While I understand that this issue has been visited more than once before, and that some may be irritated with digging it back up, but I feel that the indecisiveness regarding whether to favor either AD or CE on Wikipedia needs to end. Or, at the very least, I think we need to form a compromise that would dictate the use of one era notation for certain topics only (ex. Common Era for non-Christian religion-related articles), and the other notation elsewhere. The current recommendation—to use whichever notation you'd like as long as you are consistent within an article and do not arbitrarily change from one notation to another—isn't working. There are a couple of problems with it that I'm coming across quite a bit lately:
- As seen with this diff, editors will often make a contribution using the B/CE notation when the article they are editing uses the BC/AD notation throughout. Often, these edits are not caught or reverted and we end up having an article with inconsistent era notations. This could easily confuse the average reader who might be unfamiliar with the Common Era notation, and who might then understandably assume that 500 AD and 500 CE do not indicate the same year, since they are both being used inconsistently without explanation in the same article.
- Needless edit wars over which notation to use, as well as completely arbitrary conversion of random articles from BCE to BC or vice versa that may go unnoticed for months. Here are just some recent example diffs where I was reverting arbitrary era notation changes and then informing the user about the WP:ERA guideline:
- Blombos Cave — original edit, my reversion, second edit 2 days later, my second reversion
- List of solar eclipses for [X] century BC — 1st c., 2nd c., 3rd c.... 20th c.
- Notifications to users — [1], [2]
- Ugly compromises, as with Jesus, where both notations are used simultaneously at each instance to alleviate constant edit warring over which to use. An argument could be made that the use of both notations in Jesus helps to educate readers about the CE notation, but it's more cluttered and confusing than anything else.
I'm hoping to gather some responses and comments about these issues, and perhaps we would be able to flesh out our thoughts on what type of solution we want to go ahead with, if any.
My proposed solutions would be: (1) AD/BC ubiquitously; (2) CE/BCE ubiquitously (this would require moving all BC year articles, ex. 1 BC, 1st century BC); or (3) One notation for specifically outlined articles, and the other notation for the remainder of articles. Thank you for reading and replying. — CIS (talk | stalk) 16:09, 5 November 2010 (UTC)