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I want Wikipedia to accept a general policy that BC and AD represent a Christian Point of View and should be used only when they are appropriate, that is, in the context of expressing or providing an account of a Christian point of view. In other contexts, I argue that they violate our NPOV policy and we should use BCE and CE instead. See Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/BCE-CE Debate for the detailed proposal. Slrubenstein | Talk 22:33, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
The current Manual of Style is a compromise between people who believe BC and AD prop up a Christian POV and people who believe that BCE and CE are politically correct nonsense that should not be tolerated. You're not going to get general agreement with either extreme of this continuum. However, there may be room for you to suggest a better compromise. Gdr 08:23, 2005 May 16 (UTC)
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. BC and AD are easily understood. So are BCE and CE. BCE and CE are more scholarly, but in Wikipedia there is considerable variation from article to article in the "level" of writing.
Whatever problem AD, has, BCE and CE seem to me to have the same problem. I mean, the C stands for something, and don't bother to tell me that it stands for "common," because... well... even if it did, it's not the "common" epoch except in parts of the world whose cultural tradition is, uh, Christian.
We live with Greenwich Mean Time, the Gregorian calendar, terms such as "Western civilization," and a host of terms that carry cultural baggage if you think about their origin and history, but which are now are just names that no longer carry any particular cultural baggage with them.
How many people who understand the term "AD" can actually tell you that it stands for "Anno Domini" or that "Anno Domini" means "year of our Lord?" I'll bet it's less than 25%.
It just doesn't matter. Like US/British usage, usage should be consistent within one article, and should not be changed once the article has reached a respectable state of completion. There's no need to run around changing them wholesale. Dpbsmith (talk) 16:01, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
See a newer discussion of this on a subpage here, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Eras.
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes) says that en dashes indicate duration, and hyphens are for hyphen purposes. It says nothing about hyphens being acceptable in b/d dates - but it does say that en dashes should be used for those. This manual, however, says that hyphens or en dashes are acceptable. The purpose of a manual of style is to encourage consistency, and en dashes are more generally accepted for the purpose - so shouldn't this manual specify en dashes only (and not hyphens) in b/d dates? Neonumbers 09:56, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for the responses, we'll just leave it to MediaWiki 1.5 then. Neonumbers 09:47, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
Comments are invited on the following issue. It was raised on User_talk:Bobblewik#units_of_volume page. Feel free to read that page for context. The discussion has been moved here to get opinions from a wide range of people with an interest. (If you can improve the format of how I have quoted it, that would be welcome too). Bobblewik (talk) 13:47, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
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Well, a linked " billion m³" would certainly be an improvement over "billion m³". However, billion is highly misleading for most non-native English speakers — so misleading in fact that I'm afraid a simple link like the one above will be ignored by many. It is fairly common even for journalists of reputable newspapers to fall into that trap (and I have written the letters to the editor to prove that). For a good reason, the Manual of Style (dates and numbers) states "In different English dialects, billion may be 109, as in the U.S., or 1012, as is traditional in Britain. Try to avoid these names altogether and instead use scientific notation, or at the very least explain your usage at its first occurrence in an article.". So if there is a consensus on the use of billion, it is to get rid of it. Rl 18:01, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
When writing geology articles I always use 'thousand million' instead of billion. So if something happened 1.2 billion years ago I'd write that it occurred 1200 million years ago. This is very common in geology since it keeps things consistant and easy to follow when in the next paragraph you describe something that happened 800 million years ago. Although that would sound odd when giving a dollar figure in a U.S. related article (20,000 million dollars anybody?). In those cases I would write something like 20 billion dollars (20×109). mav 22:54, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Is there any inherent advantage to using spaces as number separators rather than commas? For example 3 000 000 rather than 3,000,000. My objection to using spaces in this way is that they don't read well with speech synthesizers, but I thought I would ask here first before making any of these changes to wikipedia articles. Graham 04:50, 27 May 2005 (UTC)
I would like to voice my concern about the use of spaces as number separators. I think this usage can improve clarity in a table of numbers, but when numbers are not in tables, the number ends up looking disconnected or confusing.
Perhaps more importantly, blanks within a number allow the number to be split across lines for word-wrapping, which does not happen when using commas (at least using Firefox 1.0.4 -- perhaps someone who knows more about CSS/HTML could comment on this). I'd prefer that the number be kept together as a unit.
U+202F
— NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE character. This page covers the issue pretty well:
Digit Grouping Separator —
Delicates 17:23, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)My guess is that if you started using spaces as number separators you would find other editors come in later and add commas. Also, I don't think the Chicago Manual of Style is a good guide to use for WP as WP is an international encyclopaedia, whereas Chicago is peculiarly American. Kind regards, jguk 22:32, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The style article doesn't specify how commas are to be used with dates. American usage places commas before and after the year, e.g., the May 2 2004, proposal called for sweeping changes. Is there a Wikipedia consensus on this?
Also, I couldn't find anything on commas with place-names. Again, in American usage commas set off individual elements in place-names, e.g., Washington, D.C., is the capital of the United States. However, closing commas are not used with two-digit postal code abbreviations, e.g., Los Angeles, CA is home to the U.S. movie industry. — Wayward 02:44, May 28, 2005 (UTC)
- I don't know of any [BrE] style-guide that would not recommend the second comma in those examples. What we are dealing with is, after all, a pair of parenthetical commas. The second comma ought not to be omitted any more than a closing parenthesis. . . In recent years I have noticed that the second comma is, in fact, often omitted, albeit inconsistently, in newspaper-level writing. (I'm thinking particularly of The Irish Times, but the observation is by no means limited to that estimable organ of public information.) The omission is irritating and incorrect. . . — Wayward 22:18, May 30, 2005 (UTC)
I've just noticed this discussion, but DES has surely mentioned the key point with regard to dates (unless I've missed something); take the following examples:
Does anyone see those differently (apart from in the edit screen)?
The link does work for date preferences, it just changes the sensitivity to commas. By removing the links, you're making the dates show up wrongly for many people. As for linking all the years, there have been many debates on this, and I've argued as you do, but we're in a minority. Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης) 18:35, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
(I'm very surprised, incidentally, that jguk wouldn't have placed a comma after "again" — that looks really peculiar to me.) Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης) 08:21, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 15 | ← | Archive 17 | Archive 18 | Archive 19 | Archive 20 | Archive 21 | → | Archive 25 |
I want Wikipedia to accept a general policy that BC and AD represent a Christian Point of View and should be used only when they are appropriate, that is, in the context of expressing or providing an account of a Christian point of view. In other contexts, I argue that they violate our NPOV policy and we should use BCE and CE instead. See Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/BCE-CE Debate for the detailed proposal. Slrubenstein | Talk 22:33, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
The current Manual of Style is a compromise between people who believe BC and AD prop up a Christian POV and people who believe that BCE and CE are politically correct nonsense that should not be tolerated. You're not going to get general agreement with either extreme of this continuum. However, there may be room for you to suggest a better compromise. Gdr 08:23, 2005 May 16 (UTC)
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. BC and AD are easily understood. So are BCE and CE. BCE and CE are more scholarly, but in Wikipedia there is considerable variation from article to article in the "level" of writing.
Whatever problem AD, has, BCE and CE seem to me to have the same problem. I mean, the C stands for something, and don't bother to tell me that it stands for "common," because... well... even if it did, it's not the "common" epoch except in parts of the world whose cultural tradition is, uh, Christian.
We live with Greenwich Mean Time, the Gregorian calendar, terms such as "Western civilization," and a host of terms that carry cultural baggage if you think about their origin and history, but which are now are just names that no longer carry any particular cultural baggage with them.
How many people who understand the term "AD" can actually tell you that it stands for "Anno Domini" or that "Anno Domini" means "year of our Lord?" I'll bet it's less than 25%.
It just doesn't matter. Like US/British usage, usage should be consistent within one article, and should not be changed once the article has reached a respectable state of completion. There's no need to run around changing them wholesale. Dpbsmith (talk) 16:01, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
See a newer discussion of this on a subpage here, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Eras.
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes) says that en dashes indicate duration, and hyphens are for hyphen purposes. It says nothing about hyphens being acceptable in b/d dates - but it does say that en dashes should be used for those. This manual, however, says that hyphens or en dashes are acceptable. The purpose of a manual of style is to encourage consistency, and en dashes are more generally accepted for the purpose - so shouldn't this manual specify en dashes only (and not hyphens) in b/d dates? Neonumbers 09:56, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for the responses, we'll just leave it to MediaWiki 1.5 then. Neonumbers 09:47, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
Comments are invited on the following issue. It was raised on User_talk:Bobblewik#units_of_volume page. Feel free to read that page for context. The discussion has been moved here to get opinions from a wide range of people with an interest. (If you can improve the format of how I have quoted it, that would be welcome too). Bobblewik (talk) 13:47, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
**************************************************************
**************************************************************
Well, a linked " billion m³" would certainly be an improvement over "billion m³". However, billion is highly misleading for most non-native English speakers — so misleading in fact that I'm afraid a simple link like the one above will be ignored by many. It is fairly common even for journalists of reputable newspapers to fall into that trap (and I have written the letters to the editor to prove that). For a good reason, the Manual of Style (dates and numbers) states "In different English dialects, billion may be 109, as in the U.S., or 1012, as is traditional in Britain. Try to avoid these names altogether and instead use scientific notation, or at the very least explain your usage at its first occurrence in an article.". So if there is a consensus on the use of billion, it is to get rid of it. Rl 18:01, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
When writing geology articles I always use 'thousand million' instead of billion. So if something happened 1.2 billion years ago I'd write that it occurred 1200 million years ago. This is very common in geology since it keeps things consistant and easy to follow when in the next paragraph you describe something that happened 800 million years ago. Although that would sound odd when giving a dollar figure in a U.S. related article (20,000 million dollars anybody?). In those cases I would write something like 20 billion dollars (20×109). mav 22:54, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Is there any inherent advantage to using spaces as number separators rather than commas? For example 3 000 000 rather than 3,000,000. My objection to using spaces in this way is that they don't read well with speech synthesizers, but I thought I would ask here first before making any of these changes to wikipedia articles. Graham 04:50, 27 May 2005 (UTC)
I would like to voice my concern about the use of spaces as number separators. I think this usage can improve clarity in a table of numbers, but when numbers are not in tables, the number ends up looking disconnected or confusing.
Perhaps more importantly, blanks within a number allow the number to be split across lines for word-wrapping, which does not happen when using commas (at least using Firefox 1.0.4 -- perhaps someone who knows more about CSS/HTML could comment on this). I'd prefer that the number be kept together as a unit.
U+202F
— NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE character. This page covers the issue pretty well:
Digit Grouping Separator —
Delicates 17:23, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)My guess is that if you started using spaces as number separators you would find other editors come in later and add commas. Also, I don't think the Chicago Manual of Style is a good guide to use for WP as WP is an international encyclopaedia, whereas Chicago is peculiarly American. Kind regards, jguk 22:32, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The style article doesn't specify how commas are to be used with dates. American usage places commas before and after the year, e.g., the May 2 2004, proposal called for sweeping changes. Is there a Wikipedia consensus on this?
Also, I couldn't find anything on commas with place-names. Again, in American usage commas set off individual elements in place-names, e.g., Washington, D.C., is the capital of the United States. However, closing commas are not used with two-digit postal code abbreviations, e.g., Los Angeles, CA is home to the U.S. movie industry. — Wayward 02:44, May 28, 2005 (UTC)
- I don't know of any [BrE] style-guide that would not recommend the second comma in those examples. What we are dealing with is, after all, a pair of parenthetical commas. The second comma ought not to be omitted any more than a closing parenthesis. . . In recent years I have noticed that the second comma is, in fact, often omitted, albeit inconsistently, in newspaper-level writing. (I'm thinking particularly of The Irish Times, but the observation is by no means limited to that estimable organ of public information.) The omission is irritating and incorrect. . . — Wayward 22:18, May 30, 2005 (UTC)
I've just noticed this discussion, but DES has surely mentioned the key point with regard to dates (unless I've missed something); take the following examples:
Does anyone see those differently (apart from in the edit screen)?
The link does work for date preferences, it just changes the sensitivity to commas. By removing the links, you're making the dates show up wrongly for many people. As for linking all the years, there have been many debates on this, and I've argued as you do, but we're in a minority. Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης) 18:35, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
(I'm very surprised, incidentally, that jguk wouldn't have placed a comma after "again" — that looks really peculiar to me.) Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης) 08:21, 31 May 2005 (UTC)