk response you have. I agree that there are a ton of characters out there and to just drop this as a "go create chronologies" policy full-stop would cause a ton of headaches and result in a lot of unfinished work. I think there are a lot of ways to avoid this just by implementing it right, and one of these possible implementations is to test it out with only a few specific characters and then scale it up from there. Just create some chronologies for a few specific characters, see how it goes, then discuss how to move this into a larger scope.

Other notes

 * Yes, these chronologies are somewhat similar to the oft-forgotten Reading Orders, but they are meant to be stylistically different and are meant to be more encyclopedic than just "suggestions for readers".
 * No, we are not trying to replace Marvel Chronology Project or anything like that. This list would be primarily visual instead of a complex text list that requires a key to read, and it is on a character-by character basis, not trying to place every comic in one complete list. This also allows the wiki to reference within itself instead of having to rely on outside sources, making a more convenient experience for both users and editors.
 * These could be called whatever the heck we want, not just "chronologies". "Timelines" is another possible alternative, though I think that term in specific might have some problems. They could even be just "list of every [Character name] comic".

So what do you think? What is everyone's opinion on this? Thoughts? Love? Hate? Constructive criticism?  