I have started this page by creating it and filling out the table for 1973. I leave it to others to do the work for other years. I have not hyperlinked anything. If the table is ever complete, perhaps the artist should only be hyperlinked for his or her first appearance in the table. I am uncertain about hyperlinking the cover subjects and so didn't do it now.
Just a little about type of illustration:
- Photograph - single photograph
- Photo montage - more than one photograph arrayed together to form an illustration
- Photo illustration - use of a special effect with a photograph (see 12/1/73 for an example) [1]
- Text graphic - an illustration that's nothing but text
- Illustration - anything else
It would also be interesting to have summary statistics of the most famous illustrators with the number of covers, first and last appearances, etc.Bellczar 18:58, 3 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
I have broken the single long table into sections by decade (1953-1959, 1960-1969, etc.) for better usability. Even with this new format the tables seem too long to me, and as the text editor notes, the page is currently too long. One solution would be to break the list into subpages by decade and have a section for each year within each subpage. A big change like that should be preceded by consensus, and I'm not sure it even makes sense at this point, given that many of those subpages would be essentially blank. Other ideas are welcome. Baileypalblue (talk) 20:37, 22 July 2008 (UTC)Reply
- I have no problem with what you have done by decade, but like the ability you have created to sort the table of an entire decade. Wouldn't this functionality be lost if you added a section by year? The section by year seems superfluous when they are in chronological order to begin with. I think it should be a higher priority to complete the table.Bellczar (talk) 08:28, 30 July 2008 (UTC)Reply
- Yes, sorting would be affected; you could still sort within each year, but presumably that would be less useful. I also think the page is more conducive to outside input this way. My primary concern is the page length; if the page is at 86K now, with less than 10% complete, then it will be huge when the tables become more complete. The page length guidelines suggest that articles should be divided at 100K, so it may not be necessary to do anything now; but it's something to think about. Baileypalblue (talk) 06:06, 1 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
- The article is now (last time I checked) at or near 100K in size, so it's a good idea to split it up by decade (1950s, 1960s, etc.). Post-separation, splitting it up by year doesn't sound like a bad idea, though the table sorting does leave that into question. This particular article can still serve as a portal for each article, working in the same way a disambiguation article does now.Darrel M (talk) 14:34, 12 July 2009 (UTC)Reply
Since as of this posting the size of this article is now at 204 kilobytes (more than double the recommended KB limit for an article), since the amount of cover entries growing, and with the start of a new decade upcoming, it seems like now is the good time to proceed with splitting up this article by decade. Of course, this main article will remain in existence, but it will now serve as a portal to the different decades (1950s, 1960s, etc.). Though I cannot guarantee it, I will also see if this talk section can be copied over to the new articles' talk sections. Darrel M (talk) 22:39, 16 October 2009 (UTC)Reply