On 9/5/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I think that the NPOV argument is rock-solid, it isn't NPOV to refer to years as AD. I remember hearing a debate a while ago that people had on the Arabic wikipedia. I don't know if it was a big thing, or if it was even that big of a deal, but I think it serves well to put some perspective on why people might not like AD. The thing was that on the Arabic wp, people tended to write PBUH in Arabic everytime a martyr or prophet was mentioned. Incase somebody doesn't know, PBUH means Peace be upon him. One could argue for allowing that under NPOV using basically the same argument that's used for AD, saying that it's "common practice" and using that convention less people will be confused/offended /whatever.
There's a huge difference here. Use of PBUH is limited to Muslims. Use of AD is not limited to Christians (anyone who says it is needs to check which orifice they are speaking from).
The problem really is that making a policy here requires us to make a decision. Yes, *us*. This is enormously different to normal article writing, where we just report what others have said. We have to make a decision about which is correct, yet we can't, because to do so would be to break our principle of neutrality (though not NPOV, which is related but different).
In short, we're stuffed.