One of the ongoing projects that I have been working on is, for lack of a better name, "Months of the 1900s". The first article in the series was January 1900. The concept is not new, as we have had pages about months since at least 2002 (January 2002) The objective is to improve upon the articles about individual years by chronicling the events of a particular month with citations to reliable, verifiable and independent sources. Eventually, every day from Monday, January 1, 1900, to Friday, December 31, 1999, will be a section of an article. The format that I follow, and try to stay consistent with, is simple:
Citations, citations, citations! Any event should have a citation to a source that can be verified. With the availability of Google news archive and Google books, images of the printed word are now just as within reach as websites and blogs once were. Some newspapers have a greater image presence; hence wire service reports are frequently linked to dailies from New York, Pittsburgh, Miami, Milwaukee, Sydney and Glasgow. Contemporary press accounts provide a more reliable confirmation of the date of an event than books, which are more susceptible to typographical errors than most people realize [1], [2], [3].
Past tense is preferred. No serious encyclopedia was ever written in the present tense. It's not unusual in timelines to follow the format of newspaper headlines, such as "July 20, 1969- Man lands on the moon". It becomes very awkward, however, when one use present tense to write more than a few words ("He and Buzz Aldrin plant a flag. They return to Earth days later." etc. etc.) and one ventures into the land of nobody-actually-talked-that-way.
If you think it's routine, boring or insignificant, don't add it in. By the same token, think for a moment before removing a sourced entry simply because you don't like it. Ideally, each section of the article (i.e., each day of a month) should have something, including something more than a birth or death. Some days have had multiple significant events, while others are difficult to find anything of interest.
Illustrations are good, but follow these guidelines:
Make sure that the photo has the "not copyrighted" tag on it, or the GNU license.
If using a GNU licensed picture, check to see the attribution and mention that in a footnote within the caption.
Do not use photos tagged "fair use"; these are copyrighted pictures that have been limited to a single article within Wikipedia.
There is a lot of blank space in the section with the contents box, often occupied only by a calendar. Place photos on either side of that part of the page but avoid compressing the contents box. Within the narrative of the article (i.e., January 1, 19## to January 31, 19##, try to keep illustrations smaller (no more than 150px) and on the right side of the page in order to avoid sandwiching of text.
Experiment with editing when placing illustrations before saving the changes. Learn the procedures for using a photo, with the format File:(Picture name)"What you want to say in the caption to the photo. The command "thumb" is used to put a box around the photo to contain a caption (or simply to frame a photo without caption); "right" or "left" is used to dictate placement; "px" denotes the size of the illustration.
