Yeah, so I've tried to do a lot of digging (including making the patch notes page), but despite a lot of really great feedback from people I'm not too much farther along.
Here's what we know:
- Nilbog will be doing monthly patches, and there will definitely be items/spells/mobs introduced between the wiki "eras"
- At the same time, in general when a new zone is introduced (which is typically when an era starts) new mobs/items/spells for that zone are introduced at the same time
On a practical level, what we want to achieve is ... let's say I hear about a cool "Magic Spoon" item, and I want to know if it's on Green yet. If the spoon's wiki page says it's from the Warrens era, or if you see the spoon listed on some other wiki page with a small blue "Warrens" next to it, the wiki has done it's job: you know the spoon will be on Green when Green hits The Warrens Era.
Regardless of what happens with the monthly patches, I think this (era-based) approach to adding timeline information to the wiki will be the right answer for most content.
I bolded that because if you want to help improve the wiki, I truly believe the right thing to do now is check
http://wiki.project1999.com/Category:Era_Templates and then use those everywhere that makes sense. No matter what happens the wiki is not abandoning eras, so adding these templates
will be helpful.
On that quest page, I think it'd be awesome if someone would add an "Era" column , and then used the "Short" templates (eg. "{{Velious Short}}") to mark which quests belong in which era. In the future I plan to make a template that is an improved version of the checkboxes you see on the class spell lists: once that's ready it will "just work" on any page where people have added the right templates (or at least that's the dream).
But all that still leaves the big question: "but what if the spoon is added
2 months into The Warrens Era?"
To solve that I think we'll likely want a new set of "patch templates", like the era ones, except that you could say "{{Patch 5}}" or "{{Patch September 2000}}". We might even add some kind of filtering template to go with them also ... but I really want to see how Nilbog actually does a couple releases first before I commit to (for instance) "Patch 5" vs. "Patch September 2000" vs. "Patch 09/2000".
Finally, there's one interesting/specific exception to all of the above. Plane of Sky came out in January of 2000, then Paineel came out in February. All other eras are at least three months (see
http://wiki.project1999.com/Timeline), so it seems odd for the "Plane of Sky Era" to be only one month. But, since both will involve large chunks of new content, maybe it makes sense to have eras for both?
Complicating matters further, according to the staff there's a chance that patch will already be in (unclassically) when Green starts ... so again I'm taking a wait and see approach.