From votes on the subject I would say Wikipedia opinion is about evenly divided, thus the style guide which permits both usages.
Fred
On Jun 20, 2005, at 10:53 AM, Fastfission wrote:
By the way, on this question in specific: I can't search the full Web of Knowledge, apparently (I'm only getting the Web of Science), but it seems in the results I am getting (and logically speaking) that "BC" can stand for a lot of things besides a date usage, whereas BCE seems to be primarily only used in designating eras. Additionally I'm having a hard time telling if searches for "BC" don't also bring up articles which use "BCE" as well.
Which indicates only that if one were to use a quantitative search for these sorts of things (differentiating between one usage and another), one has to make sure we understand how the engines in particular function, as well as thinking about the queries in question (I've had people give #s for Google Scholar searches which simply wouldn't give the information they were trying to get, just because they weren't thought out that well). There's also the bigger question about whether quantity matters more than quality, but that's even harder to parse out.
(In any event, I don't care either way. I don't think there needs to be a universal policy on this; I think it should fall under the English/American spellings clause. But alas..)
FF
On 6/20/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
So why does web of knowledge throw up far more results for BC than BCE?
-- geni
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