On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 10:11:38 -0400, Fennec Foxen fennec@gmail.com wrote:
Before Christ, or Before Christian Era? Decisions decisions. ;)
Believe it or not, there are a great many people who get deeply offended by one or the other of the conventions. (And BCE is also -- and probably more often -- taken to mean "Before Common Era".) Also, just FYI, the "BCE" usage stems back to at least the 17th century (Rabbinic scholars) so this isn't just modern Political Correctness run amok.
Note: wikitech-l is almost certainly NOT the place to discuss the relative merits of the BCE convention... if you want to do that, I'd suggest doing so here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_%28dates_and_num...
Personally, I don't really care one way or the other (I have all my dates formats set to ISO anyway). But I do care about letting OTHER people choose to view dates using the format that is most preferable / least offensive to them.
In any event, I've completed the task of creating the necessary redirects from the BCE versions of dates to the appropriate articles for their BC counterparts. I'm currently going through the several hundred pages I've found so far that use the old-style [[301 BC|301 BCE]] date links and converting them to use the new-style [[301 BCE]] method. (If anyone wants to help with that, you can find the list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wclark/BCE_fix )
Once I have some time (probably next couple days) I'll start poking through the code more so that I can create some diffs to implement the BCE option for date formatting.
-Bill Clark