Wikipedia:Eras

This is a failed proposal.

Consensus for its implementation was not established within a reasonable period of time. If you want to revive discussion, please use the talk page or initiate a thread at the village pump.

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February 2006

Please discuss this on the talk page first as the way to move forward with this proposal has not yet been agreed upon. A vote will only be held if it is clear that it may help clarify consensus. We are currently in an information gathering phase, not a voting phase.

This is a proposed amendment to the Eras section of Manual of Style (dates and numbers). It is an attempt to avoid future revert wars regarding the disputed use of BC/AD or BCE/CE.

Necessity[edit]

In August, 2005, a compromise proposal was presented to the community, and failed to achieve consensus.

BC/AD versus BCE/CE reading list[edit]

Please feel free to add sources - neutral or POV - to this list. Please comment on sources rather than removing them. This section is to help acquaint readers with the controversy, so we should include sources biased in both directions as well as neutral sources - for a panoramic view.

Common Era at Wikipedia
- This one's a bit messy, especially when it gets down to the arguments. -GTBacchus^(talk) 06:47, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The 'Common Era' at h2g2
The use of "CE" and "BCE" to identify dates - from Religioustolerance.org
- This essay definitely takes a side, but for that side, it lays out the arguments quite clearly, IMO. -GTBacchus^(talk) 06:47, 22 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Concurrent technical proposal[edit]

There is a proposal to implement a technical solution by wikifying all dates and allowing users to select in their preferences whether Augustus lived (63 BC – AD 14) or (63 BCE - 14 CE), and possibly other choices as well. (Chinese? Hindu? Muslim? Hebrew? Mayan? ISO 8601?) Please see this project page and its talk page for details or to help out.

Independence of this proposal from technical proposal[edit]

Whether or not this proposal is adopted, the technical solution seems to have some support, and is being pursued independently.

Even if the technical proposal is agreed to and implemented, it does not resolve the issue of how dates will look to non-registered users, or how they will look by default to new registered users, and this is, in many ways, the most public face of Wikipedia, so the technical fix, although it would quell edit warring to a large extent, does not make this proposal irrelevant or unnecessary. Therefore, the two are being pursued independently, and simultaneously.

Policy in question[edit]

The following is taken from Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Eras.

Both the BCE/CE era names and the BC/AD era names are acceptable, but be consistent within an article. Normally you should use plain numbers for years in the Common Era, but when events span the start of the Common Era, use AD or CE for the date at the end of the range (note that AD precedes the date and CE follows it). For example, [[1 BC]]–[[1|AD 1]] or [[1 BCE]]–[[1|1 CE]].

In articles about prehistory, if you use BP (before present) or MYA (million years ago), expand these abbreviations when you first use them, as most readers will be unfamiliar with them.

Should this policy be approved the first paragraph above would have a paragraph added to it to clarify the guideline regarding eras.

Similar policies[edit]

The controversy over eras is similar in some ways (and dissimilar in others) to the debates between spelling choices (primarily between British English and American English), which are addressed in detail in MoS, here and here.

Straw poll[edit]

We held a straw poll on options, beginning in December 2005. If you wish, you may still contribute to the poll at Wikipedia:Eras/Straw poll.