[WikiEN-l] Re: Announcing a policy proposal

Tue May 17 23:24:31 UTC 2005

(There must have ben some problem with a mail server somewhere. I
received 4 copies of this email, none made it to the list, & I've
been seeing a number of responses to emails I never saw the
first time around.)

On Tue, 17 May 2005, Skyring wrote:

> On 5/17/05, Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 16 May 2005, Skyring wrote:
>
> > >
> > > CE/BCE is already a standard in many disciplines. Make it so in WP.
> > >
> > And here we can see several reasons why this proposal stirs up so much
> > resistance.
> >
> > * The assertion that because the style "CE/BCE" is "common usage", it
> > should be exclusive usage. A confusion of categories: is there any proof
> > that if an academic or scientist uses the style "AD/BC", that the
> > editor will change it or reject the submission?
>
> We're talking about a standard usage in a single publication. I make
> no doubt that many organisations and publications have similar
> standards and will edit submitted articles to conform to the standard
> unless there is a good reason not to do so.
>
No, I think you mean *you* are. And you don't offer proof: just confidence
that your assertion is correct. So let's take a look at the possible
evidence, courtesy of Google.

I spent a couple of hours last night with Google, first searching for
"style manual", then two searches within the results: first for "AD BC",
then for "CE BCE" & looked at the first 20 pages returned. I discarded
duplicates, links to Wikipedia (which appeared in both sorts) & Wikipedia
mirrors, then studied -- I did not count -- the opinions of the remaining
29 sites.

(A bone for those of you who are growing tired of this debate, but have
read this far: the Iraq Museum's Internation Open Encyclopedia mirrors
Wikipedia's article [[Common Era]]. Not only do they give credit to WP,
but they also direct readers to Wikipedia to make edits there, content
to show only the most recent copy. I thought that was rather clever.)

While the pages this query produce do not exclusively report from academic
sites (only 22 samples are clearly either from university or academic
sites), it did return pages from a variety of different sites, all of whom
have given this subject some thought, & it provides a rather intreguing
snapshot of opinions on this issue. In brief, this shows that most writers
still standardize on AD/BC, in a manner that suggests they accept it
without any thought of the existence of an alternative by a margin
approaching 2-1; & it shows that those who standardize on CE/BCE are
far more vocal that other people should use it.

The details are as follows. Not all of these 28 pages that concern the
style of its contributors explicitly state whether papers should use either
AD/BC or CE/BCE; only 11 explicitly offered guidance over which style
should be used. (I guess this issue is not as important in academia as
some think it is.) For most, I had to infer what they expected from
the examples the guide provided: if the guide only talks about how to
use "CE/BCE", I scored it as "implicitly for" that style; if the guide
only talks about how to use "AD/BC", I scored it as "implicitly for"
that style.

The results broke down this way: 11 were implicitly for "AD/BC", including
the University of Hawai'i (which I believe has a multicultural student
body) & Middlebury College (which also includes a section about bias-free
content. There was only one site which insisted on using "AD/BC",
commenting "Use 'C.E.' and 'BCE' only when you're joking." (This
comment can be found at
http://response.adv100.com/responsemag/static/staticHtml.jsp?id=31822 --
If this comment offends you, gripe to them, not me.) Because this did
not appear to be an academic site, I almost tossed this response out,
but decided to leave it in after examining all of the results. Even though
I felt the writer would be happier in a place where showing concern for
other people's sensitivities wasn't important -- like the weblog Little
Green Footballs -- I came to understand his POV.

There were 3 guides that showed preference to AD/BC, yet allowed CE/BCE
if the contributor used it; the intent of this stand seemed to give
the individual contributor permission to exercise her/his best judgement.

Four more guides showed no preference for either style, & only provided
guidance on how to use both correctly. One guide -- the American
Anthropogical Association -- provided examples for both on different
web pages, which made my tally a little harder.

One site implicitly assumed contributors would use CE/BCE: the Tibetan &
Himalayan Digital Library.

And 7 guides explicitly required CE/BCE -- although two sites addressed
submissions for books under production for the same editor. And one
college -- the Office of Publications for the College of Staten Island --
insisted that C.E. be placed before the year, not after. (I thought about
removing one of these as a duplicate, but instead decided to leave the
snide comment about CE/BCE in the count.) I was more than a little
surprised at that twist; although I be surprised if that was some
form of protest, it could also be a clue to the erudition behind this dictum.

In short, while the style CE/BCE has many supporters in academe, neither
all academics nor the majority of them support it. Some people may think
the majority *do* support it because its supporters are more vocal; based
on this quick survey, more users of AD/BC are willing to allow others to
use CE/BCE than the other way around, & could be seen as more tolerant
or understanding of other POVs.

But then, I may have misunderstood Skyring's point: that journals must
standardize on one style. If this is the case, then either it does not apply
to Wikipedia -- where in many cases articles are written in different
styles -- or is irrelevant because Wikipedia currently insists on the
same style being used through the article.

Geoff