Talk:AD 1/Archive 1

Archive 1

1

One might expect this to be an article about the number 1, but it's not. I suppose it's far too late to rename all the year pages to forms like 1 AD or 1 CE.

Or "Year X", although that might make it harder to link to years inside articles. --AV

It would probably be easier to just add a link to number 1 at the top of the Year 1 AD page.

I strongly agree, year names under 50, at least, should be in the format 1 AD or 1 CE. Nobody would ever say something happened in 1. You have to say 1 AD for clarity. --Sonjaaa 12:52, Sep 4, 2004 (UTC)

Before you go changing things, you might like to read Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) and the long debates on this subject in the multiple archives of the talk page in which the current convention for article names was agreed. Gdr 01:06, 2004 Oct 18 (UTC)

Actually, WP:YEARS clearly states the following, "Years are normally expressed in digits,..., unless the meaning would otherwise be unclear." This is certainly the case, it is far too confusing and ambiguous to redirect all positive numbers to their years instead of their numbers. However, I agree it is far too late to do anything so drastic, and besides, WikiProject:Years is obviously too lazy to want to do anything, anyhow. LutherVinci (talk) 21:24, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

WikiProject:Years is a project dedicated to improving all year-related articles on Wikipedia to Featured status. So obviously there is nothing to do with the number 1. Veyselperu (talk) 05:10, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

• I saw that Red Slash previously suggested moves such as 1 (number) → One but it would seem more sensible to me to move the year articles to titles such as 1 AD, 1 CE or 1 AD/CE. I don't know whether consensus has ever been reached as to a preferred terminology or whether an RfC would be desirable. 1, with great irony, is ambiguous.

0.999... is an article that is about a number. Preferably the same should apply to 1.

Curiously 0 is a disambiguation page. GregKaye 13:24, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Traditional dating is Jesus's birth to 1 BC, not AD 1

Dionysius decided that Jesus was born on xxv. December AUC DCCVIII. This is December 25, 1 BC in modern terminology. He was not born in 1 (of course), nor is this Dionysius' traditional date -- although I suppose that Dionysius would have calculated that Jesus was circumcised in 1 (barely, on January 1). - Toby 06:19 Mar 3, 2003 (UTC)

DCCLIII, surely?

Year 0

There is indeed no "year 0" in the Gregorian calendar, but there is a page called 0 (year), where this is explained. Why not link to it?? Aleph4 13:18, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The last thing you want to do is list it under "years" if it is not. - Tεxτurε 17:12, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Jesus' birth: April 4 AD

just a thought i feel that date 0f april 1 as is incorrect as many schollars now feel after studying records jesus was probably born around year 4 ad around about april not december december became the world wide date to coinside with the winter solctise for reasons that are not important with this article —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 212.219.189.60 (talk • contribs).

Consensus is not for 4 AD, but for 4 BC when King Herod died. April is derived from Luke 2:8. Shepherds would only be watching over their flock by night to protect newborn lambs, which are born in the spring. — Joe Kress 05:26, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

If the consensus for Christ's birth is 4 BC (which is what I have been taught in my university courses), then why does the article not reflect this? If no one objects, I will soon change it. Vincent Valentine||talk to me! 22:31, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

I object to removing the info about Christ's birth already in the article. It describes the opinion of the creater of the Anno Domini era, Dionysius Exiguus, which is why that info is in 1 AD. My comment about a 4 BC 'consensus' was too simplistic. Before Dionysius, the most popular year was 2 BC. The first to date Christ's birth to 4 BC was Kepler in De vero anno (1614). It was then popularized by Archbishop James Ussher in his chronology (1650) wherein he dated Creation to 4004 BC, exactly 4,000 years before Christ's birth. "Yet Another Eclipse for Herod" by John P. Pratt mentions a 'consensus' of 6–5 BC for Christ's birth before he gives his own solution. In short, there is no 'consensus'. — Joe Kress (talk) 04:33, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether or not there is an actual scholarly consensus. He is so important, if only as a historical figure, that I doubt it would do any harm at all to note in various year pages that "some scholars believe Jesus Christ was born this year, but others cite X, Y, and Z years, and scholarly consensus is ..." or alternately, "the most widely held opinions of scholars on his birth year are that he was born in A or B years..." Wikipedia does not have to decide -- and shouldn't decide if there is no consensus, and should report various views if they're significant. Make sense? Noroton (talk) 03:04, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Absolutely. — LlywelynII (talk) 01:41, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Why the year 1 rather than the number 1?

Certainly more poeple reference the number 1 than reference the year 1 -- shouldn't 1 go to the number, and 1 CE or something go to this page? -Quasipalm 20:50, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

When Wikipedia was begun, it was decided that if the name of any article was a pure number, that it would be the year because the year in a date was linked much more often than was just the mathematical number (most articles have a date, but few articles discuss mathematical numbers). Thus all mathematical numbers had to be disambiguated via 1 (number) for example. It is much too late to change this convention in Wikipedia. — Joe Kress 06:01, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

the problem here is so glaringly obvious to me that i would feel arrogant to assume i understand it -- could someone link me to the reasons that we are not changing this? for me, "it was decided & is too late" cannot be an acceptable answer, lest WIKI-pedia plans for a near-future extinction. shall we assemble a team to fix this, whatever it takes, or shall i add "WIKI-pedia declared archaic" to the predicted events section of 2009AD? Harlequence (talk) 17:43, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

No, of course not. Add "WIKI-pedia declared archaic" to 2012 or something, that would be much funnier. In all seriousness though, read the comments above this section. Apparently it was far too late to change the convention in October 2001 - it's now August 2010, so that should be something of an indicator that it won't be easy to rectify (though I don't see it as a "glaringly obvious" problem anyway). Let's be honest, most people don't care about the disambiguation of the number one, and of the few that do, 99% of them care about it for perhaps a few minutes every couple of years. I'm kidding, but in a nutshell, I think this is too difficult and time confusing to change, and I'm not convinced it even needs changing. Also, I doubt it will lead to the downfall of Wikipedia. But it could. Who knows? --Jatkins ^{(talk - contribs)} 15:32, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

You should raise this issue on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers), where you might be directed to a better place or to any previous discussion. — Joe Kress (talk) 20:19, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Aside from the needless bother, you're also quite mistaken. No one needs to review what the number one is: they notice their index finger before they finish typing the search query. Many people, however, look up years to discover what events occurred then or simultaneously with another event. —LlywelynII (talk) 01:39, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Please note that currently years are not linked from normal articles. See WP:YEARLINK. Only 88 articles link to 1 and many of them are errors (see [1]). I think that current article 1 should be moved to 1 (year) and later 1 redirected to 1 (disambiguation). As for the sentence No one needs to review what the number one is just note that 595 articles link to 1 (number). Doloco (talk) 21:18, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

Most of those links to 1 (number) are totally unnecessary, just as the links to the year were. And if you move 1 to 1 (year), what about 2? 10? 100? 2011? Powers ^T 16:32, 21 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes to 2, 10 and 100; no to 2011. Beyond about 999 CE (AD 999), the year starts becoming the primary usage. I think of "1945" wholly as the year (the number being secondary), but "945" much more as the number (with the year being secondary), and "45" is definitely the number (here the thought of the year doesn't even cross my mind: that would need CE or AD to be present). Double sharp (talk) 07:31, 25 June 2014 (UTC)

Christ's Birth

Maybe I'm being hopelessly biased here, but just an idea; should the birth of Christ be moved under the "Births" section? He is historically recognized as a person who was born, if not seen by everyone as the Christians do. DoomsDay349 23:19, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, He should be listed under births. It's silly to exclude him, however asterisked the date may be.

No, He shouldn't simply be moved there from the religious section if these pages typically have one. He's historically recognized as a person recognized by Christians in a religious way. —LlywelynII (talk) 01:30, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Death of Ain of Han

Your wiki-biography of Ain gives the date of his death in the year 1 BC - 0:31, 26 november 2007, A curious  — [Unsigned comment added by 83.165.56.67 (talk • contribs).]

There seems to be some question about his death. Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies and Mythmaking and Yueh-Fu: Popular Songs and Ballads of Early Imperial China says he reigned until AD 1. But Emperor Ai of Han and most other sources says he died 1 BC. His death is already listed at 1 BC. The authoritative Hsiao-ai, Emperor says he died August 15, 1 BC. On the strength of the latter, I'm removing his death. — Joe Kress (talk) 06:36, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Biased?

I've removed the part stating the birth of Jesus from the "Events" list since it's stated as fact. Religious events like that should be confined to the religious section. — Deftera (talk) 23:30, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

If there typically is a religious section, that's where it should go, certainly. — LlywelynII (talk) 01:31, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Popular understanding

Saying that 1 AD is the year that "according to popularly understanding" Jesus was born is not a citation of any scholars. It is a reflection of... popular understanding. Go out and ask members of the general public whether Jesus was born in 1 BC or 1 AD, and they'll mostly answer the latter (since it would seem logically impossible for him to be born "Before Christ"). - Jason A. Quest (talk) 20:39, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia requires verification of challenged statements, which you acknowledged when you used the {{fact}} template to add "citation needed" to one of my statements. Neither general knowledge nor truth is allowed in Wikipedia (if challenged) unless it has been published by a reliable source. The kind of general knowledge not needing a citation can be found in thousands of sources. But I doubt that any survey such as the one you describe has ever been conducted by any polling organization. Nevertheless, you might be able to find someone who argued in the same way you did. — Joe Kress (talk) 04:00, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

I was just trying to explain your misunderstanding of the literal meaning of what I wrote. - Jason A. Quest (talk) 10:52, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

It's also bad writing. "Popular understanding" doesn't need to be appended; the fact simply needs statement on its own. Further, popular understanding has little to do with it (they're reasoning backwards from the calendar, not using their own knowledge of Jesus' birth to validate its dating.) Discussing the dating's origin with Dionysius is good enough. -LlywelynII (talk) 01:35, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Buddhism in China

Removed erroneous, unsourced claim from article. Chinese Buddhism did not begin in the year 1 or even anywhere in the vicinity. There were Buddhists in China from at least the 2nd century BC. -LlywelynII (talk) 01:47, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

1 means The God (Allah) in Islam

In Islam, one of Allah's (The God's) names is Al Wahed, which means "The One" Veyselperu (talk) 12:36, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Ambiguity between numbers and dates

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

No consensus to move. Vegaswikian (talk) 18:25, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

1 → AD 1 – As it is quite clearly stated in the Wikipedia policy, the name of an article should be relevant to the primary topic of the contents. In other words, the title should be what most people would look for in order to find that article. This is most clearly seen in WP:TITLE#Deciding on an article, WP:Redirect, among others. "1" has very little to do with the contents or the primary topic. In fact, it is exactly what most people would look for in order to find 1 (number), not 1 AD. Furthermore, WP:MOSDATE#Year numbering system states in plain English that AD and CE should be used when the context would be ambiguous without it. "1" is ambiguous because it is normally associated with 1 (number); 1 AD (or, possibly, AD 1) would be more appropriate. For more information on how this issue has progressed, see the discussions on Talk:3#Number, Talk:1#1, and Wikipedia talk:YEARS#Ambiguity between numbers and dates. Thank you for your time and consideration.LutherVinci (talk) 22:59, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose. We have a consistent system in which 2011 is the present year, 2011 (number) ie the article or section on the corresponding number. Why muck with it? (To say as little as possible of the pointless controversy which would immediately break out over making this article 1 CE.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:52, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

  Consistency can still be maintained. All that is necessary is to rename the articles 1 through 1000 to AD 1 through AD 1000. Dates larger than AD 1000 can remain the same because those dates would not be ambiguous without "AD". LutherVinci (talk) 13:45, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

  Of course they would be ambiguous. We have articles on dates before 1000 BC; Sargon of Akade, Akhetaton, and Saul are all datable. We also have articles on numbers greater than 1000, like 1729 (number). Septentrionalis PMAnderson 03:01, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose. You have no support since the current format of the MOS has been set (2005), in any of those threads, other than one anon. Even if there were consensus, you would need to ensure that all links to 1 are moved before the articles are changed. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 00:32, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

  We are not arguing who is going to change the links, we are arguing whether to rename the article. I would love to get a consensus on WP:YEARS, (although it should be unnecessary, Wikipedia's policy is perfectly clear) but no one seemed to be objecting to my proposal. LutherVinci (talk) 13:45, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

  We need to establish a way of changing the links before the rename could be performed; otherwise we are damaging one aspect of Wikipedia (linking) to allegedly help another aspect of Wikipedia (naming). — Arthur Rubin (talk) 02:34, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose; should be "AD 1" or "1 CE". Powers ^T 11:42, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

  AD 1 it is. LutherVinci (talk) 13:45, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

  Neutral then. I see the point about common use, but the year 1000 seems like a rather arbitrary cutoff. Powers ^T 01:26, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

• Support per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, the number 1 is more primary than the year 1CE/1AD/1OS . Indeed all numbers 1-100 are primarily the number. Any year before AD500 is likely to refer to a number first, since the calendar did not start until AD525, when the number "525" was instituted as the current year. The year AD524 was actually recorded as Diocletian 247 in the Christian world. 65.93.15.213 (talk) 04:52, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

• Note: a link to this discussion has been posted on WT:WikiProject Years. — Favonian (talk) 12:22, 4 July 2011 (UTC)
• Note: a link to this discussion has been posted on WT:WikiProject Numbers and WT:WikiProject Mathematics. — 65.93.15.213 (talk) 04:30, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose. Certainly there's a good case for both points of view. I just don't think it's important enough to justify the trouble of renaming a whole lot of pages and fixing all the links. (Actually I don't think "1" is a good title for an article on either subject. Ideally we should have "1 (number)" and "1 (year)", with "1" being a redirect to a disambig page. But I don't think it's worth changing at this stage.) Jowa fan (talk) 05:14, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose. First, 1 AD is needlessly disruptive. I may think CE is patronizing, but some people don't. It ought to be 1 (year) if anything. Second, we have a consistent system of titling these articles. If you want to change that system, then you need to start an RfC that will change all the article titles, not just this one. Ozob (talk) 10:44, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

• Comment I wouldn't say the current system is consistent, for example we have 1 BC but not 1 AD. Not sure how one is disruptive but the other isn't. 1 and 1 (number) get about the same number of views and it's disruptive for the people trying to find 1 (number) to find themselves in 1 (year) instead. 1 (number) has more links to it than 1 (year) so one could argue the similarity in page views is due to this type of confusion. But I can see that trying to push this is like getting Americans to use the metric system, it may make sense but there is too much inertia for it happen.--RDBury (talk) 12:47, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose. Current convention is clear, well understood and has stood the test of time. Proposed convention is overly complex and the break/switch at 1000 AD is arbitrary. Gandalf61 (talk) 14:15, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
• Support I'd do for AD 1 to AD 99, since I don't usually think of single or double digit numbers as year dates. Not necessary for higher numbers. If you don't know that the Middle Ages were AD, this isn't going to help. Kauffner (talk) 14:10, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
• Oppose, mainly because if this move is successful I can see pointless argument about whether it should be AD 1 or 1 CE. I know that's a pretty weak argument, but the way I see it we have a system that has worked for years and there is no real need for change. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Jenks24 (talk) 06:20, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Redirect

I suggest that the numbers up to 256 (including 0) be redirect to the numbers, other numbers be redirect to the year. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.115.139.96 (talk) 06:17, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

Agree (though I think 999 would be a better cutoff). Double sharp (talk) 05:26, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Disagree, for two reasons: Consistency (which I consider important, but apparently some others do not), and it would break a number of templates and bots. If you, personally, would agree to maintain the templates and fix the bots, I would consider it plausible. However, for the discussion to be valid, you would need to tag all the appropriate talk pages, or have the discussion in WT:YEARS and WT:WikiProject Numbers. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 20:39, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Articles for ancient years

Are articles for individual ancient years useful?? Can anyone explain that they're very useful, and not just a remnant from an earlier time in Wikipedia history when years were always linked in articles?? Georgia guy (talk) 00:05, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Requested move 5 August 2016

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Procedural close – Please comment at RfC below. — JFG ^talk 08:28, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

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1 → 1 AD – The number is the primary topic for 1, not the year. Likewise move years from 2 to 99 to 2 AD and 99 AD. An alternative 1 (year) to 99 (year). Voortle (talk) 14:33, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

• Support all from 1 to 100 (the number 100 is still more likely to be searched for than the year). Plus, 100 would be a good "bright-line" point; anything above 100 but below 10,000 is going to be the AD year, whereas everything is the number. Red Slash 16:47, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support per nom and Red Slash. The common name 1 is the number, etc., is the number and not the year. Randy Kryn 17:35, 5 August 2016 AD (UTC)
• Shouldn't it be AD 1 though? —  AjaxSmack  22:51, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
• Move to 1 (year); forcing AD over CE notation is not permissible, per MOS:CE (and if we were going to pick one or the other it would be CE anyway, as religiously neutral).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:18, 7 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support moving all numbers from 1 to 100 with pattern 42 → 42 (year) and 42 (number) → 42. Beware of the incoming links, there may be lots of work involved. Policy pages will need alterations, starting with Wikipedia:Naming conventions (numbers and dates). Notifying this discussion on the relevant talk page there. Also, this suggestion should probably be formalized as an RfC and widely advertised to gather more input. — JFG ^talk 02:55, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support in principle. But there should be a wider RfC and it will entail a substantial amount of work as JFG says. Plantdrew (talk) 05:31, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
• WeakStrong (temporary?) technical oppose, While there appears to be consensus, I'm personally concerned what this will do to year templates/modules that depend on the current naming scheme to generate links, etc. (haven't looked into it myself) I agree with Plantdrew about a wider RfC that makes this more visible. I don't really have serious qualms if a closer decides to move the 99 or so pages, but if people start experiencing broken/incorrect links, please consider moving these pages back to "1", "2", etc. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 17:53, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

  Okay, as far as I understand (and correct me if I'm wrong), we will need to pass a new year param (like |year=1, |year=2, etc) to {{M1 year in topic}} and pass it through to {{M1YearInTopic (no calendar)}} to get the correct year. Also in that template, the call to {{Year in other calendars}} in that template needs to use |year= as well. {{Year nav}} generates links to years. If these pages are moved, the behavior for years 1–99 will need to be updated to generate direct links rather than links to [[1]], [[2]], etc. I suggest that these technical changes be implemented first before these moves, please. (Ping me if I should personally act on this) — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 18:06, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

@Andy M. Wang: Thanks for investigating. I think we should avoid large-impact changes such as forcing a new parameter when calling year-processing templates. It's much easier to modify the coding of such templates so they extract the numeric year from the page title in which they are embedded. And yes, we must do that before the move; good time to rewrite some of this stuff in Lua for clarity and maintainability. — JFG ^talk 18:59, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

@JFG: As I see it (or believe the change to be), the param would be necessary only on the 99 pages, and the template changes have no effect on any current pages. Extraction is possible, but I don't think it's as clean. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 20:09, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

I forgot to mention {{Year dab}}, which needs a logic update before any move happens. The line {{#ifexist:{{{1|{{PAGENAME}}}}} (number)|For the number, see [[{{{1|{{PAGENAME}}}}} (number)]].}} in particular, assumes the number page is appended with " (number)". What this template can probably do (and if I have time to get to this) is check if PAGENAME is in the format proposed here, and if it is, assume that the "number" page does NOT have the parenthesized dab.

I suggest procedurally closing this and opening an RfC for greater visibility as suggested above, where some of these template changes can be mentioned. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 23:37, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

I'd rather let the present discussion continue, see if there is strong consensus (so far there is, but it might change), and only then start preparing for the move technically. While we work on the technical details, the wider RfC could be opened, informed by the local consensus here and requesting help with other technical consequences. In other words, decide on the merits of the move first, then discuss how to execute it with minimal disruption. — JFG ^talk 11:06, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

• Support move, but recognise that implementation will take time. Suggest we also consider three-figure dates. While 1066 is commonly recognised as the year not the number, 512 and 666 would be more recognisable as numbers. Andrewa (talk) 08:41, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

I fear that extending the move to 3-digit numbers would weaken the potential consensus. 1 to 100 are undoubtedly seen primarily as numbers, whereas 101 to 1000 can be debated. Going against a longstanding Wikipedia convention here, we must tread lightly. A line must be drawn somewhere, and changing 100 articles uncontroversially beats changing 1000 with potential for dissent. — JFG ^talk 11:12, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose until a proper RfC is made. Moving so many articles will go against long standing policy, as JFG said. Anarchyte (work | talk) 11:47, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support 1 (year) to 100 (year), but no further. I think I see these years, 1-100, usually clearly introduced (in introductory contexts, which google ngram doesn't note) with "the year" or similar. Not so for three and four digit years. 0-100 I consider inherently ambiguous (0 is already at 0 (year). Oppose AD/CE notation as too controversial, despite natural disambiguation being preferred in general over parenthetical disambiguation. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:21, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
• Procedural oppose. Since this would require a change to WP:NCNUM, this should be an RfC, not an RM. -- Tavix ^(talk) 02:54, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

RFC: Should articles "1" to "100" be about numbers instead of years?

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Should articles "1" to "100" be about numbers instead of years? — JFG ^talk 10:18, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

It has been proposed to move "1" to "1 (year)", arguing that the number 1 is the primary topic for title "1" whereas current Wikipedia guidelines assign all titles which are positive numbers to articles about years. The discussion noted that low-value numbers are likely to be considered primary topics, so that it would be desirable to treat titles "1"…"100" as numbers and to move the existing articles to "1 (year)"…"100 (year)". Existing titles "1 (number)"…"100 (number)" would redirect to "1"…"100". Because of the technical impact on existing links and on several templates, extra care should be taken before moving those pages. There is consensus that, if the change is approved, year articles should be titled "1 (year)", not "AD 1", "1 CE" or similar. Please focus the discussion on the merits of the proposed change, not on calendar disputes. — JFG ^talk 08:23, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

Notified WT:WikiProject Years, WT:WikiProject Numbers, WT:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) and WP:Village pump (policy). — JFG ^talk 08:39, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

Survey

Please indicate your support or oppose stance here.

• Support as nominator. — JFG ^talk 08:23, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support I've wondered why this was so for a long time. The primary topic for small whole numbers is likely to by the number itself; for larger numbers the year is likely to be the primary topic. While it is somewhat arbitrary where to place the dividing line, 100 is a logical choice. --Jayron32 12:09, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support plus 4 numbers in the 101-999 interval; these are 128, 256, 512, and 911. (For the first 3 of these, it's the number which should be the primary topic. For the last of these, it's the phone number (the 9-1-1 article can stay where it is; the 911 page should simply be a re-direct.) Georgia guy (talk) 12:36, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

  Adding special cases will make the year template logic more complicated than it should be, in my opinion. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 15:30, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose (for now) See the technical changes required in the discussion section below (if anyone has anything to add, that would be great). Also, would strongly oppose any 100–999 special cases. They should (need to) know the direct links of each year, and at least right now, they are consistent across. Including more special cases may potentially make the year nav templates even more complicated than they need to be. (Looking at the revision history, the names of these year pages have been well-established, and apparently have been in this format since 2001. There were occasional moves to other locations, including a copy-paste move, that were quickly reverted.) — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 15:30, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

  Comment Somewhere in Wikipedia I learned that for years in the 1-100 interval this rule about year articles is a remnant from an earlier time in Wikipedia history when years were allowed to be linked for wikification. Any comments on this?? Georgia guy (talk) 15:56, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

  Interesting. I remember when years were linked, yes, but I don't know without doing a search exactly when that changed. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 16:10, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

  Ooh, that was a long long time ago. 2007? Red Slash 18:49, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

  @Andy: Provided that the necessary conforming changes were made prior to the move taking place and that there were no "special cases" over 100, would you support the move? Graham (talk) 19:00, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

  @Graham11: Thanks for the ping. I would support the move weakly, I suppose. (I'm mostly neutral) struck 06:38, 18 September 2016 (UTC). Still oppose now. This discussion doesn't seem to be about consensus across all numbers/years... but there are actually occasions when I'd type something like "2000" and expect information about the number, not the year. Anyway, I somehow feel that if the lower-numbered pages were to be moved, we may even consider moving all of them for consistency. Currently, it's the special-case template changes that bug me a bit, but it's not a very big deal. They just need to be in place before the moves happen. added 06:38, 18 September 2016 (UTC): it's the resulting lack of consistency in the entire naming scheme that has been in place for 15 years that bugs me, and the potentially painful template dab/nav tweaks that I mentioned below weeks ago that honestly are not worth it unless the entire numbering scheme changes with strong consensus in my own humble opinion — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 19:03, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

  Let's just hope thatI think that folks unaware of this new scheme (if passed) will not attempt to move "101" or "789", etc. As Template:Year dab will not know about the change, it'll potentially return an incorrect hatnote. Or Template:Year nav will make the reader jump through redirects. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 19:48, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

• Support - This is an excellent idea.--WaltCip (talk) 17:24, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support - 1-100 gives us a really obvious and clean ending point, which I think is important. For anything bigger, we'll do the year. Support 1 AD, 2 AD, etc. Red Slash 18:49, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support. Although I would extend it to at least 999. Also support 1 AD, as new names for year pages, per COMMONNAME (no one sees "123" and automatically assumes that means the year). Having 1 et all point to the years is a leftover relic of an obsolete WP attempt at auto-pseudo-category by year before we knew better how to do such things. --A D Monroe III (talk) 20:59, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support per nominator, provided that the necessary conforming changes that Andy M. Wang discussed are made prior to the move and that exceptions for "special cases" over 100 are not considered at this stage. Graham (talk) 04:52, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support. Numbers are certainly Primary Topic for low values, and per virtually unanimous above. But how about we keep the page system fully consistent? We could move all year pages, and numbers above 999(?) could be redirects to the year page. Alsee (talk) 16:11, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support (year) disambiguation for all numbers; Oppose AD as a Christian name, inappropriate for an Encyclopedia which is supposed to have a neutral point of view and not a Christian point of view. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 19:32, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

The date is the exact same, adding an E to bc or changing AD to CE is arguably pushing for a non christian POV. In the same way as you may use the oxford comma or not, or else use american or british english, either should be ok as long as you remain consistent. Iazyges (talk) 04:35, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

As evidence I provide this failed proposal to change BC and AD to BCE and CE. Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/BCE-CE Debate Iazyges (talk) 04:38, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

• Support. Not willing to go to war on this, but the fundamental concept of every number is the number, whether it is 1, 1066, 23456789, or 33554432. For derived, associated, familiar, mystical, sacred, or specialist perspectives, we have whole ranges of disambiguation, hatnote, and redirection tools. Consistency is precious in encyclopaedias; don't waste it. JonRichfield (talk) 05:14, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support This is trivially evident. -The Gnome (talk) 07:31, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support numbers 1–100; weakly support all numbers above 100 for consistentcy if necessary. Oppose move to 1 AD etc. per MOS:ERA: 1 (year) is vastly more neutral. All this of course presumes the template issues discussed below are ironed out first. Snuge purveyor (talk) 12:24, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

  1 (year) is ambiguous, as there is both a year 1 CE/AD and 1 BCE/BC. We already have 1 BC et al; consistency requires 1 AD et al. WP settled article/category titles for this long ago. --A D Monroe III (talk) 20:32, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

  1 (year) isn't ambiguous; if one wanted to refer to 1 BC(E), one would write 1 BCE, 1 BC, or -1 - and not 1. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 06:30, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

  Exactly. No one writes "1" to automatically mean a year; per COMMONNAME, it should be either 1 AD or 1 CE. For WP article names (only), we don't use BCE/CE -- decided long ago. And, um, -1? This is just making things up. --A D Monroe III (talk) 16:29, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

  Tangent There are disciplines (e.g. astronomy) and languages (e.g. Chinese, when using western dates) that commonly refer to the BCE years as negative numbers, but I agree that no one could reasonably expect a search for '-1' to come up with 1 BCE. If the BC/AD consensus was reached "long ago", perhaps it has changed since then, but where we put the 1–100 pages for the immediate future definitely seems like a side issue to this survey. Snuge purveyor (talk) 17:03, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

  I agree consensus may change, but it hasn't yet. This RfC doesn't have to scope to cover that article naming consensus. (BTW, -1 in astronomy isn't 1 BC; it's 2 BC. 0 is 1 BC.) --A D Monroe III (talk) 14:16, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

• Support I would prefer all year pages be moved to 123 (year), 123 AD or 123 CE for consistency. [AD seems to be appropriate per WP:Commonname but as CE is becoming more common "(year)" would be most appropriate.] I wouldn't support 1-100 + special cases.
• 1 to 100 should be disambiguation pages (unless DABCONCEPT pages). 101 to 2500 or so should be years. Support 1 (year), but prefer not 1 AD, due to the AD/CE controversy and confusion. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:26, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Support 1-100 in the format 1 (year)] to 100 (year). No firm opinion on 101-999, but I think there is not enough ambiguity with these years to justify the change.

Support disambiguation in order: "(year)"; " AD"; " CE". --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:27, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

• Support Thanks for making an insightful proposal, JFG. The default to years has always been counter-intuitive to me. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:26, 22 August 2016 (UTC)
  • @Bluerasbeery: The actual proposed of this change was Voortle. JFG just restructed it into an RFC. Pppery (talk) 21:26, 23 August 2016 (UTC)
  • @Bluerasberry:, I misspelled your username earlier. Pppery (talk) 22:08, 23 August 2016 (UTC)
    • Voortle Thank you for doing this, Voortle! I checked your archive at User_talk:Voortle/Archive_1#Odd_redirects and it seems like you have been minding Wikipedia's number articles for about 10 years. Thanks for putting thought into this and making a proposal. Blue Rasberry (talk) 11:21, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
• Neutral I can see the appeal of number being the primarary topic, especialy to mathematicans, engineers and those of a like bent. However the arbitrary change at 100 givess me pause. As mentioned below [foo (year)]s should be dab pages, covering various calenders, and other meanings. 1 AD or AD 1 would be my preferred name if we do move. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 11:55, 24 August 2016 (UTC).
  
• Support per WP:COMMONNAME Using (year) is better than AD or CE. --Iamozy (talk) 18:16, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support. Not only is the '1 (number)' article significantly longer, it also contains information that people are more likely to be interested in. This is even more true for examples like '5 (year)' vs '5 (number)'. I further propose to extend this move to the numbers 1-260. This is because each number up until 260 has its own article, after which numbers are placed into groups of 10. Mooseandbruce1 (talk) 17:57, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
• Support, per WP:COMMONNAMEWP:PRIMARYTOPIC for most of the numbers. Common name Primary topic can be determined for every number separately. 1984 is more known for the novel than for special properties of the number, and 1812 for the overture. In every case, the plain number should only be a redirect to 1984 novel, 1812 overture, 1776 (year) (assuming it's deemed that the year is more significant than the number itself), or 5 (number).“WarKosign” 05:28, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

  The year is important for all years in the 1492-present interval. 1492 is the beginning of U.S. history; in no way independent of Old World history is any year before 1492 notable. Georgia guy (talk) 12:27, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

  It seems that you are suggesting that US history is more notable than the Old World history, if this is the case please see WP:BIAS. If it's not, please clarify what you mean.

  More to the point: of course something happened in every year, the question is - is the year more notable than other associations with the number ? I think 1984 novel is more notable than the year, and 1024 (number) is more notable than 1024 (year). Certainly for some years that had major historical events the year is more notable than the number, for example 1945 or 1776. As a rule, though, the years should not have automatic preference over numbers. “WarKosign” 21:11, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

  I'm suggesting that it's important for Wikipedia not to be Old-World-centric. Years in the 1492 to 50-years-from-now interval are important to both the United States and the Old World. Pre-1492 years are important only to the Old World. Thus, it can't be considered US-centric; it would be US-centric if there were a year in history that's important only to the United States. Georgia guy (talk) 21:20, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

  Things happened before 1492 in the Americas which are usually dated using AD/CE. 1428 and 1438 are important dates in American history. You're not just privileging American history, you're privileging the history of Europeans in the Americas. You might equally say that 1606 is the beginning of Australian history and that pre-1606 dates are important only to the Eurasian-American world. Furius (talk) 17:39, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

• support generally, but it should be either 'Year 1' or, better, 'AD 1'. Why try and 'neutralise' (see WP:COMMONNAME above) what the Year 1 stands for by ignoring AD. AD is the accepted convention. CE is just a matter of political correctness and a vain attempt to hide what '1' stands for. After all, '1' is still dated from the supposed birth of Christ (although he was born in 11 BC, we think). So my preference is AD 1. Incidentally, Wikipedia should stop trying to be politically correct. Who is it that decided this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by T A Francis (talk • contribs) 16:44, 28 August 2016 (UTC)
• Please focus – As mentioned in the RFC statement, I would appreciate that participants please focus the discussion on the merits of the proposed change, not on calendar disputes. The question we want to answer here is firstly whether small numbers should be considered primary topic vs years, secondly how far this new convention should supersede the present one about years being primary (1–100 is the proposal but some people have suggested other cut-off points or exceptions). If this proposal is adopted, there will be ample time to discuss the name of the year pages while technical prerequisites get sorted out. — JFG ^talk 17:17, 28 August 2016 (UTC)
• Comment. I would support that all participants must list exactly which numbers should have which meanings as the primary topic. For me, this is:

• Number for 1 to 100, 128, 256, and 512 (the last 3 of these numbers are significant to computer science)
• Phone number for 911 (only as a re-direct; the article can stay at the hyphenated 9-1-1)
• Year for 1066 and 1492-2066 (the late limit goes up by one every year; it will go up to 2067 on January 1, 2017.)
• Undecided for all other numbers

Georgia guy (talk) 17:33, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

@WarKosign and Georgia guy: I strongly believe special case numbers are out of scope, such that if we had inconsistency across the range of numbers/years, that would deprecate the usefulness of the templates I've listed below. I believe there are limits to WP:COMMONNAME, especially when it comes to hundreds of pages serving a similar purpose, and especially in this case, when the nav/dab pages need to link directly to the year page without needing to jump through redirects and having special cases for numbers. Please reconsider. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 17:43, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Strongly agree with Andy M. Wang. WP:PRIMARYTOPIC only goes so far, and adding dozens of exemptions to dozens of templates is not worth avoiding a redirect for special cases. Also agree with JFG: in any event, special cases are not in the scope of this RfC, which is for the 1..100 interval. Snuge purveyor (talk) 23:41, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Support for all numbers 1..100, as in the RfC. I think that for almost anyone, "39" is a number, rather than the year of Tigellinus's exile. For larger numbers it's less clear. Maproom (talk) 07:18, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

• Support for 0 to 100. Obviously, 1 is used as a number more than as a year. Therefore, 1 should be a number and 1 AD should be a year. Also, 0 should be a number because there was no year 0. Timo3 12:59, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
• Qualified support. As a member of WP:TIME and WP:YEARS whose main interest is chronology, I might be expected to oppose this proposal but I have to agree that articles whose titles equate to numbers within the percentage range of 1 to 100 should be about the numbers for the reason of primary topic. Outside the percentage range, I think all numeric titles commencing with 101 should be year-based. As for using 1 (year) as a title, I disagree and recommend year articles in the ranges 100 BC to 1 BC and 1 AD to 100 AD. Thanks. BoJó | talk UTC 17:19, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose - Keep it to years for a number of reasons...

- First WP:SURPRISE that anyone not party to this talk is going to be surprised because of the variation.

- Second, titling WP:CRITERIA guide for CONSISTENCY, so to use one rule for all numbers that they are years suits but not sometimes-this and sometimes-that.

- Third, this just lacks a sufficient WHY to motivate this, a nod that this is asking to do a lot of work for no great reason. This is talking about retitling and editing 200+ pages plus many many wikilinks, and we just don't have much of a motivating reason to do it or reason why not stop at 50 or why not include 101 etcetera. There just doesn't seem sufficient appreciation in this discussion about what would be involved -- that this is massive title changes, that every number pages shows links to the next higher and lower, that external webpages linking here would get blotted, etcetera.

- Fourth I think in this case dismiss WP:PRIMARYTOPIC as none strongly exists for most cases and other considerations override it where there is any. It would just lead to a very confusing variation of other things as well as mixed years and dates. Possibly have 0 go to 0 (number), 1 go to Oneness, 7 go to Title 7, 13 go to Triskaidekaphobia, 911 go to September 11 attacks, 2001 got to 2001: A Space Odyssey (film). And then that would be subject to recentism or changing popularity when the most common meaning of 100 changes from being the year to the number then The 100 (TV series) and then back to the year when the TV show ends or if some discovery is made about year 100.

Cheers, Markbassett (talk) 19:59, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

• Support but... can a person or a bot please include a hatnote on each page helping the reader find the article they want if they're actually looking for the year. Casual readers especially find our disambiguation processes hard to follow. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 15:04, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

  @Dweller: Makes sense. I've mentioned several year-related dab/nav templates that should be updated before the pages get moved. I think the closer of this RfC would be sufficiently aware of this so folks will not jump on this immediately before the hatnotes, etc are not ready — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 15:44, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose. More useless deckchair rearranging instead of article writing. In the beginning we set up simple rules to put all this stuff together and just get on with building the encyclopedia. Now it is all my city is a shiny special case, my number is better than that system. Better to just expand and source the article. Move these and we will look forward to a thousand yearly debates and moves, the sky will fall and great spouts of fire will.... It just isn't worth the trouble. Rmhermen (talk) 16:36, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

Oppose unless the procedure is the following.

1. No exceptions, and no moving intervals. A specific date range (1-100, 1-999), etc.
2. It is to be reversed (or not put in place) unless all the year templates can be fixed, including test templates such as (my) {{L3d}}.
3. As a temporary matter, the raw numbers should be changed to disambiguation pages, to allow time for all Wikipedia pages (including talk pages and archives) to be fixed I suggest the pages be moved no early than 90 days after the close, and the final move be no earlier than 180 days after the creation of disambiguation pages.

If all those conditions are met, neutral. I still don't think it's a good idea. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 18:31, 7 September 2016 (UTC)

• Support It seems clear that the numbers, not the years, are a primary topic here. Everymorning (talk) 02:11, 8 September 2016 (UTC)
• Support This is a legacy of the archaic practice of date wikification that was commonplace many years ago, and is certainly no longer necessary. 100 is a good cut-off point, and I certainly agree there should be no exceptions for any individual number/year articles (other than 0, which is a special case). — This, that and the other (talk) 03:09, 8 September 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose 1–100, but would support 1–999. The only problem I have with this proposal is the arbitrary selection of 1–100 (the same problem I had with the old MOS:DATERANGE policy which preferred two-digit abbreviated end-range years for 1000 AD+ only) — why should 101 be about the year but 100 be the number? What makes that a good delineation point? Status quo of 1 being the year was a logical place to start since the preceding year is 1 BC, which doesn't present this conundrum. I would support moving years→numbers for 1–999, while 1000+ would remain as year articles. A couple of reasons for this dividing point, (1) 1000 is when the "AD" or "CE" are generally no longer needed for disambiguation, and (2) Gregorian calendar years always omit a comma; so any time we see 1034 for example, we can assume it is a year, while the corresponding number is normally written as 1,034. Numbers before 1,000 don't use a comma. — Crumpled Fire • contribs • 05:30, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

• And to add, I would support the 1 (year) naming format over any AD/CE labeling. — Crumpled Fire • contribs • 05:44, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

• Support clearly, the number is the primary topic. ThePlatypusofDoom (talk) 19:18, 8 September 2016 (UTC)
• Support. Because when I see 1, or any other small number, I assume it's about the number. Without a context, it's always a number, unless it has significance or within a context that suggests time or date (for example when I say 1776 it can be assumed that I'm talking about the year. But not when I say 43 for instance). In fact the first thing that popped into my head when I received a notification for this RfC I thought it was about the number one. —Hexafluoride ^{Ping me if you need help, or post on my talk} 22:47, 8 September 2016 (UTC)
• Support allowing the numbers 1-100 to be numbers, not years. As for the current articles on years, I prefer 1 AD to 1 (year), although in either case, there should be redirects.Fieari (talk) 00:38, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

Wait... isn't it technically supposed to be AD 1? That might be a better option? But then again, people naturally tend towards putting the AD afterwards for whatever reason, and WP:COMMONNAME suggests we should follow. But the commonname is technically incorrect... ARGH! Can't decide! Regardless, numbers should be numbers, and years should have something to mark them out as years. Fieari (talk) 00:41, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

• Support conditional on the use of either CE or (year) as the disambiguator here. Common Era has become the global standard for dates, with AD quickly going the way of the dodo. Frankly, we should be talking about a mass rename from BC to BCE. Changing the years to 1 AD is hardly desirable. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 04:55, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

What is the basis for the assertion that CE is the global standard in lieu of AD? I'm sure we can all agree that the Gregorian calendar itself is virtually ubiquitous (why shouldn't "Gregorian" be eliminated if AD is?), but how exactly does one determine that CE—but not AD—is the "global standard"? Certainly CE has increased in popularity since the '80s just as many other forms of culturally sensitive language have, but that doesn't automatically make it the standard in lieu of the original term. By whose measure? Many reliable source publications and organizations still employ BC/AD exclusively – Google and The Met museum, as examples I can recall. Most prominent style guides neutrally present AD & CE as equal options. In other languages, there is variance, but even in non-Western/Christian languages such as Arabic the term "Before the Birth" (قبل الميلاد) is used rather than "Before Common Era" for Gregorian years. Regarding your idea to rename BC articles to BCE, I would disagree, not only for practical reasons, but because we already ran that debate into the ground a decade ago and I fail to see how Wikipedia's use of a religiously-derived term such as BC in tandem with the religiously-derived calendar is any different than our use of the similarly religious-derived terms Thurs­day, Janu­ary, etc. — Crumpled Fire • contribs • 09:40, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

• Support I'm surprised it wasn't this way already. Kurtis ^(talk) 17:58, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
• Support (year) disambiguation for all numbers. Not everyone uses the Gregorian calendar after all. Kaldari (talk) 07:20, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
• Support I also remember being surprised the first time I came here for a maths lesson but was taught history. 1 CE or AD 1 seems more precise than 1 (year), as the period has a different number (or is split over two numbers) in some calendars. Once done decided, let's consider numbers over 100: because the same arguments apply to many of them, and for consistency. Certes (talk) 17:28, 13 September 2016 (UTC) Edited after reading Bilorv's point: we should discuss 101+ before implementing 1-100.
• Support: moving the year articles to "{number} AD", "AD {number}", "{number} (year)" or "{number} (CE)" would all be preferable, in my opinion, to leaving them at just "{number}" (although the order I just listed marks my most to least favourite options). To me, I expect all years with three or fewer digits to be qualified with 'AD' (or 'CE'), and even up to about 1500 AD I would usually choose to include those qualifiers. I think I would extend the page moves all the way from 1–1000, but if that's not going to gain traction then 1–100 would be sufficient. The mass of technical changes do concern me, though, so I don't support someone blindly moving all these pages immediately after this discussion if changes are to be made: I see I am not alone in supporting different changes to the original suggestion (both with the numbers involved and the formats of the years' page names), so I think maybe some sort of follow-up RFC to clarify the exact scope and nature of the changes would be welcome, and some more detailed technical discussion about how to change all the templates associated with the years/numbers is necessary. I have been perplexed in the past about searching (e.g.) 83 and finding a year where I thought it was obvious that I wanted a number, but the large scale of the changes necessary have overwhelmed me. If there is enough support, I think we should do it, but it would be a big annoyance to move all the 1–100 pages now and then in a couple of years reach a new consensus to change 101–1000 and have to mess about with templates and huge scales of page moving all over again, so a very careful decision maybe based on a second RFC needs to be made. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 22:40, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

  Why 1500?? Is it because 1500 ends in 00?? 1492 (the beginning of New World history) is more natural. Georgia guy (talk) 23:45, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

  Well, it was just a rough number. 1492 might create a bit of confusion and seem arbitrary, especially for templates/redirects grouped in 10s or 100s, but I was just trying to find the point where I start to think year rather than number. 1964—obviously a year. 489—obviously a number. I think 1500 is the cut-off point for me; I don't really hear many pre-Tudor dates mentioned on a daily basis. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 20:05, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose. Why create a mountain of work to fix something that's not broken, when we have mountain ranges of things begging to be fixed that are broken? A less radical move would be One (disambiguation) → 1, as it seems we don't have agreement that there is a primary topic. Some are likely surprised to find that 74 (number) is even an encyclopedic topic. 74 (seventy-four) is the natural number following 73 and preceding 75. Well duh. That lead pretty well summarizes the so-called "article". Maybe merge 74 (number) and 74 (disambiguation) to 74, and move the year to either CE or AD – I don't care which, but the parenthetical "(year)"?? Ick! – wbm1058 (talk) 02:38, 14 September 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose For several reasons. Firstly, there seems no non-arbitrary way to do this. I see no particular reason why all numbers under 101 are more clearly the primary topic than round or unusual numbers over 100: why is (say) 86 more notable than the number 1000? Moreover, it is not a foregone conclusion that the numbers are primary topics generally than the years: as someone interested in the ancient world, when I search for (say) 30, I want the year (And interest in this period isn't a small niche interest, given its importance to Christians). Secondly, consistency of years is important, especially given the large number of templates based on years. Thirdly, avoidance of controversy: the AD/CE debate is the longest lasting and LAMEst debate on WP - this change would give it even more fuel. Fourthly, if you do arrive at 1 expecting the number, there is a clear disambig notice at the top of the page. You click it and your problem is solved. What is wrong with that? Furius (talk) 11:09, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

  Oh Jesus. 2006 AD/CE was a decade ago, as was 2006 (year). wbm1058 (talk) 15:12, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

• Support changing n to n (year); oppose using BC/AD. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 17:50, 15 September 2016 (UTC)
• Support giving numbers priority over years 1-100 and using "n (year)" naming over using BC/AD. I have many times gone to a year instead of a number and believe there should be action to change this; though it currently isn't "broken", it can and should still be improved even if it takes some work. William Casey (talk) 05:02, 17 September 2016 (UTC)
• Support 1-100, oppose 1-999. I would prefer 1-999 over 1-100 in principle, as I'd still say numbers are on average more important than years in the 101-999 range. (Actually, I'd venture that if you compared each number vs. year in 101-999, you'd find there are more years that are the more important of the two, but a few outliers like 128, 256, and 512, not to mention all the hundreds, skew it so much that a random person is more likely to be searching for a number than a year conditional on their search query being in 101-999.) However, past 260 (number) there start to be numbers without articles, with 261 (number) being the first one. What should 261 contain? How can we legitimately claim that a number is more important than a year when it's not even notable (and the year is)? And I am absolutely against exceptions and special cases, in order to avoid unnecessarily complexity. This leaves the only option to let 101-999 be years. For 100 and below, we don't have this issue as all numbers are notable. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 07:05, 17 September 2016 (UTC)
• comment (oppose, for now) should be all or nothing, otherwise it is a mess; a mess of discussion for editors and, quite worse, a mess for readers. No opinion for now on which is the best option, numbers or years - so I would default to status quo (year articles) until a clear consensus is formed. I think the primary topic for every number is the number itself, the remaining are uses of the number (allow for a very poor simile: we do not have Whale discussing Moby Dick which is a rather famous whale, and then an article about the Whale (animal)). OTOH, there is not much (encyclopedic) to say about the numbers, themselves. Maybe the number pages should actually be disambiguation/indexes... :-) - Nabla (talk) 09:28, 17 September 2016 (UTC)
• Support I support 1-999. When you think of each number you doing think of the year you think of them as numbers themselves. For they years they should either specific in parentheses (year) or be specific with A.D.. Chase (talk) 01:07, 18 September 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose. This is a solution in search of a problem. For about 15 years a given number (say 38, 204, 731) points to that calendar year, & is what users have come to expect. Changing this to where the number points to the number itself will confuse people. Then there is the labor involved to update all of the links. Further, many of the articles for the corresponding number is nothing more than a redirect to another article; on the other hand, all of the corresponding year articles have been created & are populated. And most important of all, unless there is a consensus to declare all numbers as notable subjects, we will be replacing established articles with non-notable articles. (Quick, tell my what is notable about the number 1939? Were you able to come up with a fact about the number quicker than what is notable about the year 1939?) Making this change will simply distract people from doing more important work (at the least creating & monitoring bots that could be doing other maintenance work) as well as give Wikipedia the new reputation as the website with 10 million articles -- 5 million on actual subjects & another 5 million on the numbers 1 to 5,000,000. -- llywrch (talk) 03:23, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

I agree that most articles about years should remain untouched. The proposal that makes sense and may gain consensus is strictly for the numbers 1 to 100. — JFG ^talk 17:20, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose First off, no I do not think of the number before I think of the year. For the rest, Llywrch sums things up quite well. Doing it piecemeal would be confusing for editors old, new and still to come. The sharknado storm that would occur no matter which - BC/AD or BCE/CE - is chosen scarcely bears thinking about. There is just no need to reinvent the wheel in this situation. MarnetteD|Talk 03:44, 18 September 2016 (UTC)
• Support as a good step, but per JonRichfield I'd go further and do this for all numbers, or at least all numbers up to 1000, at which point it does get more likely that the year might be primary. Dicklyon (talk) 04:43, 19 September 2016 (UTC)
• Support as WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for all numbers. First Light (talk) 05:33, 19 September 2016 (UTC)
• Support for 1–100. Double sharp (talk) 11:25, 21 September 2016 (UTC)
  • That said, it is true that many of the number articles are loose collections of trivia. In some cases (e.g. 191) I cannot imagine them ever becoming more than that, and this is why I changed my mind about the cutoff (originally I supported 1–999, because I don't think of 527 as a year automatically, for instance). But I think the first few numbers are potentially good, encyclopaedic topics. Of course, the way 74 (number) does it is emphatically not the way to do it. But surely it is possible to write an intelligent article about the mathematical and cultural significance of 5 (number) – in fact I think it can definitely be done for the first twenty, probably the first fifty, and hopefully the first hundred. Double sharp (talk) 12:11, 21 September 2016 (UTC)
• Support for 1-100, would also support 1-999. The current structure has never made sense to me.

+Comment In general, I think there is a confusion between what is an appropriate target, and what is an appropriate naming standard for the articles. I would like to see the following...

* All year articles named like 1234_(year) or 1234_BC as appropriate. (Since there is confusion between AD and CE I think (year) is preferable).

* All specific number articles named 1234_(number)

* Number range articles named 1000-1999

* Disambiguation used to pick the appropriate targets betweeen number and year (I would suggest 1000-2999 as years, but the range can be debated separately).

* Redirect numbers to the renamed number range articles if a specific _(number) article is missing (as at present). Almonaster (talk) 21:45, 26 September 2016 (UTC)

Discussion

Please place lenghty arguments, impact analysis and process suggestions here.

Required template changes

(This is a slightly amended copy-paste of some stuff I wrote in the RM above. Feel free to move this to some other section/page if appropriate.) If this passes, as far as I understand (and correct me if I'm wrong), we will need to pass a new year param (like |year=1, |year=2, etc) to {{M1 year in topic}} and pass it through to {{M1YearInTopic (no calendar)}} to get the correct year. Also in that template, the call to {{Year in other calendars}} in that template needs to use |year= as well. {{Year nav}} generates links to years. If these pages are moved, the behavior for years 1–99 will need to be updated to generate direct links rather than links to [[1]], [[2]], etc. I suggest that these technical changes be implemented first before these moves. This will probably need roll-out to the 1–100 pages before the moves. (JFG suggested possibly extracting the numeric year from the page title, which may be an alternative solution.)

What is also very critical: {{Year dab}}, needs a logic update to generate the correct hatnote as seen at the top of these pages. The line {{#ifexist:{{{1|{{PAGENAME}}}}} (number)|For the number, see [[{{{1|{{PAGENAME}}}}} (number)]].}} in particular, assumes the number page is appended with " (number)". The template should probably check if PAGENAME is in the format proposed here, and if it is, assume that the "number" page does NOT have the parenthesized dab. (When "23 (number)" moves to "23").

Again, if this passes, please add any other changes that need to happen before the 100 pages get moved. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 15:17, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

• Comment If this change goes through it should be made explicit in the appropriate MOS(s) that it is limited to this set of numbers. I see from the above that there is already some support for expanding it to a few numbers outside of the "1-100" that the proposal has started with. I foresee newbies (as well as editors that are already here) finding some confusion in the switch. One example - an enthusiastic editor who enjoys page moves could start moving all of the numbers after 100 to (year) - Now you may think I am worrying unduly and perhaps I am, but, IMO a big change like this needs to consider all of the aspects of what it will mean both now and in the future. MarnetteD|Talk 20:16, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

  In complete agreement with MarnetteD here. (Though a valid concern is about editors who don't know the MOS change and decide to move "101" or "789" may mess up the pages' hatnotes/dab/navs too) — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 20:45, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

  Easy solution: move protect all articles titled "0"-"9999". — JFG ^talk 21:11, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

  Found a bunch of other things that should get consideration on changing (haven't looked too deep, just going by name and output glance):

  • Template:Year box (specifically Template:Year box/core), if it's used on triple-digit year pages. Ping Rich Farmbrough.
  • Template:Decades and years/decade or Template:Decades and years/year
  • Template:Year in region, Template:Year nav range,
  • Template:DecadeYearsIn
  • Template:Decadebox
  • Template:Decade years navbox
  • Wordings at "Category:nth century" (ex. Category:6th century)
  • {{Year nav topic}}, {{Year nav topic2}}, ... {{Year nav topic5}}
  • Possibly many others listed with Special:PrefixIndex/Template:Year, Special:PrefixIndex/Template:Decade, if they link to a year assumed to be just a number. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 00:00, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

  • This is ancient stuff, which would need a long hard look. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 11:48, 24 August 2016 (UTC).
    

• @Andy M. Wang: What you are suggesting is not necessary, as the 1 (number) family of redirects will continue to exist as {{R from unnecessary disambiguation}}. Pppery (talk) 13:49, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

  Thanks, yeah I suppose, though direct links are preferable I think. I suppose what'a more critical is This article is about the year {{{1|{{PAGENAME}}}}}. and For other uses, see [[{{{1|{{PAGENAME}}}}} (disambiguation) — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 15:27, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

• We could make things simpler and more consistent by moving all year pages, and any page above 100(?) or above 999(?) could be a redirect to the year page. Alsee (talk) 16:26, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
  • @Alsee: That violated WP:CONCISE if I understand your point correctly. Pppery (talk) 22:22, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
• comment This discussion of required template changes seems to have stalled at an early stage. I'm not clear from what has been said so far whether changing templates to accommodate moving some but not all of the years (as seems to be the developing consensus) will be easy or very very difficult. It seems to me that that should be an essential point for anybody to make an informed decision in the discussion above and that the decision in favour shouldn't be made without the support of those whose technical competency means that they will be the ones to actually have to make the template changes.Furius (talk) 14:16, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
  • @Furius: While I am still not in support of the change, the necessary dab/nav updates are on my own list of things to do actually. I hope that if the closer assesses conseusus for moving (despite valid concerns on the contrary), that he/she possibly give a timeframe in which the changes can be made and tested, and possibly while a second RfC determines the year format. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 14:30, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
  • @Furius: As a template editor and the formal proposer of this RFC, I confirm seeing no technical difficulties to change relevant templates for the 1–100 year range. There are actually several technical solutions which User:Andy M. Wang, myself and others can apply and test thoroughly prior to executing the page moves. This assessment would *not* cover the option to include special cases as "notable" numbers or years outside of a well-defined range; I am strongly opposed to making exceptions, both for the encyclopedia's clarity and because it would become a technical nightmare. — JFG ^talk 12:49, 30 September 2016 (UTC)

Target

Clarification: Section is about the target of the proposed moves, that is, the new name of the articles. --A D Monroe III (talk) 13:45, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

• Warning. Despite the strong support for moving, it seems we don't have such strong support for what it should be moved to. The OP suggests 1 (year), but I (and others) actually support 1 AD. I thought this an obvious and trivial point, but it seems others do not. This could derail this RfC. --A D Monroe III (talk) 14:21, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

  @A D Monroe III: Would it be worth having a second RfC on the naming issue, provided that this one passes? Graham (talk) 21:54, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

  That's probably best. --A D Monroe III (talk) 21:58, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

  I'd agree with this one. The closer of this RfC can assess consensus on change first. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 22:07, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

• 1 (year) should probably be a sort of disambiguation page anyway. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 11:48, 24 August 2016 (UTC).
  

Agree. --A D Monroe III (talk) 16:36, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

• This might be out of scope for now, but it's worth considering whether 65536 (number) should be without a disambiguator post-RfC. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 00:44, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

• Very long numbers, a subset of very long character strings generally, are ambiguous, because they are more likely to names, pseudo-clever trademarks for example. While there are notable big numbers, 65536, 142857, 2147483647 for example, for the normal reader they are quite ambiguous as to what might be found if followed. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:23, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose a second RfC for Target. It will be like 2005's Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/BCE-CE_Debate all over again. Not only will pointless debates rage over CE vs. AD, but even if CE were out of the question, there would be a debate on whether to place AD before the year (AD 1), which is technically the correct format, or to place it after the year as User:A D Monroe III suggested - which is increasingly common and used for centuries (i.e. 1st century AD), but is still a relatively new and "unofficial" format shunned by some style guides and academics. There seems to be more support for 1 (year) than any AD/CE format, and I think that's what we should go with. It's certainly the most neutral and least controversial of the options, and fits nicely with general Wikipedia naming conventions. — Crumpled Fire • contribs • 05:42, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

I think I completely agree with this, but what is meant by "target", the subsection title, and in Crumpled's bolded !vote. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:28, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

I can only speak for myself, but what I understood "target" to refer to was the intended target article name of these moves, i.e. 1 (year) vs. 1 AD vs. 1 CE, etc. So in opposing a second RfC for "Target", I was referring to an RfC for deciding which title format the moved articles should adhere to. — Crumpled Fire • contribs • 18:53, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

Insisting that there cannot be another RfC is somewhat odd, as is claiming that it's both already decided and cannot be decided. My main point is that such insistence may cause this RfC to be closed without consensus. I, for one, would change my vote to "oppose" if the target name is "fixed" as 1 (year). --A D Monroe III (talk) 13:52, 17 September 2016 (UTC)

• I strongly support a second RFC for the targets per my comment below. I personally think 1 (year) is a terrible title. If the community can't decide, it may choose to retain the current title.— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 04:28, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

• Comment - A name format should be decided upon by the community before these moves take place. If AD or CE can't be decided upon, the community may find 1 (year) unacceptable, and decide against the move altogether. The prior consensus cited in the proposal is null and void because so few participated there, while so many participated here. It needs wider discussion. I've always disliked proposals that ask the participants not to discuss crucial details that will need to be decided on. The more I see it, the more my opinion strengthens that it is as an attempt to usher in change that might not otherwise be agreed upon, which can be detrimental.— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 04:24, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

  Agreed here. This would also buy time to plan the technical template changes (if any) in the meantime. (sorry to keep harping on this, but honestly think this is very important) — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 04:42, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

  Disagree. There is no evidence or reason that "the community may find 1 (year) unacceptable" and therefore that point should be dismissed. I dispute the assertion "null and void". The disambiguation is a trivial decision. I prefer "(year)", but none of it, "AD" or "CE" is problematic enough justify derailing this progress. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:48, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: My "null and void" comment stems from Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive283#Numbers 1 to 100 where I question the prior consensus. Perhaps it was strong wording, but more input is needed on the matter, and it should happen before the moves take place. There is no harm in doing so, we don't have a deadline. What you call "derailing this progress", I call making sure the community has their due say on the matter. Furthermore, the community was led to believe there was prior consensus on the target, which isn't really accurate. That could have led them not to comment on the matter, making my first point un-dismissible.— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 05:03, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

I don't read any substantive reason to not move forward. If you think sections of the community are unaware of this discussion, and they need to, then the answer is Wikipedia:Publicising discussions. I think the current level of participation is more than sufficient. However, if you post further notifications, we should wait at least another seven days. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:22, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

I didn't say this wasn't properly publicized, I said the community was mislead by the proposal, by being asked not to discuss something based on a faulty premise.— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 05:38, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

• AD would be the target. The pages should end in AD. Therefore, 1 should be moved to 1 AD, 2 should be moved to 2 AD, and so on. We already have 1 BC, so we should have 1 AD. Timo3 12:16, 19 September 2016 (UTC)
• Comment Anyone who thinks the community will acquiesce more or less quietly to any single year format definitely was not active on Wikipedia during the BC vs. BCE conflict. (The link Crumpled Fire provides above was only a civil beginning to what was often acrimonious, & resulted with at least one person being blocked from Wikipedia.) This proposal can only cascade into a very messy situation; best to leave sleeping dogs lie & refrain from making these proposed changes -- llywrch (talk) 17:38, 19 September 2016 (UTC)
• Since we already have 1 BC, why would we need another round of discussion to have AD 1? Double sharp (talk) 11:40, 21 September 2016 (UTC)
  • If AD is to be the target, we _do_ need another RfC. The initial proposal was (year), and there are enough people who say that "AD" is not acceptable to make a legitimate claim of consensus improbable. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 23:52, 27 September 2016 (UTC)
• I have started a poll below about what the articles should be moved to. Timo3 13:55, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
  • I have closed the section (for now) pending closure if this RfC. It should be up to the closer how to proceed, including how dab/nav templates are handled, etc. Your poll below might not be how the closer wants to proceed. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 14:06, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Post-RfC comments

• Comment from RFC nominator – I appreciate the closer's rationale and I agree that further consensus-building is required to decide on article titles for the years 1–100. However, we are now facing a potential loophole, as identified by SmokeyJoe below: if no consensus emerges between the AC, CE and (year) options, the closer said that pages should not be moved. I am not convinced that the debate above establishes consensus not to move in that case. Disagreements on calendar notation should have no bearing on the overwhelming majority in favor of making articles "1"–"100" about numbers instead of years (which was the exact question asked). Therefore I would suggest a formulation of the followup RFC making it clear that those pages will be moved regardless of agreement on how they should be titled. For practicality, the "(year)" disambiguator would be the default choice (to distinguish them from numbers), whereas the "AD" or "CE" titles would be picked if consensus emerges for one of them. @Agtx: would you consider amending your closing statement in that spirit? — JFG ^talk 11:48, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

  I assume that was a WP:BOLD part of the closure and can accept the statement as-is (just personally) — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 15:01, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Not done Sorry, no. I don't think that's right. The issues are necessarily interrelated, and it is reasonable for an editor to take the position that one renaming of the year pages is better than the status quo, but another renaming of the year pages is worse. There are a number of comments above that expressly indicate that support was conditional on a certain choice in year numbering, and even more that strongly imply it, most of which cite policy and make valid arguments both directions. That makes the consensus not quite so overwhelming as it appears when you just do a nosecount. I have a feeling that the argument below is going to turn largely on what is going to be the most neutral—and therefore "default"—choice. I am not willing, based on the discussion above, to determine that there's a consensus to call "year" the default. agtx 15:10, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Second RfC preparations

Agtx Thanks so much for the closure! JFG I hope you don't mind a ping here. Timo3 started a draft below and I think it's a reasonably decent start. Todos as of 23:19, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

• Bring this second RfC (below) to clarify AD/CE/year prefix/suffix live around October 6 after refinements are made to the RfC question/format. Ping WT:NCNUM and WT:MOSDATE.  Done
• Technical changes
  1. List the templates in scope potentially affected by the change
  2. Possibly begin implementing changes in the sandboxes as the RfC progresses. Test the changes as appropriate (?)
• If the second RfC has consensus, make changes to WP:NCNUM and WP:MOSNUM (MOS:CE) as appropriate.

— Andy W. (talk · ctb) 23:19, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

@Andy M. Wang: Thanks for the ping. I suggest waiting for the closer's response to my concerns above before raising the titling RFC. — JFG ^talk 12:47, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

What should the articles from 1 to 100 be moved to?

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Whereas currently the pages titled "1" – "100" are on the topic of years, The RfC above determined consensus that they should be about numbers. To achieve this, the articles from 1 to 100 should be moved to year-related names, and the articles from 1 (number) to 100 (number) would be moved to names from 1 to 100. However, no consensus was reached as to how the year articles should be titled. There are differing opinions about what the articles from 1 to 100 should be moved to.

How should the year-subject pages be titled? For example, should 1 be moved to 1 AD, AD 1, 1 CE, or 1 (year)? Timo3 and Andy W. (talk · ctb), modified and elaborated 00:23, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

AD

If you support "1 AD" or "AD 1", please !vote here, but [Please] clarify if you support [prefer AD as] a suffix or prefix [if supporting].

• Support. 1 should be moved to 1 AD, 2 should be moved to 2 AD, and so on. We already have 1 BC. Therefore, we should have 1 AD. Timo3 13:55, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

  Redirects serve this purpose effectively, for linking from dates expressed in the traditional format. 1 AD or AD 1 would only invite title-warring, without any actual benefit to readers. — JFG ^talk 06:54, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  I don't care about CE/AD, but if the latter is chosen, "AD #" is the correct form, while "# AD" is incorrect. I know this is pedantic, but WP shouldn't be wrong even on small details. Furius (talk) 11:21, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  The Google Ngram seems to agree with you that AD 1 is the most common usage. wbm1058 (talk) 16:45, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Millennium:	1st millennium
Centuries:	1st century BC 1st century 2nd century
Decades:	10s BC 0s BC 0s 10s 20s
Years:	3 BC 2 BC 1 BC AD 1 AD 2 AD 3 AD 4

• First choice, if we must move these (I'm content with the status quo). {{Year nav|1}} (see navbox in right margin) shows that this would be the least disruptive change. I'm open to flipping it to AD 1 as that seems to be the common and proper usage. Template:Dr-make would need to be changed to implement that switch in the position of the "AD". wbm1058 (talk) 17:11, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
• First choice as AD means in the year of our lord, and your lord is whoever you hold to be your god, or else no god if that is what you believe in, how is this a matter of religious debate? Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 03:57, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

  I believe it is against WP:WORLDVIEW (just an opinion, peace be with you).Your welcome | Democratics ^Talk→ Be a guest 10:51, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

• 1 AD etc. is my first choice. After that, I'd prefer: AD 1; 1 (year); 1 CE. Yes, there are religious connotations to "AD" but (speaking as an atheist) those connotations are still there with CE – a secular way of doing it would be to create a new calendar entirely, not just swapping two random initials for another two. "AD 1" might be technically correct but I see "1 AD" used more frequently, and in my opinion that makes it more correct; maybe if I was a historian I would feel differently, but from my experience "1 AD" is what I would expect. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 18:56, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

  Comment. Bilorv, you must think that CE stands for Christian Era based on your comment. It actually stands for Common Era, and thus has no religion in it. Georgia guy (talk) 19:35, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

  I know exactly what it stands for, but my point is that basing a calendar system off of the birth of Jesus Christ (or one ancient estimate for it) is inherently religious—or at least, has the same degree of religion involved in it whether you use "AD" or "CE". Renaming the initials doesn't really change anything: I can't imagine anyone thinks "Before Christ" and "In the year of the Lord" every time they see "AD" and "BC" written. They just tells us exactly the same thing "BC" and "BCE" do, but are more commonly understood. — Bilorv_(talk)^(c)(e) 21:37, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

• AD 1 as first choice, as it's grammatically correct and Ngram shows it to be the most common. Lizard (talk) 01:11, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
• To be clear, I approve of any of 1 (year), AD 1, and 1 AD, 1 CE and CE 1. If pushed for a preference, it would be for AD 1, which I think is the form that historically predominates. AD agreeing with BC already in use is important. Grammatical considerations of the phrase in latin does not matter to me above what people usually do. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 02:02, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
• Second choice support for AD after "(year)". Existing articles before the year 1 use BC, so AD rather than CE would be necessary for consistency's sake unless we changed BC to BCE, which is another matter altogether. AD is more common, is the original inherent terminology associated with the era, and the only argument I'm seeing from CE proponents is that it's "religiously neutral", which isn't true at all. In fact it's less religiously neutral than AD, since it assigns the Anno Domini era as the world's "common era" above all other cultural calendars, thus enshrining it as superior. AD/BC do no such a thing, they are just the terms describing the era and how it originated and what it was intended as. AD 1 is preferable to 1 AD, since the latter is not proper format according to most style guides. I prefer the aesthetics of 1 AD for consistency's sake, but there would be too much debate ensuing over improper format. — Crumpled Fire • contribs • 04:58, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
• First and only choice (I don't support the move if this isn't the title, preferring the status quo as my second choice). The Anno Domini (AD) year labeling system was developed in AD 525, its use was widespread after AD 800. It is still in common use today. The first known occurrence of Common Era is traced to AD 1708, which was euphemized from "Christian Era" (an uncommon synonym of AD), of which the first known occurrence was AD 1584. The abbreviation of common era, "CE", was introduced in the late AD 1800's. Common Era is purely a euphemism of the original name Anno Domini (they both refer to the exact same year dating method). AD is much more common especially if historical usage is taken into account (and still more common currently per Google Ngram). Furthermore, CE is less intuitive. Though one unfamiliar with AD would have to look up that it means "in the year of our Lord", it's easier to grasp quickly, "common" is vague. We also already use the counterpart of AD, BC (Before Christ) to title those years, as opposed to the counterpart of CE, BCE (Before Common Era). There is no reason to be inconsistent. Setting my bias on this issue aside and lightly playing the devil's advocate debate arguendo (I'll even euphemize that for those who prefer CE), the neutral point of view policy (which I strongly believe in) can be argued, but I believe it is countered to a certain extent by censorship arguments the other way. That aside, the system itself will always inherently lack neutrality regardless of which label is used, because it is based on Christianity (i.e. it centers around the birth of Christ). The only way to remedy that would be to use a dating system like the Holocene calendar (though even that is influenced by the Anno Domini system), which wouldn't reflect common usage in sources, and would be relatable to few causing confusion. Using "X (year)" is a poor compromise, because it is ambiguous, as it could equally refer to e.g. 1 BC (BCE) and AD 1 (CE). Lastly, the abbreviation should be in front of the number (i.e. AD 1), as English usage has traditionally followed the Latin practice of doing so (content with 1 AD over the other options).— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 05:47, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
• Happy with any of the options, with a weak preference for AD 1. Certes (talk) 11:17, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
• Support the AD nn form, as counterpart to the nn BC already used. This form is still much the most commonly used according to ngrams also for years beyond 1: Noyster (talk), 18:37, 15 October 2016 (UTC)
• First choice for AD 1, to be consistent with 1 BC. Double sharp (talk) 11:43, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
• AD 1; the only correct option for anno Domini calendar era annotations. The only basis for choosing to display something in an incorrect format when the correct format is ubiquitously well known is editorial incompetence. Our encyclopedic credibility requires us to not exercise editorial incompetence. If our readers can not have confidence in the integrity of information we provide for their assimilation, they will not continue being "our readers".--John Cline (talk) 02:53, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
• Switching my !vote to AD 1 as first choice – This is the historically dominant notation and a natural disambiguator. Fears of an intractable conflict with "CE" proponents seem overblown. — JFG ^talk 07:13, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
• 1 AD as that is the most common method I believe. "AD 1" is OK too although not as common I don't think. Yeah AD technically means "Anno Domini" but lots of things have odd origins that are mostly forgotten. We can call the fourth planet Mars without worrying about the old religious connotations, and we can use AD without worrying about the old religious connotations. Herostratus (talk) 14:05, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
• 1 AD or AD 1 (no opinion between these two) for consistency with 1 BC — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pppery (talk • contribs) 00:24, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose both per my comment in the CE section. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:29, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose both --SI 01:30, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
  • @Schmarrnintelligenz: Polling is not a substitute for discussion, comments should not consist of just a vote.— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 03:16, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

  @Godsy: "Essays are not Wikipedia policies or guidelines." & WP:VINE. ;) But nonetheless thanks for caring: I already gave a comment just didn't consider it necessary to c&p three times. But on your request a longer argument: 1 (year) and Year 1 are far better for our readers all over the world, because Wikipedia is a global project ad we should avoid having page titles that are hieroglyphical for many. 1 Anno Domini or 1 Contemporary Era aren't good to read either. --SI 18:29, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

• Support the AD format, and if AD 1 is really more common than 1 AD then that should be the choice... it's not in my experience, but the evidence above indicates that I'm unusual in this. Andrewa (talk) 22:26, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
• Strongly oppose This is an explicitly Christian notation. We should not be favouring any one religion over others. Almonaster (talk) 10:25, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
• anno domini. We have an article Central Intelligence Agency, not CIA; in the same way, these year articles deserve a full name, not an abbreviation. Wnt (talk) 17:50, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

  You're saying "Anno Domini 1" as opposed to "AD 1"? — Andy W. (talk) 17:57, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

  I'm a bit fuzzy on the details - I thought it would be 1 anno domini, perhaps. A wrinkle is that anno Domini, in our article, capitalizes Lord (but not year), but this sort of religious honorific punctuation is generally avoided on Wikipedia when we can (e.g. we don't use "PBUH" after Muhammad). I thought it wasn't always necessarily capitalized but I don't actually know that. I'm not going to invest a lot of effort figuring these things out when I'm in a minority of one, but just wanted to put a divergent opinion out there. Wnt (talk) 12:51, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

• 1 AD: We cannot completely secularize our coverage of calendar systems. The Gregorian calendar was created for religious reasons; for example, all its leap year rules were created to align Easter with the vernal equinox. What is more important is what is more identifiable. AD is more identifiable than CE. Esquivalience (talk) 01:20, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
• Support AD 1 as first choice (1 AD as 2nd choice), with a DEFAULTSORT of 1, and incoming redirects (or dab page entries or hatnotes) from AD1, 1AD, 1 AD, 1 A.D., A.D. 1, and CE1, 1CE, 1 CE, CE 1, 1 C.E., C.E. 1 and anything else plausible, even if incorrect, while we're at it. And from Anno domini 1 and Anno Domini 1, too - redirects are cheap. PamD 20:00, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
• Support 1 AD as it is most commonly used. --TerraCodes ^{(talk to me)} 21:22, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
• Support AD as prefix per Godsy. Using CE or some such is ahistorical. AD is a prefix and should not be used as a suffix simply to mirror "BC." Chris Troutman (talk) 02:00, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
• AD 1 (prefix) as first choice, as it's grammatically correct and Ngram shows it to be the most common. Thanks User:Lizard the Wizard. —  AjaxSmack  03:52, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

CE

• Comment. I'm sure no one will support using CE as a prefix; CE follows the year. Georgia guy (talk) 23:32, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
• CE represents modern scholarship and future scholarship, AD represents the past. 1st preference is to avoid enshrining this preference in article titles. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:43, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
  • User:Wbm1058's ngram below surprised me, I hadn't checked. It was merely my feeling that scholarship is moving to from BC/AD to BCE/CE. If others like CE, I have no objection, should of indecision blocking the already agreed movement of numbers to undisambiguated 1 to 100. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:55, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
• Our BC years are titled 1 BC, 2 BC, 3 BC, 4 BC, etc. Using CE implies these will also need to be changed, for consistency, to 1 BCE, 2 BCE, 3 BCE, 4 BCE, etc. Per BCE, The system uses BCE as an abbreviation for "before the Common (or Current) Era" and CE as an abbreviation for "Common Era". – wbm1058 (talk) 15:12, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
• Second choice. Perhaps this represents "modern scholarship" (we shouldn't speculate about future scholarship), but this Ngram shows that it's scholarship that has yet to dominate common usage in books (unless that's happened in the last eight years). If we must change anything, then just changing the AD years will be less work and less disruptive than changing all years before 100. wbm1058 (talk) 15:39, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
• Comment AD stands for Anno Domini which means "the year of our Lord". I've never made much headway with the argument that this is a comprehensive violation of NPOV, but I'll state it here again. CE/BCE represents a neutral point of view on the subject of Jesus' divinity. And the argument that CE/BCE changes nothing in the point of view because the years still are numbered from a zero year that represents the purported birth of Jesus is a straw man. CE/BCE recognizes that this is mankind's common numbering system without suggesting that Jesus of Nazareth is "our" Lord. David in DC (talk) 21:18, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  @David in DC: The reason your argument never makes any headway is because AD is not a violation of NPOV in any way whatsoever. Unless you're ready and willing to suggest that Wednesday is an analogously egregious violation because it refers to the third day of our common week as "Woden's day"? What about a "neutral point of view on the subject of Woden's ownership of the third day of the week"? You could extend this to all the pagan weekdays and months in the Western calendar. AD/BC/Wednesday/January/etc. are common calendrical terms, nothing more, nothing less. Any perceived religiosity attached to them is entirely subjective. — Crumpled Fire • contribs • 16:24, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

  @David in DC: Allow me to be pedantic and correct your latin here: "Anno Domini" means "Year of the Lord", there is no possessive ("Year of our Lord" would be "Anno Domini nostri"). Besides, using this traditional date notation does not imply that Jesus is "our" Lord in the sense of having dominion on all of humanity. Thankfully the Crusades are over. — JFG ^talk 20:00, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

  In fairness here, our Anno Domini article says it's "often translated as in the year of Our Lord." I think that we can say that this nomenclature reflects the worldview of the creators of the Julian calendar at the time, and we simply are following that tradition without expressing any opinions about its "appropriateness". On the other hand, obviously the proponents of BCE/CE are expressing a different view. Once you get past the subjective, or perhaps research-based view of which is in more "common use", this all comes down to personal preferences as I don't think it can be determined that one is "right" or the other is "wrong". I'm happy to let the community vote on this, without any pretense of that being !not voting. My preference is simply for the established convention because I'm not keen on helping to change it. If others want to volunteer to do the extra work required to switch to "common era", I'd be happy to let them do it. wbm1058 (talk) 22:01, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

  @Wbm1058: this nomenclature reflects the worldview of the creators of the Julian calendar at the time – Exactly, and we shouldn't care, it's just a convention. Hence my support for "(year)" titles because in order to implement the RFC consensus we need to disambiguate years from numbers, not get into an intractable debate about notation/religion/neutrality. — JFG ^talk 09:13, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

• Suggestion I think CE must be used, as in 1 CE in comparison with 1 BCE because it means the one year from the start of the Common Era, while 1 BCE means the one year before the start of the Common Era instead of 1 (year) beacuse the user may mean either 1 CE or 1 BCE. I recommend using CE and BCE compared to BC and AD because it is more scholarly and is less religion-sensitive. I further recommend redirecting searches like 1 (year) to 1 CE.Owenloveclaire (talk) 00:52, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
• First choice. It borders on non-neutral to use the religious term when a non-religious term with just as widespread of usage exists. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 09:21, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
• First choice- CE (Common Era) is a universal and non-religious term, therefore is more fit to an encyclopedia considering not all viewers and page visitors are Christians (in contrast to AD, which means in the year of our Lord).Your welcome | Democratics ^Talk→ Be a guest 10:47, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

  Comment Just to add my 2¢ about this argument, which is by far the most common for CE but doesn't hold any weight in my opinion. I've mentioned the pagan elements of the calendar numerous times, but it's really the best analogy. Gregorian calendar has a mixture of religious mythology from various historical Western religions, including Christianity and Nordic and Roman paganism. If anything seems religiously-biased, it's the idea to use neutral language for the Christian element of the calendar but not the remaining polytheistic elements. It can be construed as either giving Christianity more weight by singling it out as more important for removal compared to the others, or being singularly anti-Christian. Also, Anno Domini simply translates to "Year" and "Lord", not necessarily "the year of Our Lord", which is the commonly noted translation within Christian contexts based on the original entire phrase Anno Domini nostri Iesu Christi. And as for the "not all viewers and page visitors are Christian", this "sensitivity to non-Christians" argument flirts dangerously with violating the WP:CENSORED policy, as Wikipedia is not intended to disallow what some may find to be objectionable content just for the sake of "avoiding offense". I get that "Common Era" is widely used in reliable sources, so that makes it different from any other theoretical euphemisms for other designations that never caught on (such as "First Day" for Monday, etc. within the Quaker movement), but then the argument should be "use CE because it's commonly used", not "use CE because of sensitivity to non-Christians", which is the argument you are using. But when you get into a common usage argument, AD clearly wins as seen in the Ngram previously posted. — Crumpled Fire • contribs • 18:28, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose CE for a few reasons, first of all the existing articles of 1 BC, 2 BC, etc. would need to be changed to BCE for consistency, and that is an astronomical task that would also technically require its own RFC to decide about undertaking. Second, AD is still by far more commonly understood and more widely used throughout the world, and is the inherent default terminology associated with the Gregorian calender's era. A lot of common phrases in Latin are used in the Anglosphere, most of them as a result of the church's massive historic influence, so AD is not unique in that regard. Wikipedia's primary goal is to disseminate information as objectively and truthfully as possible in alignment with reliable sources, and for articles whose subjects are the years of an era created by Christians intended on being based on the birth of Jesus Christ, it seems silly to use euphemistic language like "common era" to eschew acknowledgment of this unavoidable fact. We base our months and weeks on many pagan gods and I don't see Christians or anyone else complaining or arguing for generic language, so why the push with CE? I don't buy it. It's a Christian era marker, let's just accept that reality and move on. Until AD/BC disappear from reliable sources, I'll stand behind their use here. — Crumpled Fire • contribs • 04:51, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose. CE was invented so people who were not Christian would not be offended. However, this is a Christian calendar, so we should use AD. That is like saying, "Happy Holidays!" because people might get offended by "Merry Christmas!" That is crazy. Besides, we already have 1 BC, and that is not offensive. Timo3 12:27, 11 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose per the rationale I gave in the AD section. However, this would be my third conditional choice after AD and retaining the status quo, because it is unambiguous (where "(year)" isn't, as I explain in the sections above and below this). The condition would be that a consensus was gained to move the BC year titles to BCE (which I would oppose), otherwise a move to CE makes no sense.— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 18:13, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
• Support#3 I'm voting three extra times because the above three Oppose votes are from folks who have ALSO voted in other sections including the first one - which I'm told not to vote in (per the "If you support "1 AD" or "AD 1", please !vote here, but clarify if you support a suffix or prefix." language). Rather than strike the votes as improper and perhaps triggering an edit war, I'm doing this, which seems more collegial. If you want to be stupid, delete the extra votes, starting the war I'm seeking to avoid. --Elvey^(t•c) 02:48, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Support#4 Because that's how I read NPOV and because we're building an encyclopedia for everyone, not one that religiously discriminates in its appeal. When given a good opportunity to avoid Wikipedia:Systemic bias, we ought to take it. --Elvey^(t•c) 02:48, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Support#1 --Elvey^(t•c) 02:48, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Support#2 --Elvey^(t•c) 02:48, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
• Support Religiously neutral and it's a fairly common way of numbering years. ThePlatypusofDoom (talk) 11:11, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
• CE and BCE The majority of academic sourcing uses this notation. Popular nonfiction history books also use this notation. Publications which need to distinguish eras are typically academic or history books, so it makes sense to follow that precedent. It is true that sources from a few decades ago used the AD/BC notation, but since then there has been a long enough trend of academic and institutional preference for using CE and BCE. AD and BC are a system and it is right to change to the common era notation. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:40, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
• Support as suffix (1 CE) with {{R from alternative title}} redirects from 1 AD and AD 1. This solves the globalization problem and the AD prefix/suffix problem. The issue of renaming the BC articles to BCE is trivial, I'm pretty sure it could be done easily with WP:AWB, and it's a separate issue anyway. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:28, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

  @Ivanvector: Thanks, but yeah, separate issue, out of scope of this current RfC. The moves may be trivial, but the pre-move template readiness and post-move cleanup is not trivial in the slightest. (template year nav/dab changes as already mentioned here, here for example). — Andy W. (talk) 18:41, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose using CE unless BC is changed in concert to BCE; consistency is important in my opinion. Strenuously oppose using CE if the rationale is said to be religious neutrality or institutional/scholarly trends which are conjoined with the politically correct flavor of the day and too far removed from scholarly correctness. As I recollect, none of the professional Manuals of Style align with a preference for one annotation over the other. They merely show the correct manner of use for each; without prejudice. And BCE/CE annotations are not without religious connotations. It is the prescribed manner of some churches, like Jehovah's Witnesses, and just as with BC/AD time is measured in relation to the birth of Christ. I will support using BCE/CE only if the rationale reflects the sensibility of technical and navigational ease of transition.--John Cline (talk) 14:15, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose --SI 01:31, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
  • As above, "Polling is not a substitute for discussion, comments should not consist of just a vote".— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 03:16, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

    @Godsy:: (see also above & below) on your request a longer argument: 1 (year) and Year 1 are far better for our readers all over the world, because Wikipedia is a global project ad we should avoid having page titles that are hieroglyphical for many. 1 Anno Domini or 1 Common Era/1 Current Era/1 Before Christ aren't good to read either and furthermore ambiguous what unit the figure stands for. --SI 18:37, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

• Second choice Although CE is more neutral than AD, it is not well known among the general public. (Year) would be clearer and widely understood. Almonaster (talk) 10:23, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose – CE is a 19th-century invention whose real-world usage remains sparse. It has no more and no less religious connotations than AD, as CE was promoted out of religious motives. Both are conventional notations of years in the Julian, then Gregorian, calendars. AD has been in use for about 1'500 years both to discuss contemporary events or to date ancient events retroactively (popularised by historian Bede's work in the 700s). Therefore AD is the rational choice. Switched my preference from "(year)" to "AD" after considering other editors' arguments here. — JFG ^talk 14:28, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
• 1 CE. I'm definitely against "(year)" - the western calendar doesn't have a monopoly.  — Scott • talk 21:06, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose per Timo's comment. --TerraCodes ^{(talk to me)} 21:25, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose CE/BCE Use of CE/BCE is ahistorical. I don't think Wikipedia should follow the minority of scholars intent on pretending the calendar doesn't have religious foundations. Chris Troutman (talk) 02:07, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
• Second choice after "(year)". While less common, it is recognizable, associated with scholarship (as we should be), and not perceived as carrying a religious connotation, which is an aspect to consider given WP:NPOV.  Sandstein  11:32, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

(year)

• Move to "(year)" as the first step, avoiding the AD/CE as an unresolved agreement breaker of the first question of moving the numbers. AD/CE is a much bigger question that should not be rushed by this issue, the decision will lead to all content on all pages following. Attempting to solve everything at once is a method known as quagmire. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:39, 5 October 2016 (UTC)
• Move to page with "(year)" dabs per SmokeyJoe. Apparently AD/CE has been unresolved, and since our current system is by far the common system, a page like "97 (year)" shouldn't be ambiguous. Weak oppose further movement of 1–100, as that would simply mean more technical changes on dozens of templates that need to know where these articles actually are. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 00:26, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
  • @Andy M. Wang: Actually, I'd argue that "X (year)" it is ambiguous in our current system, as it could equally refer to e.g. 97 BC and AD 97.— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 12:42, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
• 1 (year) (as second choice) avoids perennial disputes on calendar notation. It also allows expanding the year article to "Year 1" in other calendars. Redirects are already in place for AD 1, 1 CE and friends, so there is no impediment to searching and linking easily from dates expressed in any notation. — JFG ^talk 06:50, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  Switched my first choice to AD 1: this is the historically dominant notation and a natural disambiguator. Fears of an intractable conflict with "CE" proponents seem overblown. — JFG ^talk 07:13, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

• Support per above discussion. CE vs. AD arguments abound to date, even recently here on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Dates_and_numbers#Era:The_time_has_come_for_Wikipedia_to_require_that_era_designations.2C_if_used.2C_must_be_.22BCE.22_and_.22CE.22_in_almost_all_new_articles and Talk:Genesis_creation_narrative#Proposal:_BC_-.3E_BCE for discussions I've come across in just the last few weeks. If we implement either CE or AD for the year articles, we'll never hear the end of it from the other side. I strongly oppose using either one of them. — Crumpled Fire • contribs • 06:56, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose. The idea that whether to use "AD" or "CE" is disputed and unresolved is not correct. It has currently been resolved in favor of AD because all of our "BCE" articles are titled BC. Expanding the year article to "Year 1" in other calendars is a very bad idea. For example, we see that in the Minguo calendar, 1 (year) means 1912. It would be preposterous to have a 1 (year) article that discussed the events of both 1 AD and 1912 AD. The only thing these two distinct years have in common is that they are "year 1" on someone's calendar. (Year) is thus ambiguous. Natural disambiguation, when available, is preferred over parenthetical disambiguation, and 1 AD and AD 1 are both more concise and precise than 1 (year). wbm1058 (talk) 15:54, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  Comment. Wbm1058, I can conclude that you think WP:WORLDVIEW is important as if it were policy, specifically you don't like it when Wikipedia is world-outside-Taiwan-centric. Georgia guy (talk) 15:59, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  You've come to an incorrect conclusion. Clearly Gregorian calendar is the dominant calendar of the world. I am in favor of keeping the status quo; I am content with keeping 1 AD as the primary topic for 1. Adding the parenthetical (year) to that sows doubt as to what the primary topic is. That is WP:partial disambiguation, and we still have disputes over whether Thriller (Michael Jackson album) is the primary topic for Thriller (album). See the latest discussion about that. Using (year) will invite similar debates. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:22, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  The idea of a potential extension of "1 (year)" and friends to other calendars is not to list events about all the years involved, but rather to point readers to various meanings of year 1 under other widespread calendar systems. A vertical navbox template would do this job well. — JFG ^talk 10:43, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

• (year) is much more general, allows application to all kinds of calendars, and avoids those disputes about if our calendar may still be named after the person giving raise to this certain (religious) event or not.
  Therefore, I support the ″(year)″ option.--*thing goes (talk) 18:06, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  Just curious as to how those favoring (year) to "avoid religious disputes" would handle the years before 1. Move 1 BC → -1 (year)? Have we had debates over moving 1 BC → 1 BCE? I'm guessing we have, and it seems we've survived them. wbm1058 (talk) 18:41, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  @Wbm1058: Years prefixed with BC have so far been out of scope since the original RM on Aug 5. If they were in scope, I'd generally prefer these pages not to be moved (technical changes). I was not an editor who supported moving 1–100 in the previous RfC — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 18:52, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  There were several mentions of BC and BCE in the previous discussion. The decade-old Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/BCE-CE Debate seems to be the definitive discussion about this, though it was framed as a religious debate from the get-go, and not a requested move to CE and BCE based on policy- and guideline-based rationales. Yes, it was lengthy and contentious I suppose (tl;dr) but the outcome is that it was rejected – so for over ten years, BC and AD have been the stable, accepted consensus. If there have been any intervening discussions, please point them out to me. This hasn't been the same back-and-forth as, e.g., whether the current US Democratic presidential candidate has a middle name. wbm1058 (talk) 20:19, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  • In the previous discussion, Chatul supported changing n to n (year) and opposed using BC/AD. @Chatul: if you oppose 1 BC, how would you disambiguate that from 1 (year)? wbm1058 (talk) 20:41, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
  • (year) is a perfectly valid for parenthetical disambiguation, if used properly: 1BC is a dab: 1 BC (year) and 1BC (corporation) (Grupo 1BC) 4 BC (year) and 4BC. – wbm1058 (talk) 21:07, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

• Support as only acceptable choice. AD 1 requires the default sort to be set to "1" (probably not "1 AD"), 1 AD is wrong, and 1 CE creates a conflict in notation. Either AD or CE suggests we should rename the decades and centuries, as well. (I'm still not particularly in favor of the move, but I'm willing to acquiesce if the templates are properly handled. I believe it possible, but the problem is identifying all the templates.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 21:20, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Why is setting the default sort to "1" a problem? wbm1058 (talk) 23:48, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
    • @Wbm1058: I believe what Arthur Rubin's saying is, if the pages are moved to "AD 1" etc, a custom DEFAULTSORT needs to be added to the hundred pages. The year pages had been sorting numerically. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 04:21, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

      Right, but considering we already have the burden of moving 100 pages, I don't see how making a single edit to each to set their DEFAULTSORT value substantially adds to the work. I agree that tracking down and making all the necessary template changes will be significant work. wbm1058 (talk) 09:47, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

  • 1st century can stay where it is. AD or CE is assumed when that's omitted, just as with the current title 1. wbm1058 (talk) 23:48, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Ditto for 1st decade and 10s, etc. There is no ambiguity vs. numbers, i.e. there is no number "10s". wbm1058 (talk) 23:48, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
    • If "AD 1", agreed that decade and century pages can stay. — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 04:21, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

      Thankfully there is no article "10s" about the set of numbers between 10 and 19. I'm still dubious about the encyclopedic validity of articles about individual numbers. Individual digits, 0–9, fine. Maybe a few more beyond that. But the bar set at List of notable numbers is so low, that if we followed this standard for musical artists, we would be letting anyone who ever uploaded their song to YouTube into the encyclopedia. wbm1058 (talk) 09:47, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

      You raise a good point here. I might dare to suggest twenty as a stopping point below which numbers are automatically notable: above that, they need to prove that they are. The slight issue is that even if I agree that 74 isn't really notable (maybe it would worked if merged into an article on two-digit numbers in general?), I read it far more as a number than a year; so we have the strange situation where the primary topic isn't notable. Double sharp (talk) 13:44, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

      I just read your suggestion above to merge 74 (number) and 74 (disambiguation) to 74 and make 74 the disambiguation page: that makes a good deal of sense. After all, there's not much to say about 74 other than that it's the integer between 73 and 75. I do think that the numbers from −1 to 20 inclusive are certainly notable, and a few higher ones are; but the vast majority that we already have aren't. Double sharp (talk) 13:51, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

• Second choice. I'm generally against the use of a parenthetical disambiguator when a more natural disambiguator exists, but I don't want to get into a month-long debate over this issue. I'm happy with this as a compromise solution if that's what it takes to get these moved somewhere more suitable. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 09:23, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
• Second choice - Though I really support using CE, I believe the conflict between the usage of AD and CE can't be resolved so let (year) be a substitute.Your welcome | Democratics ^Talk→ Be a guest 09:25, 10 October 2016 (UTC)
• Second choice – I would prefer consistency with the BC years, but I'd rather not let the AD/CE conflict block these eminently reasonable page moves. Double sharp (talk) 11:43, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose per the rationale I gave in the AD section, i.e. "using 'X (year)' is a poor compromise, because it is ambiguous, as it could equally refer to e.g. 1 BC (BCE) and AD 1 (CE)".— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 18:13, 18 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose per Godsy's rationale. 1 (year) suffers both from incomplete disambiguation (because it refers to AD 1/1 CE and 1 BC equally, in the same way that 32 (temperature) refers equally to the freezing point of water and to a warm summer day) and from unnecessary disambiguation (because the title can be naturally disambiguated with AD/CE). Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:23, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

  Also, to be pedantic, 1 (year) is still ambiguous with year 1 of the Hebrew, Thai, etc. calendars. Certes (talk) 17:53, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

• (year) - This could easily resolve the AD/CE conflict. The Ninja5 Empire (Talk) 08:45, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose the oxymoron of using an ambiguous parenthetical for disambiguation--John Cline (talk) 14:26, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
• Second choice, if we can find a way to make 1 B.C.E and 1 C.E have different titles. Still better than the religious B.C / A.D. ThePlatypusofDoom (talk) 16:11, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
• Strong support for readability & understandability for our readers. --SI 01:28, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
• Strong support Other options are contentious, but the subject is clearly a year, so (year) seems obvious as the distinguishing feature. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Almonaster (talk • contribs) 10:18, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
• Support as a slightly uneasy compromise because of the intractability of the AD/CE dispute. I'd be perfectly happy if one or other of AD or CE was successful in this RFC, but I don't think that will happen. — This, that and the other (talk) 00:54, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

  Not to go against your !vote or myself, but according to wbm1058, The decade-old Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/BCE-CE Debate seems to be the definitive discussion about this and claimed that "AD" is stable. A number of AD supporters are unwilling to budge, so I don't think "(year)" has any sort of consensus either (which is not an invalid outcome per the previous RfC above) — Andy W. (talk) 01:17, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

  Surely we need to wait and see what the results of this particular discussion are before we can conclude whether '"(year)" any sort of consensus either'? — This, that and the other (talk) 05:06, 29 October 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose. Strangely enough, we don't have an article 1 AH or 2 AH (i.e. Islamic calendar), but if we did, I'll tell you one place they should not be sending the reader, and that is anywhere near 1 AD or 2 AD. Wnt (talk) 17:41, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
• Support as a compromise between the AD/CE dispute. Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 11:43, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose per Wbm1058's comment. --TerraCodes ^{(talk to me)} 21:27, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose per Ivanvector. SmokeyJoe's proposal only kicks the can down the road. If we cannot decide the AD/CE debate then those 1-100 articles should remain years and not numbers. Chris Troutman (talk) 02:10, 6 November 2016 (UTC)
• Support as first choice. There are valid arguments for both AD and CE, but this is as neutral as can be and understandable to all.  Sandstein  11:33, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

Further discussion (or other)

Please place lengthy arguments here, or if you had a different suggestion

Julian year

• I initially feel the disambiguation should be (Julian year) opposed to simply (year).--John Cline (talk) 09:04, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  Why use the older Julian year rather than the modern Gregorian year? wbm1058 (talk) 16:32, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  I am not averse to using (Gregorian year), introduced in the 1500s, as long as they directly correspond with years 1 through 100 in Julian years, in contemporary use throughout that period. I simply am not aware of its affect on retrospective years. If they do correspond, I agree that (Gregorian year) would be a better term for disambiguation. Thank you for inquiring in this regard.--John Cline (talk) 17:07, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  So the difference with the Gregorian is that every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100 but not divisible by 400. Thus, the first 100 years are identical and the first difference in calendars is that Julian has a February 29, 100 and Gregorian does not. We didn't see this difference in year 2000 because that's divisible by 400. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:28, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  I don't recall exactly where in Wikipedia:WikiProject Years it is specified, but it is specified that years before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar are Julian years or prolectic Julian years. Even if the range were changed to 1000 (or 999), (Julian year) would be a proper disambiguator. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 21:28, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  @Arthur Rubin: wikt:prolectic? I see, we don't retroactively rename the calendar used at the time, or adjust Julian dates to be Gregorian dates. Not that it makes that much difference – even today, the calendars are only 13 days apart. So, we might only err in assigning a year to an event that happened in late December, which really happened in early January (depending on one's POV regarding the "correctness" of those calendars). wbm1058 (talk) 22:08, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  I see: The Julian calendar day Thursday, 4 October 1582 was followed by the first day of the Gregorian calendar, Friday, 15 October 1582. I like it when I learn something via participating in these debates. That means that, e.g. October 9, 1582 is an invalid date as that day never existed? Is 1582 a Julian year, A Gregorian year, or both?

  Wait a minute, now I'm confused. I thought the Julian calendar was getting ahead of the seasons, because it never skipped any leap years. So, wouldn't they have needed to back the calendar up, and repeat several days? wbm1058 (talk) 22:29, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  Julian calendar never skipped any leap years... so "catching up" meant retroactively skipping "leap days" that should have been skipped... if you skip Feb. 29, then March 1 come a day earlier... in this case, October 15 came ten days earlier because they retroactively skipped 10 days... got it. wbm1058 (talk) 23:18, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  Thank you Arthur Rubin. I had just noticed this at MOS:JG where it does in fact say: "dates before 15 October 1582 (when the Gregorian calendar was first adopted in some places) are normally given in the Julian calendar. The Julian day and month should not be converted to the Gregorian calendar".--John Cline (talk) 22:39, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  Answering one of my own questions: Proleptic Gregorian calendar. wbm1058 (talk) 22:36, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  In other words, Wikipedia doesn't use the proleptic Gregorian calendar, per the MOS. What about the proleptic Julian calendar? wbm1058 (talk) 23:18, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

  What about the years where Rome was Gregorian, but England was still Julian? wbm1058 (talk) 23:18, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Suffix or prefix

Per Anno Domini, traditionally, English followed Latin usage by placing the "AD" abbreviation before the year number. This convention comes from grammatical usage. Anno 500 means "in the year 500"; anno domini 500 means "in the year 500 of Our Lord". Just as "500 in the year" is not good English syntax, neither is 500 AD; whereas "AD 500" preserves syntactic order when translated.

References

3rd (4th, 5th, etc.) RfC

If this RfC develops consensus for a name, we'll need a 3rd RfC to determine if the move is to take place. There are at least two editors who oppose the move unless their specific choice of the target is used, and they have different choices. (One of the editors is me.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 17:13, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

@Arthur Rubin: I believe that sort of decision is up to the uninvolved closer. Folks who support only a certain title could add to a lack of consensus, which isn't an improbable (or undesirable, depending on where you stand) conclusion. I hope that if the closer evaluates that there is consensus though, give a sensible amount of time for template changes to be tested before any pages get moved. And for the record, I'm slightly opposed to another follow-up RfC (but note my "COI" oppose !vote in the first RfC). — Andy W. (talk) 17:41, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Why change the number article names?

I strongly support the major idea that a user looking for 100 would want to see the number article, but surely this can be done by redirect, leaving all the number articles at (number). Likewise, I would like to see all year articles at (year) or whatever we decide on.

In other words, keep the article names consistent but use redirection to fit the most appropriate targets.

Is there some technical problem I am not aware of? Almonaster (talk) 10:33, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

Sounds like a WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT argument, which I don't believe we've discussed previously. — Andy W. (talk) 20:19, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

When an article is the primary topic for its natural title then it's normal to name an article with that topic and no qualifiers. But then number and year articles aren't normal - I don't think anyone would argue that the primary topic of the term "1" is the year AD 1. WP:ATDAB says that the name can be its title without modification (my emphasis; I was expecting something stronger). WP:PRECISE (just above WP:ATDAB) even gives examples of using a modifier when the title is totally unambiguous. Certes (talk) 00:05, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

• I'll say what I've said above again here because I think it is important: "using 'X (year)' is a poor compromise, because it is ambiguous, as it could equally refer to e.g. 1 BC (BCE) and AD 1 (CE)", or a year within any other calendar era system for that matter.— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 19:32, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

  Which (a) many others disagree with, and are discussing elsewhere; and (b) has absolutely nothing to do with keeping the number articles consistent, which is the intended topic of this section. First para amended to clarify that. Almonaster (talk) 23:49, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

  Hi Almonaster, if you search "2015", do you expect the number or the year? — Andy W. (talk) 23:51, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

  In that case, the year. For smaller numbers I would want the number, which was the point of the original RFC. We're now discussing how best to achieve that. Almonaster (talk) 11:41, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

The status quo and consistency

As the years predating the "year(s) of the Lord" (i.e. anno Domini) already reside at its counterpart BC, if there is consensus for a move, but not a title, it could be argued that moving the year articles up for discussion here to AD is maintaining the current system that is already in use.— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 19:32, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

@Godsy: Perhaps it could, but I believe the closer should keep in mind the closing statement of the first RfC above: the consensus is that the pages 1-100 will be moved only if a consensus can be reached as to the name of the articles — Andy W. (talk) 00:52, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton

This discussion is similar to the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton that is currently happening in the United States. People have strong opinions both ways. The initials are similar (AD=Anno Donald, CE=Clinton Era). This RFC might even close on Election Day. Did anybody else notice this? Timo3 17:20, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the chuckle, Timo3! — JFG ^talk 09:51, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

What is this article's topic?

I have boldly reverted this good-faith edit which added information about an event in Minguo year 1, because I think this article's topic is the events of a 12-month period 2,015 years ago, which many of us know as AD 1 but which goes by different names in other cultures rather than the events of various 12-month periods which share the property of being called "1" in some calendar or other. The start of the Minguo calendar is a candidate for inclusion in 1912, or at least January 1912#January 1, 1912 (Monday). We could consider adding 1912 to One (disambiguation) and/or redirecting 1 (Minguo year) to 1912, so that readers who use the Minguo calendar can easily find the events of the year they call "1". Other opinions are very welcome, and I'll not be unhappy if someone reinstates the edit. Certes (talk) 09:24, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

The article could legitimately point to "Year 1s" of other calendars as a convenience to readers, but in no way should it include information about events in those years. One article per Earth revolution around the Sun is enough :) — JFG ^talk 15:33, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

Agree. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 20:01, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

1 symbolizes The God

One of the names of Allah is Al Wahed, which means The One. Veyselperu (talk) 13:40, 18 October 2016 (UTC)