Board Thread:Wiki discussion/@comment-6517-20190219121823/@comment-18014300-20190221114005

Jasca Ducato wrote: Whilst I completely understand your points Sol, the suggestion of 1,000 CE as a cut off is for purely practical reasons. Without a cut-off, we'd end up having to write every date up to today with "CE" at the end. Whilst this is not a problem per se, it is somewhat cumbersome to have to write "21 February 2019 CE." My suggestion of 1,000 CE as the cut-off date was given so as to avoid any bias towards particular cultural relevance.

As you yourself pointed out, different cultures consider different years CE to be the start of a "new age", and there is no way we would be able to find a specific date that satisfies all cultures, and we can't have multiple cut-off dates depending on the article subject in question as that would be, simply put, anarchic. On the otherhand, almost all cultures globally recognise and utilise (to varying degrees) the Common Era dating system, and given that 1,000 CE is, rounded down, the mid-point between BCE and today, I considered it to be the most practical cut-off point. Your reasoning is a bit clearer, but while it is true that different cultures all have different milestone dates, it is not an issue to find a specific date that satisfies them all because our intent is not to find a specific date but to round to the nearest dawn of a century (e.g. 500 CE, 1000 CE, etc.), and my point is that 500 CE adequately satisfies as a universal approximation. I should clarify that I do think that matching the cut-off date with a new era is not really the purpose nor should be the primary criteria. Rather, it is just that pushing that aside, choosing a date purely based on practical reasons would still allow for dates like 100 CE and 500 CE aside from 1000 CE, and I think that among these, 500 CE sounds the most reasonable for reasons I have previously stated.

Eras are only a factor in so much as a general guideline for how likely our audience is to feel that a date given is ambiguously BCE or CE because it would be unlikely for a reader to think an event set during the High Middle Ages is in BCE, for example. I suppose 1000 CE then just honestly feels a little too far into a period where I don't that confusion would be made, if that makes sense. I know this really shouldn't be that big of a deal, so pardon me if it may seem like I am making it out like it is.