Wikipedia talk:User preferences for BCE/CE notation

message: The proposal says: This page sets out the specifications of what would need to be programmed into the software. It assumes that, to work, all dates would need to be wikified - which here means that some of the text appears in double square brackets. Currently, not all dates are wikified. If this specification is adopted, the MoS will change to make clear that all dates should be wikified so the specification works.
This idea alone would lead me to oppose the proposal. i think that far too many years (as opposed to full dates) are now wiki-linked to little or no benefit, and I typically remove all such links when I encounter them in editing, which the MoS currently supports. If we are going to request a new feature, then that feature should include a way to indicate dates for the software to parse and apply preferece settings to oates other than standard wiki-linking. Most dates are now linked only so preferences can be applied, not because the link adds any value. Many years are linked in imitation of the style for hadling full dates, even though this is quite pointless. If there was new syntax for indicating dates and parts of dates, preferences could be acted on even in the avsence of a wiki-link. 
Furthermore, the proposal assumes that an era indication ought to follow (or be assocaited with) all years.  When a topic is talking about the 2004 US Election (for example), there is no reason for any era indication. Only when the topic makes the year less than clear without an era indication should one be present, and the the new date syntax should allow the editor to specify whether or not an era indiaction is desired, with the default being NO, just as it is currently. DES 21:18, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Wikifying

message: There is no need to favor either side of the controversy, either in the "situation" section or the default (when no preference is chosen). Maurreen (talk) 06:09, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: No need to favor either side

message: Hi.  I bear tidings from Wikipedia talk:Eras - it's back, because another group of Wikipedians got tired of the BC/AD versus BCE/CE edit warring.  I'm therefore atttempting to restart this talk page and see if we can get this proposal off the ground, after all.  It looks like some good work was being done here.  Do the rest of those tables on the project page just need filling out, and then we try to get a developer's atention, or what else remains to be done here? -GTBacchus(talk) 23:49, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  This situation hasn't gone away 

message: ;Comments
A problem here is that not all years are wikified, and lots of people are in the habit of un-wikifying years that aren't substantially important to the article.  Also, how do we address the fact that, for years in the Common Era, the abbreviation is often suppressed, whether AD or CE? -GTBacchus(talk) 02:19, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: see my comment above. Both cases (wikified and unwikified CE dates) have to be addressed. We do not want to auto-wikify all dates. dab (ᛏ) 11:01, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

text: --William Allen Simpson 18:59, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: no, I don't think it is acceptable to have all BCE dates and all eras wikified. Whether a particular string is wikified depends on the context in the article, and shouldn't be prescribed by formal considerations. something like  can only work with a MediaWiki update, while  could work right away. {Era|year|month|day} could be a good approach at least for cases where you want the entire date wikified, which is not infrequent. Let's not discuss things like Hebrew or Chinese calendars; blindly converting to these could have strange effects. "Iceland was Christianized in {Era|1000}, under the impression of the impending millennium" will be incomprehensible in the Chinese calendar. The year of foreign calendars can only be calculated from the full date ({Era|year|month|day}, in the case of the Islamic calendar, not even then with complete accuracy), it is hopeless to convert {Era|1844} into AH, you will get three possible results. dab (ᛏ) 17:36, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Wikified dates

message: I recently came across this proposal after trying (without knowing the extent of previous debates) to get some work done on the subject of Common Era notation vs BC/AD. It sounds like a great idea to me, and the only thing that seems to have enough support to actually reach concensus. It's been a few months since anyone posted here, however, and I am just wondering if there's anything going on with the implimentation of this proposal. Did discussion move elsewhere? Or was it abandoned? As this topic is apparently extremely divisive within the Wikipedia community, it seems like it would be in everybody's best interest to get going with this; otherwise, more discussions (that often turn quite sour) will keep cropping up because more and more Wikipedians will decide to start them going, as I did, without realizing that such debates had already cause a lot of electronic blood shed. Romarin 20:59, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Can we get this going again?