What the colours mean, why some things are collapsed, and how to tell a fact from an opinion on any page here.
This site has a small number of conventions and they are used everywhere. Once you know them you can read any page in about half the time.
Every page is written for two people at once
The person who has seen nothing and the person who has seen everything are reading the same page, and the layers exist so that neither has to be sacrificed for the other.
The one sentence at the top is for somebody who knows nothing. No jargon, no names they have not met. If you read only that, you should come away with a correct impression rather than a vague one.
The body assumes curiosity, not knowledge.
A collapsed grey block is depth. Production history, continuity problems, retcons, a date that contradicts another date. Nothing you need is ever hidden in one; they are for the reader who came for exactly that.
A collapsed red block is a spoiler, and it says which title it spoils. That is a different promise from the grey ones: it hides what happens, not how deep the page goes.
Colour is a classification, not decoration
Every entry takes a colour from what it belongs to. A saga owns a colour and a franchise owns its own within it, so a list running across the years arrives already sorted by eye.
One colour means something on its own: amber is always the state of having watched something.
The badges on a row
A row in the timeline tells you, in order: the year, whether it is out yet, what kind of thing it is, how many episodes, how long, which franchise, which Earth if it is not the usual one, and when the story is set.
A row that says Series and then a runtime is telling you the length of one episode. The hours in the tally use the whole thing.
Everything has a source, and the exceptions say so
The bottom of every entry lists what it was written from and the day somebody opened it. Where two sources disagree, both are recorded and the disagreement is explained in a detail block rather than being settled quietly.
Where a figure could not be sourced, the field is empty and the page says why. That is deliberate: a visible gap is worth more than a plausible guess.