Information:Succession Box

Overview

Succession boxes are template-created wiki-tables that serve as navigational aids in a wide variety of articles, mostly biographies. Placed at the bottom of their respective articles (or sections where applicable), they show the place of each article's subject in one or more well-defined chains of succession, naming in each line their predecessor in the left-hand cell, their title (and usually the dates wherein that title was held by the subject) in the middle cell, and their successor in the right-hand cell. Although succession boxes generally track titles held by people, they may also be used for anything that can be arranged in some order generally chronological, such as states, electoral constituencies, transit stations, buildings, ships, models of goods, such as cars and cameras, and creative works, such as books, films, and music albums.

Succession boxes can visibly improve an article in several ways. Firstly, they offer an overview of a person's career through the titles said person has held throughout their life. Secondly, they gather and categorize all the person's official titles in a form easy to understand, and in an order different from the one provided by the article itself. Thirdly, they offer dynastic information about monarchs, information which is usually not given in their articles.

There are also several advantages of succession boxes that are not limited to the individual articles: they offer readers the ability to follow a chain of succession, clicking their way from incumbent to incumbent, or to go straight to the article of the title, where they should be able to find a list of all the title's holders; also, they can better illustrate cases of a change in a title's name, joined offices having passed down from/to the same person, and cases where a person has held an office multiple times.

Standardization becomes more important when these features are considered, as succession lines of the same chain ought to be similar. However, it is also a matter of appearance; succession boxes should contribute to the positive overall image of an article rather than be simply tolerated for their functional benefits.

Further information

You can learn about the usage, template system, naming conventions and various other aspects of succession boxes and succession box editing in the following pages:

• Documentation: Information about the code and templates behind succession boxes and instructions about their correct use, all complete with examples.
  • Cheatsheet: A handy guide of succession templates and their parameters.
• Guidelines: A page giving general instructions about the content of succession boxes and its format, as well as the categorisation of the various titles and offices under headers and their correct order within these headers.
• Templates: A full list of all succession templates, both those endorsed by Succession Box Standardization and those that are not—the latter are in the process of their removal from articles and their subsequent deletion, and this page serves as a record of this procedure.

These pages can also be accessed from the navigation template at the top.