Extension:EasyTimeline

As the saying goes: a picture often tells more than a thousand words. This is certainly true for graphical timelines. A detailed listing of events and dates in tabular form may offer the reader a lot of specifics, but may fail to provide an overview, a grand perspective.

From June 1 2004 there is a wiki way to compose graphical time charts offline.

Syntax description at MediaWiki User's Guide: EasyTimeline Syntax.

You can also use this tool outside Wikipedia, see the EasyTimeline project site.

Charts examples
Two simple examples of what is possible. For a much more extensive example (admittedly very crowded) see en:Template:Timeline WW II - Pacific Theatre

Code example
Just to show you that the script syntax is reasonably intuitive: here is the script for the image to the left: Soviet Leaders.


 * 1) All measures all in pixels

ImageSize = width:160 height:550 PlotArea  = width: 25 height:530 left:50 bottom:10 AlignBars = justify

DateFormat = yyyy Period    = from:1919 till:1991 TimeAxis  = orientation:vertical ScaleMajor = unit:year increment:5 start:1920


 * 1) there is no automatic collision detection,
 * 2) so shift texts up or down manually to avoid overlap

Define $dx = 25 # shift text to right side of bar

PlotData= bar:Leaders color:red width:25 mark:(line,white) align:left fontsize:S

from:start till:1922 shift:($dx,15)  text:Vladimir~Ilyich~Lenin from:1922 till:1953 shift:($dx,5)    text:Josef~Stalin from:1953 till:1964 shift:($dx,5)    text:Nikita~Khrushchev from:1964 till:1982 shift:($dx,5)    text:Leonid~Brezhnev from:1982 till:1984 shift:($dx,-12)  text:Yuri~Andropov from:1984 till:1985 shift:($dx,4)    text:Konstantin~Chernenko fontsize:XS from:1985 till:end  shift:($dx,10)   text:Mikhail~Gorbachev

Double and single brackets can be used like on wikipedia, language prefix is possible, e.g. more about foo. Single brackets for external links are also supported.

Request
Please add a link for any timeline (or at least any category page) to this subpage. This will make it easier to check them, see what does work and what could be improved or simplified, either in that specific timeline or in the syntax. It also allows a quick survey after a new version of EasyTimeline has been released. It provides an overview which timelines are available for migration to other Wikipedias.

Also I would like to propose the following:
 * Put each timeline on a separate Template page: this makes it easier to edit, faster to preview, possible to include it in several pages
 * Add Category:Timeline to that page for quick indexing: this will also make it easier to check timelines after a software upgrade.

Great Timelines Elsewhere
Here are two great sites that may serve as inspiration, it would be very easy to recreate most of those timelines verbatim and with roughly similar layout with EasyTimeline (not yet with images but that may change), but I'm afraid that would be 'not done'.


 * Hyperhistory (e.g. click on button 'people' left, then on 'special lifelines', right.
 * I hope we will have a set like this in a years time (click on full size image for any map), possibly even with images. The main effort will be to gather all info without snatching everything from here (most of these maps are based exclusively on data from Brittanica).

Unicode
EasyTimeline does not yet support unicode. This will be added later. So better not use it on unicode enabled Wikipedias yet.

Support
Feel free to ask Erik Zachte (the author of EasyTime) for help or advice.