Talk:Timeline of Ulster Television

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Listing years with "No events."[edit]

It seems unnecessary and unhelpful to have a bunch of years listed in which we claim no events occurred. Firstly, to specifically guarantee the reader that absolutely nothing happened that year is an unverifiable claim of WP:OR/WP:POV; the most we may claim is that we don't have anything notable to list for that year. Secondly, it's a waste of space to list years with no events only to say "no events". Readers can tell that 1965 and 1966 are missing, and assume that we have nothing notable to list for those years (and possibly absolutely nothing happened that year).

Separately, I would point out that the use of bulleted lists (and sub-lists) is inappropriate here. 1964 and 1968, for example, should have bullets for their events, but the single-event years should be bulleted only for parallelism with those multi-event years. And in no case should the years be bulleted; they can just be bold headings. In any case, the MoS tells us to omit the period after sentence fragments like "No events". If we have consensus to keep this "event", I'll remove the periods.

There's an argument for accessibilty to make here: the extra listing of non-event years and the failure to provide correct markup makes the page rather unfriendly to users of screen readers. To get to 1998, for example, a screen reader user would have to follow the TOC link to "1990s", then go item-by-item, having to listen to "No events" being read to them 5 times before they get to the year in which they are really interested. It's better for them (and everyone else, and certainly harmless) to just omit the non-event years. @Rillington: would you be inclined to revert your reversion? — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 03:44, 24 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I take the point that it is possible that notable events did happen in those years marked as having no events and as time goes by, new information becomes available and the number of no event entries become fewer. I have been producing timelines using this format for several years and no-one has mentioned any issues with the no event entry, or with any other formatting issue, until now so John, can we please just leave this article as it has been written? Rillington (talk) 13:36, 24 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]