User:Sphilbrick/sandbox for latest project

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

While foolish consistency can be overkill, there is value in consistent presentation of virtually identical material.

The various articles on sports conferences almost all have a timeline, indicating the membership over time. There is some measure of consistency—virtually all use the Easy Timeline feature, all use annual periods, all have some color coding to indicate various classes of members, almost all have the same section heading, all use the same fonts.

However, there are major inconsistencies. Colors do not always mean the same thing from conference to conference. A team in yellow in the Big East means one thing, in the SEC it is used for two different categories, while in the WAC, it means something else. Most of the table sizes are the same, but some are not. Most of the bar sizes are the same, but some are not.

There may be valid reasons for some departures from a standard, but in most cases, I think the first person working on a conference made some choices, reasonable in the context of the single conference, but now generating inconsistencies across Wikipedia.

To see what I mean,check out Conference timelines as is. (The sections are collapsible, if you want to see some, but not others.)

I propose proceeding in two steps:

Consensus that consistent presentation of timelines is a valid goal
Specific discussion and consensus on each aspect of the graphic

If we can generally agree on the first point, then we can discuss a number of attributes of the graphic (illustrative, not exhaustive):

Overall size of the graphic
Size of bars
Whether a title should be included
Color scheme for categories of teams
How a legend (when needed) should be presented

At the moment Conference timelines proposed is in progress, I've made size changes to make them all the same, and finished with colors; I suggest that as we discuss options, changes are made to that page, and only if we reach an overall consensus that the changes are an improvement, would we then replace the existing time lines with the proposed.