Talk:Timeline of the near future

Public Domain

Ex. "2034: James Bond comes into the public domain" A couple accounts simmilar to this - where are the references? -- MelbourneStar☆ ^{(talk to me)} 05:06, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. Shouldn't every Wikipedia article have verifiable sources? An article like this, to me, seems calling for all sort of speculations. --JanusDC (talk) 10:52, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

Prediction of legislative activity or inaction is folly. Nothing says that the length of copyright protection cannot be extended indefinitely or made retroactive. As it is, the term of expiration of copyright protection in the United States is 95 years, having been extended from 74 years in the 1990s. Thus "all compositions of George Gershwin enter the public domain in the USA in 2033" depends upon the assumption that the term of copyright protection remains as it is in early 2017.Pbrower2a (talk) 12:01, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Composers, authors, architects, and artists

Although tastes in literature, painting, architecture, and musical composition can change over time, some tastes seem stable enough to merit recognition of the potential of exploiting the commemorations of creative people. Military reality can destroy empires; technological change can make certain forms of wealth irrelevant. Political entities? The standing of Abraham Lincoln obviously depends upon the survival of the United States of America. This explains why a "Lenin sesquicentennial", which would depend upon the survival of a political order that no longer exists is unlikely to happen even if as late as the early 1980 such seemed an inevitability to most people then living.

I had composers because I had seen much exploitation of centennials, sesquicentennials, bicentennials, and tricentennials of composers in the recording business. It is highly unlikely that knowledgeable people will lose their taste for Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Bartók, or Stravinsky. Mozart is no fad; appreciation of the works of these composers is not tied to the survival of a political order. Literature? Are there any Latin authors who deserve the equivalent of a bi-millennium? Literature is closely linked to the culture around it, including language.

Franz Josef Haydn and George Washington were born in the same year. The renown of Haydn has outlasted that of the political order in which he lived (the Hapsburg monarchy); that of George Washington cannot outlast the United States of America should it disintegrate or be otherwise dissolved. Thus I would have a "Haydn tricentennial" (Haydn is arguably the most important composer ever because he created music to which practically everything subsequently written has an origin, but there is no trend to his composing styles) and not a "Washington tricentennial" on the list.

Half-millennium of Shakespeare... that might be the ticket. Pbrower2a (talk) 12:01, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Hong Kong and Macau

I removed claim that the One country, two systems policy will end in the 2040s because it had no source, and it is contradicted by the article itself, which states: "Hong Kong and Macau [...] can retain their established system under a high degree of autonomy for at least 50 years after reunification. What will happen after 2047 (Hong Kong) and 2049 (Macau) has never been publicly stated." This entirely leaves open the possibility that the policy will be extended before its expiry dates, so keeping this claim here is clear original research. In my opinion, for this to remain on this page, sources must be provided that show that there is a consensus among experts that policies will not be extended. Trinitresque (talk) 01:16, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

European-Americans becoming the minority in the USA

It is possible that, in view of children of mixed origin that have very slight sub-Saharan, First Peoples (mostly from Latin America), or Asian ancestry that there will be redefinition that negates the one-drop rule for persons who look undeniably 'white'. One cannot predict a legal definition for more than the near future.

Anniversaries

I don't believe any country anniversaries should be listed. Comments? — Arthur Rubin (talk) 22:43, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

2029 Merge

• Oppose - Just for the record I oppose this merge for consistency reasons, the line appears to have been drawn at 2039. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 19:32, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Merges

I have undone the mergers as no discussion appears to have been started regarding the matter. An RfC can always be started for additional input as the proposed changes are disputed. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 19:43, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

@Knowledgekid87: Greetings! WP:MERGEINIT says boldly merging pages without advance discussion where it looks obvious that's a good idea is standard practice, and this seemed to be a sleepy backwater where few editors were interested, and contributions are few and far between. Sometimes I've been putting merge tags on the next page to be cleaned up before I do it, but sometimes I've just been merging without tagging because they go so quickly.

Serendipodous asked on my user talk page:

On a related note, what is the end goal here? Are you planning to merge all the future dates between 2040 and 3000? If so then fine, but it should be consistent. Right now it's a mess. Also, it's stretching the definition to consider the year 3000 the "near future." Oh, and, given that, minus fictional references, the future millennium articles now consist entirely of astronomical events, and that you have now created a separate page for astronomical events, are you planning to merge them into Timeline of the far future? Serendi^podous 22:38, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Yes, there are lots of year, decade, century, and millennium pages that are very short lists, which I've been cleaning up and merging. They overlap a lot with each other and the timeline articles. Things are in an inconsistent state right now as you both pointed out because it takes longer than a single editing session to do I've been moving everything outer space from now to 10000 to List of future astronomical events, since there are potentially a very large or very small number depending on how much detail one goes into, and depending on the reader they are either very interesting or completely irrelevant to life on Earth. I did not create that list; User:Strangenight created it in 2014. It has been sitting around since then not getting many edits and being somewhat redundant to the by-time-period articles. Timeline of the far future contains a mix of things after that. Serendipodous, as you were concerned about maintenance burden, this merging should make it a lot easier to watch future-oriented timelines for inappropriate additions, and having one copy instead of two or three for each time period should prevent them from diverging or having to be updated in several places. I've already seen several cases where one copy of an event is well-referenced and a second copy has a "citation needed" tag.

It looks like 3rd millennium to 10th millennium are all short and need to be merged.I was doing that into Timeline of the near future because there's no Timeline of the intermediate future and I was a bit unsure if that was a thing I should create. I agree it stretches the meaning of "near" probably too much. Probably a better way of doing it is to simply use numbers, like Timeline of the future (3000-9999) or something like that; it would also work for 2040-2999 or whatever the "near" span should be.

21st century is now exclusively events that have already happened, but 22nd century to 30th century are or were short, and I was in the process of merging all of them into this article, minus astronomical events which I'm merging to the list. It is a bit weird that both 3rd millennium and 21st century have already started, and the former is future-oriented and the latter is past-oriented; the proposed mergers would mean that we only have century and millennium articles with events that have already happened, which would be more consistent.

2030s to 2090s are short enough to be merged here, especially after removing astronomical events. The other obvious alternative merge target would be 21st century, but as I mentioned that's already been refocused on events that have already happened.

I merged 2030 to 2039 into 2030s since they were all short. That leaves only 2021 to 2029 as future year articles. I can't merge them into 2020s because that has already been refocused on events that have already happened, and the same with 21st century which they are also a part of. Looking through them now, after cleanup and extraction of astronomical events, I think they will be short enough to merge into Timeline of the near future. Depending on feelings about length, we could also split "Timeline of the near future" into several articles in different ways based on length, such as 2021-2099 (remainder of 21st century)/2100-2999 (remainder of 3rd millenium)/3000-10000 (everything else before far future).

Anyway, I'm hoping to end up with a consistent pattern of articles after the merging is done, and reduce the amount of clicking around readers would have to do to navigate future timelines. Let me know what your thoughts are. Does this whole plan sound good? Are there parts that are undisputed which I can carry on with while we plan out the remainder? Anything I'm missing?

Thanks, Beland (talk) 23:24, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Any un-sourced content should be removed and there is room for debate on what "expert" sources can be considered per WP:CRYSTAL. "Predictions, speculation, forecasts and theories stated by reliable, expert sources or recognized entities in a field may be included, though editors should be aware of creating undue bias to any specific point-of-view"

That being said.... please be aware that we had a discussion here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Years/Archive 12#Future decades on where to do decades with 2040 as a cutoff point. Here are some pros and cons with your proposal:

Proposal	Pros	Cons	Impact
Create a "Timeline of the near future" for x years	• Combines all of the stub year articles  • Creates a counter to Timeline of the far future	• Breaks the consistency of by year articles  • Is not as easily managed (long list).	Depends on what years are included

I will continue reading your rationales on the years for exclusion/inclusion... but I think we all need to agree on that sticking point. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 23:41, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Personally, I find one long (but not huge) list much easier to maintain than dozens of small, overlapping lists, so I disagree with that "con". I don't understand what the con "}Breaks the consistency of by year articles" means. If all the future year articles are merged and all the past years have articles, that seems more consistent to me than having some future years in their own articles and some not, which is the current situation. The previous discussion does not give any particular reason why the individual years 2030-2049 shouldn't be merged. Arthur Rubin said "arguments could be made" against the 2040s, but that was part of the proposal anyway. There was no explanation as to why the 2030s were not part of the proposal, and WildEric19 seemed open to the idea. After my merge, 2030s was 15.8k, which is not much more than the 12.3k of 2040s. According to Xtools, 2040s is at .5k of readable prose and 2030s is at .16k, which Wikipedia:Article size recommends merging just as a matter of length. (And much of the prose is boilerplate that is repeated across articles.) -- Beland (talk) 00:43, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

@Knowledgekid87: Would you care to clarify what you're objecting to? It appears you've reverted merging of decades into this article and object to 2029 being merged here. Would you support the future year article merges given that I was intending to do 2021 thru 2029? Do you object to the decade merges on procedural grounds only or do you have an actual objection on the merits to merging all of them here? -- Beland (talk) 05:33, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Have you looked into expanding the articles first or are you confident that these articles will stay as stubs? What I mean about the break in consistency is that we have a List of years, a List of decades, and a List of centuries. All of these articles are about events that have happened, but follow a similar format. Why would we leave a stub article for say.... 1280s BC but not have one for the 2040s? - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 18:08, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

@Knowledgekid87: I expect most of the future event lists to be smaller, both because they have astronomical events that can be listed separately, and because here and there they list things that are unlikely to happen. To take 2040s as an example, that article has been around since 2002 and should be relatively mature by now. I think these are generally short because there is just not much we can say with any certainty about what will happen that far in the future. I'm sure we'll need to start adding lots of stuff some time in 2039 and certainly once stuff actually starts happening in 2040, but that will result in de-redirecting one article per year. As for the lists of years, decades, and centuries, there's no particular need for those to go into the future if there are no future year, decade, century, or millennium articles. They only go as far into the past as there are non-redirect articles to link to. As it stands now, I would definitely merge 1280s BC into 13th century BC. I haven't checked all the articles, but we probably only need centuries, not decades, for the entire 2nd millennium BC. Maybe there's more to say because we actually know what's happened, but very few records have survived, dating is often imprecise, and those have also been around since 2002 and should be mature by now. -- Beland (talk) 03:17, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Beland:At this point I think it's fair to assume he's not coming back. Just go ahead and do it. Serendi^podous 20:33, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Merging 2029

I was under the impression that it had been agreed that "the future" began in 2040. Given that it is already 2020, it seems a bit drastic to merge 2029 into this page. Serendi^podous 14:29, 24 October 2020 (UTC)

I've already addressed that in the previous section, and you told me to go ahead with the merge up there. -- Beland (talk) 04:33, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

@Beland: Hm. OK. But 2029 is only a little over eight years away, and I've been editing Wikipedia longer than that. On another note, why are there so many astronomomical events on this page? I was under the impression that they would be moved to the astronomical events page. I was also, perhaps mistakenly, under the impression that this page would become Third millennium. Seems simpler to have this page with a few hat notes than a stub whose only job is to send you here. Serendi^podous 22:23, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

Yes, one article per year is either going to have to be created or completely rewritten, merge or no merge, because...time. The astronomical events haven't been cleaned out yet; feel free to pitch in. Unfortunately the third millennium includes both future and past content, so I'm not sure it's the best destination for this content, but I'm open to discussion. -- Beland (talk) 02:18, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Here is how I would incorporate the material from Third millennium into this article. Serendi^podous 15:12, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

That works. -- Beland (talk) 17:35, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

OK. Done. But I don't have the authority to move an article to an already extant article. Serendi^podous 20:24, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

In this case, anyone can do so by copy and paste, since both pages have significant edit history. Beland (talk) 22:19, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Merging 2030s

@MB: What was the rationale for reverting the merge of 2030s into this article? There was no edit summary. Thanks! -- Beland (talk) 22:24, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Beland, I have no rational - it was clearly unintentional. I don't remember if I was attempting to make a minor change or what, but I did not mean to revert the merge. Please go ahead and fix it. Sorry for the trouble. MB 22:49, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Beland All the same, I find it difficult to believe that NONE of the material from the original 2030s page can be moved here. Serendi^podous 23:11, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

Who is proposing that? -- Beland (talk) 01:22, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

OK. I didn't see it when it was merged. Serendi^podous 02:41, 2 November 2020 (UTC)