[WikiEN-l] Re: Arbitration Committee Seeking Comment

Sun Jun 19 15:52:16 UTC 2005

>From: Jon <thagudearbh at yahoo.co.uk>
>
>Assuming you're not holding my newbie edits 9 months ago against me, I very 
>quickly stopped
>changing articles from BCE/CE to BC/AD notation.

What about attempting to change the MOS to reflect your views months after 
you joined Wikipedia, and had already been involved in conflicts at the 
Common Era 
article?[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_%28dates_and_numbers%29/proposed_revision&diff=prev&oldid=9603439]

>What I continued doing was (1) reverting
>those who were changing BC/AD notation to BCE/CE notation (which 
>presumably, if you are
>neutral, you would agree with on the grounds that they shouldn't have 
>changed the notation
>in the first place); (2) making articles consistent. When I first came to 
>WP most articles that
>used BCE/CE notation also used BC/AD notation. It makes sense (and indeed 
>should be
>regarded as a good edit) to copyedit those articles so that they use one 
>and only one notation.

That might be a reasonable argument except that you appeared to use any 
excuse to convert an article to BC/AD notation.  You used "consistency" as 
an excuse to convert an article that had one use of BC and eight of 
BCE,[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bihar&diff=prev&oldid=10934688] 
or one that had 10 uses of BC/AD and 19 uses of 
BCE/CE,[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Silk_Road&diff=prev&oldid=10939297] 
to all BC/AD format.  If a stub used BC, but the subsequent re-write into a 
proper article used BCE, you used "original usage" as an excuse to switch it 
back; yet if an article originally used BCE as notation, and subsquently 
grew to contain both usages, you used "consistency" to switch it to BC.

>Wouldn't a barnstar be more appropriate than approbation?

Perhaps if you had truly been even-handed in your attempts to support the 
MOS.

Jay.