Talk:Era (geology)

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Where are Holocene and Pleistocene?[edit]

My understanding is that the most recent eras are Holocene (now) and Pleistocene. Why aren’t they listed here? --MadScientistX11 (talk) 21:14, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Pleistocene and Holocene are epochs, not eras. They are in the Quaternary period of the Cainozoic era. DuncanHill (talk) 21:24, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for clearing that up. BTW, since I left that comment I found this page: Geologic_time_scale IMO, that page covers everything in this page and much, much more and has 41 references where as this one has 0. I don't really see the point of having this page when the other page covers the same material and does it so much better. My recommendation would be to nominate this page for deletion. Do you agree? --MadScientistX11 (talk) 22:19, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
No I don't agree. This article does need references, but I think it makes sense to have articles about the various subdivisions of geological time, and the terms used in it, so that we can link to era, epoch, period, etc as necessary. DuncanHill (talk) 08:54, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
But eras are covered very well in Geologic_time_scale, IMO far better than in this article. Even if this was a good article I would advocate merging it into the Geologic_time_scale article for consistency because it makes sense to describe the difference between an Era. Eon, and Period, perhaps having a subsection in Geologic_time_scale on eras that then pointed to this article for details. But since I don't see anything in this article that isn't already covered (and covered much better) in Geologic_time_scale I think deletion makes sense. We can always create a synonym for eras that points to the time scale article (or to the Terminology section in that article which explains Eras). As a user when I look something up and the first place on Wikipedia I get pointed to is some very incomplete poorly referenced article (which is what happened to me when I was trying to understand some terminology in a journal article) it gives me a very bad impression of the quality of the encyclopedia. Unless you have a better argument for keeping this article I'm going to nominate it for deletion and see what the community thinks. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 17:19, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think that we should keep this article. The geologic timescale article helps explain how all the different subdivision of time relate to each other, but it's good in my view to have an article on just this topic as well. Mikenorton (talk) 20:48, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, that makes sense. Especially now that there are some references here and that there are links from here to Geologic_time_scale and from that article back to this one. Won't nominate for deletion. Thanks for adding the references. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 20:04, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]