Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates)


 * See also: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) (and archives)

Article for each date

 * Topic imported from Village pump (policy)

Is see user Pcb21 is making many new pages with titles like February 27, 2003. He is breaking up the February 2003 articles. Is this current policy? -- SGBailey 17:12, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
 * The most recent month pages are getting far too long, and many now appear on Special:Longpages, so breaking them up seems reasonable. That said, some thought needs to go into how these pages are organized and linked to. - SimonP 19:34, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
 * This came up on Articles for deletion/January 1, 2005, and there was no consensus. I agree with Simon that we could use a discussion about how best to do this before people start making radical changes. Christopher Parham (talk) 20:51, 12 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Additional problems include the fact that mislinked dates, using February 27, 2003 instead of February 27, 2003 are indistinguishable or nearly so on the page, if it weren't for the fact that preferences don't work with the former.
 * Another problem is the fact that there is no redirect from 27 February 2003.
 * Some of the problems of overcrowded and overlinked to pages could be alleviated by removing the screwball connection between preferences and ordinary linking. Can't someone get the developers to come up with some independent scheme to make date preferences work?  Gene Nygaard 12:03, 13 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Drag it to RFC maybe? Radiant_ &gt;|&lt; 17:17, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
 * And/or discuss at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) - I started Naming conventions (numbers and dates) a few hours ago, as the result of a revived discussion on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles), thinking it would be better to treat the whole scope of dates and numbers in article names in a separate guideline (instead of the "years in titles" guideline proposal, that was IMHO not really coming out of the "proposal" stage); also separate from Manual of Style (dates and numbers), that does not give many clues on article naming. Anyway, for the time being I copy this topic to Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates) - maybe also list the new guideline proposal on current surveys. --Francis Schonken 17:39, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Much better - thank you, now I understand it. - Haukur Þorgeirsson

Is there a policy discussion still going on about this? If so, where?

Just for the record, I support individual pages, though some dates should probably be disambiguation pages with (Gregorian) or (Julian) appended.

RandomP 01:36, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

guidelines and practice don't match for olympic games and others
The current guideline states: (quote)


 * The recommended format for separate articles on events that recur at regular intervals is as follows:" "Where:
 *  is the existing article title (non-redirect) that describes the event;
 *   is used only as a disambiguator, giving no more detail than is needed for disambiguation, which would be a year in most cases.

But the actual format used for events is. The article Summer Olympic Games (1920), given as example in the guideline, is at 1920 Summer Olympics, and there is not even a redirect! I found the same with Winter olympics and Alpine skiing World Cup. For Football World Cups, is used, as in Football World Cup 2002. The Expo articles are inconsistent, cf. Expo '70, 1982 World's Fair, Expo 67, Expo 2005.

The only consistency seems to be that the guideline is not used.

Four different proposed solutions:
 * 1) Abolish guideline and use official name of event, i.e. the name the organizers use
 * 2) Rewrite guideline to match majority of articles; leave events with different, but consistent format as they are
 * 3) Rewrite guideline to match majority of articles (either  or  ); rename all articles that don't match new guideline
 * 4) Enforce old guideline with mass renaming and relinking

-- Mkill 17:19, 3 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Notes
 * 1) Sorry, this isn't a guideline, it's only a (relatively new) proposal (see template on top of the Naming conventions (numbers and dates) page), so the rest of Mkill's comment becomes quite senseless. --Francis Schonken 17:54, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

FYI, there is Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles)/Poll going on presently (as indicated on current surveys, if you ever visit that page). Up till today only three people voted in that poll. And then there's Naming conventions (years in titles), which is older, and maybe more to your liking, but presently no more than a proposal either.

So there are two relatively new initiatives to get the "years in titles" NC guideline out of its long-standing proposed status:
 * Naming conventions (numbers and dates) (also mentioned on current surveys)
 * Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles)/Poll

These two initiatives started more or less concurrently, neither of them anything near to "guideline" status presently. --Francis Schonken 17:54, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Radiant!s suggestions

 * From: User talk:Francis Schonken:

Naming conventions (numbers and dates) looks good to me, and to the best of my knowledge matches most of what we already have. Let's see, some remarks...
 * As noted on the talk page, it may help to put some thought into structuring articles like March 18, 2001. We probably don't need an article for each day in history. So which days get their own articles, and which go in March 18 in general?
 * The bit about Roman numbers is weird. Some of them redirect to years, others to numbers. Arguably some should redirect to Roman numerals. Some consistency would be nice. And arguably, a lot of deletion since many of these seem to be entirely arbitrary.
 * I think some standard would be nice on the repetitive events section, but good luck in getting any. I think we should stick with the "Event (year)" bit because it matches practice in other areas.
 * Overall, looks good! Radiant_ &gt;|&lt; 16:51, 28 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Re. the general issue I read in your remarks, i.e.: balance between "instruction" and "multiple option recommendation": I tried to keep on the "safe" side this time, too instructive is more often a problem than presenting sensible options without pressure (that can always be made more stringent afterwards, in the case that would be desirable).
 * "March 18, 2001" type articles: I hadn't really discovered the mechanism behind them yet: apparently it works via a template in the "March 18" type articles, only for the years 2003 and up. I added that info to the guideline proposal.
 * Roman numerals: I don't really think the "weirdness" can be much helped, because of the weirdness of how Romans wrote down numbers. Take for instance C, it's even not unambiguous as a numeral, as in hexagesimal it can mean 12 (in Roman it is 100). Both numeric meanings are listed on the "C" page. CIC (Roman for 199) is at the same a TLA with many meanings (so, a disambig page). I don't think "arbitrary", and don't see what you would delete (...most of them either "harmless" redirect, or a mentioning in a disambig page list - even the MIX article mentions the numeric value of these letters read as Roman numeral). I think consistency of "x (number)" and "xxxx" year articles more important. IMHO Roman numerals should keep second plane, while their ordering principle is not really compatible with several other established wikipedia ordering principles (like for instance the TLA category). I wouldn't redirect MMVI to 2006 (number) though, nor VII to the year 7. Also I wouldn't know from what number it should flip from a redirect to a number article, to a redirect to a year article...
 * "Event (year)" is my preferred format too, but for the 5 or so voters on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles)/Poll this was not the unanimous choice. Also prior talk on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles)/Archive 01 indicated this only as the third option: since the "years in titles" NC guideline proposal only marked the two other options as acceptable, "Event (year)" is not applied very frequently yet in wikipedia, so I decided, for the time being, not to try to go too much against tide. As I said above, if the time is ready for a more stringent approach, it will not be too difficult to adapt the guideline in that sense (e.g., with an intermediate step of "discouraging" the two other formats for a period of time). --Francis Schonken 20:54, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

BC/BCE
It looks good to me, but perhaps a mention of the style guideline for BC/BCE usage would be appropriate? Talrias (t | e | c) 10:50, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Re. Eras:
 * This poll hasn't come to a conclusion yet (seen the controversy over the poll, including edit-warring on the poll page, I'm not very inclined to fan its relative importance prematurely);
 * It is outside the present scope of Naming conventions (numbers and dates) - the NC guideline is about pagenames of non-redirect pages - the rest is topic for Manual of Style (dates and numbers): the Eras poll is not likely to change anything re. pagenames of non-redirect pages.
 * --Francis Schonken 12:05, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

User:Hoof38
(Copied from the wrong place to both Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Numbers and Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates)

List of "bad" articles he's created (IMHO) include:


 * (-> means redirect)
 * with my comments after


 * 292,277,026,596 -> 11th millennium and beyond


 * (still on WP:RfD.)


 * edited both 10000 and 10,000 to be separate disambiguation pages


 * (I think they're now at least the same disambiguation page)


 * Category:Thousand
 * Category:Million
 * Category:Billion


 * on WP:CfD


 * 123456789 (number)
 * 1023456789 (number)
 * 1234567890 (number)
 * 12345678987654321 (number)
 * 987654321 (number)
 * 9876543210 (number)


 * (On WP:AfD, but will probably end up redirected to Pandigital number)


 * −2 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
 * −3 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
 * −4 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
 * −5 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
 * −6 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
 * −7 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
 * −8 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
 * −9 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers
 * −10 (number) -> Negative and non-negative numbers


 * I changed all of the −n (number) to redirect to n (number), but I don't think they should be there at all


 * Year −1 -> 2 BC
 * 1st decade -> 0s
 * 1st decade AD -> 0s
 * −0s -> 0s BC


 * (OK, these aren't confusing, anyway)


 * 1st changed from 1 (number) to first
 * 2nd from 2 (number) to second (completely wrong, this time)
 * 10th from 10 (number) to tenth (wrong again)


 * I reverted these.


 * −1 as a disambig between -1 (number) and 2 BC
 * −2 as a disambig between −2 (number) and 3 BC
 * −3 as a disambig between −3 (number) and 4 BC
 * −4 as a disambig between −4 (number) and 5 BC
 * −5 as a disambig between −5 (number) and 6 BC
 * −6 as a disambig between −6 (number) and 7 BC
 * −7 as a disambig between −7 (number) and 8 BC
 * −8 as a disambig between −8 (number) and 9 BC
 * −9 as a disambig between −9 (number) and 10 BC
 * −10 as a disambig between −10 (number) and 11 BC


 * Why?


 * 2100 changed from a redirect to 21st century to a disambig between 21st century, 22nd century, and 2100 (number)
 * 4000 added reference to 5th millennium and 4000 (number) to disambig
 * 5000 changed from a redirect to 5000 (number) to a disambig with 5th millennium, 6th millennium, and 5000 (number)
 * 6000 etc.
 * 7000 etc.
 * 8000 etc.
 * 9000 etc.


 * I'm not sure about these. They probably should be reverted per Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (numbers and dates), but...


 * 12:00] -> [[hour
 * 1:00] -> [[hour
 * 2:00] -> [[hour
 * 3:00] -> [[hour

etc.
 * I've proposed these for deletion. He's now redirected one of them to clock.


 * Help &mdash; Arthur Rubin | (talk) 02:22, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
 * What's the problem? Why is it that 10th should redirect to 10 (number) rather than tenth Hoof38 02:38, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Except in slang, 10th only means the ordinal 10 (2nd disambiguation from tenth), with occasional references to the interval (4th disambiguation), and rare references to 1/10 (1st disambiguation). I've added a second otheruses (more or less) to 10 (number).

Standard format?
Should we have a standard format where the article on an event that does not recur at regular intervals (or didn't recur at all)? Currently there is no "standard format" for the representation of the time indicator, This creates inconsistency as well to the project. I feel that a conclusive consensus would create less inconsistency here. -- S iva1979 Talk to me  22:03, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Are people following these guidelines?
I was wondering why some of the examples are red-linked in the Articles on events section? it seems strange that the guidelines give Summer Olympic Games (1920) as an example, and then later say 1920 Summer Olympics is also acceptable, but maybe giving too much weight to the year (though the guideline fails to mention that it also drops 'Games' from the title). Looking at the articles for Summer Olympic Games, they all use the 'year in front' and 'Olympic Games' -> 'Olympics' style. So what is going on there? Then there is the example of "UEFA Champions League (2005-2006) (note that each year is written in full, separated by a hyphen)". If you look at Category:UEFA Champions League, you can see that this guideline hasn't been followed. They all write the second year as two digits instead of the full year and drop the brackets (eg. UEFA Champions League 2005-06). The guideline also gives the example of U.S. presidential election, 2000, when that is actually a redirect, and the article is at United States presidential election, 2000. So is this guideline just out-of-date, or are people not following the naming conventions? Carcharoth 22:15, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Francis Schonken changed the U.S. example - thanks for that. Anyone know anything about the other examples? Is 1920 Summer Olympics just accepted as an exception, and are the football league ones named in a different style for some reason? Carcharoth 22:35, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Anyway, maybe also have a look at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions/Archive 9, an aborted attempt to add still more formats (" of " this time, for elections). All formats currently on the Naming conventions (numbers and dates) guideline page are used (I made all "examples" reflect real examples now), and I think these three formats are enough to choose from for recurring events. --Francis Schonken 00:10, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Funnily enough, I was going to mention elections, as they are the only events mentioned at Naming convention that have their own convention. See Naming_conventions. I thought that was a bit funny, as it should technically be a subset of "events" or "numbers and dates". Did someone slip that onto the page over there after the above discussion, or was it already there? And what should be done about those earthquakes (that's what set this all off for me). I moved a couple to fit what I thought was the standard way to title (not name) earthquake articles, but now I'm not sure what to do. If you look at the examples I gave, different names give differing amounts of information to the reader. Some earthquakes have local names, some are widely known by another name, many have absolutely no name at all. The USGS seems to introduce them as date (day, month, year), location, and size. With the occassional 'common' name thrown in when an earthquake has acquired one. I suppose if the names are a mess in the real world, then Wikipedia article titles will inevitably reflect that. Would that be a good way to sum this up? Carcharoth 01:11, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Francis, thanks for the election naming convention update. Was there a talk page discussion somewhere to support that? I really would like to start a discussion somewhere to get guidance on how to decide on a title for earthquake articles, as I want to start filling in the gaps in Wikipedia's coverage in this area (mainly older, pre-20th century earthquakes). I would go ahead with using the Disasters Wikiproject naming convention, but I had a bad experience with 1356 Basel earthquake, which I requested a translation of from the French at that page title, and a few days later (even before the translation process was finished) it got moved to Basel earthquake. The arguments for both sides are at Talk:Basel earthquake, along with the current move request, but before I create any more earthquake articles, I want to make sure I don't get bogged down in any more arguments over what title the articles should be at. What would be the best way to do that, and still fit in with the necessarily slow development of naming convention guidelines? Carcharoth 11:04, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Conflicting style guidelines! Date ranges: en dash or hyphen?
I noticed that Naming_conventions (numbers_and_dates) explicitly recommends a hyphen in an article date range, e.g. Azadegan League (1999-2000), while WP:DASH explicitly calls for an en dash, e.g. Philippines campaign (1944–45). I personally opt for the latter (even though the former is easier to type), but more importantly, the contradiction should be resolved. 71.41.210.146 08:02, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Since no-one has replied to this contradiction over several months, I am going ahead and changing the hyphen to an en-dash in conformance with WP:DASH. Ayla (talk) 21:58, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Commas in large numbers
Would commas in article names that use large numbers be acceptable? For example, Temperature record of the past 1,000 years. ~ UBeR (talk) 18:11, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Far future and "plausible" search terms
I don't think that this guideline actually is sufficient to support the notion that we shouldn't have redirects like 4004, 6502, 7805 (to 78xx) when there is no year article but would only be a redirect to an article about a century or a millennium. I came across a dispute between User:Sceptre and User:Foogod on this issue and felt it should be resolved in a wider forum. —Random832 21:06, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Proposal to amend the naming convention for numbers
I propose to amend naming conventions for numbers and years, and also to redirect 911 to 911 (disambiguation) and rename the main article as 911 (year). (Note that the consensus against on Talk:911, while overwhelming, is 2 years old.)

Please discuss here or here. 69.140.152.55 (talk) 13:22, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Decades
The convention for decades has been discussed before (at the Years project and at the Manual of Style); no-one came up with any convincing reason for having (e.g.) 1800s referring to the decade as it does now, rather than the century as it does in real-world English. It was proposed then to rename these pages to (for example) 1800–1809. (Other decades not ending in 00s, i.e. 1810s, 1820s, etc., would be unaffected.) This move was generally supported (at least at MoS) though was never acted on. Any opposition to doing it now? I know it means various templates need to be updated, but that can be done as well. --Kotniski (talk) 12:45, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Strong support. When you look at WhatLinksHere to "1800s", you'll find that, naturally enough, all writers not familiar with Wikipedia's jargon (I'm working on WP:JARGON at the moment :) thought they were linking to 1800-1899, so the page as it stands now (representing a decade) confuses most readers and makes us look jargon-y. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 13:36, 19 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Oppose, as before. The only reason to have such an article at all is to make decadebox and its sisters produce a system of chronology, and renaming it will make the template not work. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:51, 19 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Sept, whose reason? The typical editor isn't up to speed on our practices, and if you look at WhatLinksHere to 1800s etc, you'll see that well-meaning editors were trying to link to 1800-1899.  I'm open to the suggestion that my reasons aren't helpful, but how do we change the minds of all the editors who are linking to 1800s, thinking that it means 1800-1899? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 20:10, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Don't worry about the templates; I'll make sure they still work. I'm sure that's not the only reason for keeping these articles (if it is, it's not a very good one). It certainly isn't a reason for having articles misnamed.--Kotniski (talk) 10:28, 20 September 2008 (UTC)


 * It is terrible that 1800s is about a decade rather than the 1800-1899 years as most people would expect. Must be corrected Asap.  NerdyNSK (talk) 23:45, 19 September 2008 (UTC)


 * It's a little confusing, but there's already an article for Nineteenth century that covers 1801-1900; do we need another article for a range shifted one year from this? The current style has the virtue of consistency with all the other decade articles like 1810s, 1790s, etc.  Out in the "real world", we're near the end of the 2000s decade, and there still seems to be no clear consensus on what to call it. *Dan T.* (talk) 12:18, 20 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Normally I don't argue back and forth in a thread; it's too easy to become obnoxious. But I'm not following, Dan T.  If you're saying it would be better if there's no article named 1800s because we already have an article that's almost the same thing, I think that would be okay, as long as we "salt" it (prohibit re-creation) so that when people try to link to 1800s, they immediately get the red link and know there's a problem (and hopefully, remove the link).  But you're going farther and saying there's no problem here, and I am just not getting that.  If our article called "cow" was about a fish, and 4/5 or more of the editors who linked to "cow" thought they were linking to a cow, wouldn't that be a problem, even if we had very good reasons for why the article should really be about a fish?  This is the kind of argument that makes me want to upgrade WP:NOTLEX to a guideline.  Words (and symbols and phrases) don't mean what we say they mean, they mean what the dictionaries say they mean.  Dictionaries are well-developed, and fantastic at representing nuance and consensus, and when they're not, we'll know because we'll pick up evidence of that in other reference works.  Every ghit on "1800s" that doesn't come from Wikipedia refers to 1800-1899. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 12:57, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I got carried away. We don't in general need more guidelines, we just need to be more rational and follow the guidelines ... including WP:SELFREF, which means that we can't explain in article-space how we got into this mess and how Wikipedia deals with this in a jargony way. I propose that 1800s be a disambig page that follows the usual disambig format and says simply:

1800s may refer to:
 * The period from 1800 to 1899
 * 1800–1809, rarely

As we have time, we can then go through the infoboxes (maybe with bots) and replace 1800s with 1800s, although my personal preference would be to avoid ever seeing "1800s" refer to 1800 to 1809, even in infoboxes. But I acknowledge I may not win on this one. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 16:45, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm basically with Dank's reasoning all the way. Not sure that the 1800s can really mean 1801–1900, but the precise content of the dab page is a detail that needn't bother us right now. Just because we don't know what to call the present decade is no excuse for calling other decades things that they are definitely not called. This offends against goodness-knows-how-many WP principles, quite apart from common sense. --Kotniski (talk) 19:44, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Good point, and I just changed the suggested dab page accordingly. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 20:04, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm still opposed, but if it were to go through, the templates would need to be adjusted first, before any of the the articles were changed. And I see no use outside of Wikipedia of 0s, 00s, or 100s BC, so those do not need to be changed.  (Any reference to the decade expressed literally could be handled by disambiguation.)
 * However, we'd also need to decide if the categories need to be renamed; and, if so, that should also be done at the same time. — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 19:58, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Agreed on all 3 points, Arthur, since it should be easy to locate and change the templates, except not agreed (probably) for 100s BC; would it really cause any harm to be consistent with my suggestion and go with something like 100s BC ?. (What I'm saying is that you would see 100s BC in the table, but go to the page 109–100 BC when you click.) I would just prefer that we not investigate every occurrence of a link to 1800s, 1900s etc before we make the change; it would take forever. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 20:11, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * We don't seem to be pulling a crowd here. Let's give it a couple of days and see if we can get consensus; if not, then maybe add the RfC tag and a notice at the Pump? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 20:22, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

It would help to evaluate consensus if those (well, Arthur at the moment) who say they're "opposed" could say why. If there are no arguments against the principle of the change (as there seem not to be at the moment), then we can decide on a strategy for implementing it. It won't be too difficult, as long as we keep redirects (or dab pages of the type suggested above) in place the whole time while the links and templates are being sorted out. There will then be no pressing need for simultaneity. Categories should be renamed as well, I guess, by the same arguments, and in accordance with general principles that categories are named like articles.--Kotniski (talk) 21:00, 20 September 2008 (UTC)


 * The problem is much larger than it first appeared, even to me. For it to make sense, not only the articles (1900s) and categories (Category:1900s) would need to be renamed, but the auxilliary categories (24 first level, with one already renamed, for 1900s) and articles (3 first level, in the 1900s) would need to be renamed.  Templates that reference such categories and articles would need to be modified.  There may even be a few objects in other namespaces that need to be modified.  Links to such, even in userspace, would need to be modified.  In order for sort order to be maintained, sort key defaults (and some non-defaults) would have to be set back to the original name. (Well, maybe not.  It's hard to test category sort keys.)  Oh, and it would become much more difficult to rerun the category sort key modification which was run at my suggestion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Time.  It would also become more difficult to automate crosslinkages to make sure that year articles and categories are in decade categories and decade articles and categories are in century categories.
 * I mean, why should 1900s in games be in Category:1900–1909. Perhaps this could be minimized if we did a continual bot-automated category redirect for each renamed category, and from Category:1900-1909 (with a hyphen).
 * I think we'd have herds of broken links or dead categories if this were not done all at once.
 * Other than that, I have no objection. :)  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 21:46, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * It sounds like you're saying it would be better not to rename the cats, and I have absolutely no problem with that. I didn't get "Links to such, even in userspace, would need to be modified."  A link in userspace to 1800s could still go there, regardless of whether the user was thinking of the decade or the century; either way, they'll find out there's ambiguity when they get to the DAB page. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 22:00, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * To the anal-retentive personality like me, there's some attraction to maintaining the neat lineup of consistency up and down the line... if you've got 1980s and 1990s and 2010s, doesn't 2000s need to be in between? -- The other Dan... *Dan T.* (talk) 00:37, 21 September 2008 (UTC)s
 * There is no support in sources that I'm aware of for a meaning of "1900–1909" for 1900s. I wish we hadn't done tables and infoboxes that way, but we did, and I can compromise on keeping that appearance, as long as the actual page linked is 1900–1909. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 01:39, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, we have to follow real-world usage, not what we would like to be true. It would be far more neat and consistent if year 1 were preceded by year 0, but that's not something Wikipedia can enact. We probably won't know what humanity decides to call the present decade until we're well into the next one, but we do know that "1900s", "1800s" etc. are not the common names for any decades.--Kotniski (talk) 07:40, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * If we rename the articles and not the categories, we need to refactor an undentified, but large, number of templates, including those in userspace. And there (appears to be) no real-world source for 0s or 10s, either.  I think, perhaps, consistency may be better than all articles matching real-world uses.  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 08:16, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * For that matter, 510s is probably used more often in Wikipedia than elsewhere in the world. — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 08:17, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Per WP:NOT (policy!), some things that aren't allowed: "proposing theories and solutions, original ideas, defining terms, coining new words, et cetera". This subject has come up several times, and I've never seen anyone present any evidence that "1800s" meaning 1800-1809 isn't Wikipedia's own made-up term.  (And that's moving the goalposts quite a bit; usually the argument is over whether enough people in the proper sources use a term to justify it.)  I can stretch ... barely ... to admitting that in certain tables and infoboxes, 1800s may be "prettier", but only if the user is likely to find out fairly quickly that 1800-1809 is meant.  A pagename of 1800–1809 is helpful, and so is a disambig page, and "1800s here means 1800–1809" would be helpful in some contexts. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 11:42, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * First two sentences in first section of WP:NAME, also policy: "Generally, article naming should prefer what the greatest number of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature. This is justified by the following principle: The names of Wikipedia articles should be optimized for readers over editors, and for a general audience over specialists." - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 11:53, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

About 0s and 10s: I could accept 10s (in line with 510s, 1910s, etc.), even though there is unlikely to be much real world usage - there may be some usage, and at least there isn't another obvious meaning that people would expect for these terms. But 0s seems particularly weird (there isn't a 0 in any of those nine years). In any case, when we change the others (500s -> 500–509, 1800s -> 1800–1809, etc.) then it will be consistent to change 0s as well (to 1–9, or perhaps better in this case 1–9 AD).--Kotniski (talk) 17:16, 21 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm strongly opposed to 1–9 AD. We have enough trouble with AD/CE wars in that era without taking a POV in the title.
 * Even if we can reach consensus that the move is desirable, we would still need to get the templates rewritten first before we could consider performing the moves, or a large number of redlinks will appear. The additional confusion in having Category:19th century containing:
 * 1800–1809
 * 1810s
 * 1820s
 * 1830s
 * … is better left to the imagination. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 17:38, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * No, no redlinks appear as a result of a move. We have to do the moves first, then change the templates, in order to avoid redlinks. And I don't see much additional confusion in what you illustrate there - most real people are going to be more confused by the way things are at the moment, by seeing 1800s as a subcategory of 19th century.--Kotniski (talk) 18:12, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually, redlinks will appear directly as the result of a move, but only in the article moved, because of the templates which use PAGENAME and related built-in macros. There are two different types of templates that need to be considered; those which are included in the decade articles, and those which link to decade articles.  To avoid redlinks, the former need to be changed before the move, and the latter after.  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 18:35, 21 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Actually, thinking about it a google search shows reasonable traction for 1900s (or the clearly improper 1900's) as referring to the years 1900 through 1909. The first 10 google hits include Wikipedia, three pages about a pop music group, and 6 articles about the decade, none about the century.  It appears only one of the next 10 refers to the century.  This is very difficult to verify, as you actually have to look at each page to determine, rather than depending on the google summary.  Now, I know the google test is unreliable, not necessarily representative of the "real world", but it shows that it's not "WP:OR".  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 17:50, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, I was quite surprised by that. But I think it's particular to 1900s; people haven't generally referred to that century (being the present one or a very recent one) in that way. Look up 1800s, 1700s etc. and I think you'll get quite different results.--Kotniski (talk) 18:19, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * We haven't been talking about 1900s, because most of our sources come from the 1900's, and someone writing about the century they're living in is more likely to say "this century" than "in the 1900s". Let's stay focused on 1800s and earlier, instead of trying to make a general rule by extrapolating from the boundary cases of 1900s and 2000s and 0s.  The first hit on "1800s" is the Wikipedia page.  The next 20 are not from Wikipedia, and concern the century.  I'll keep going if I need to.  Google suggests two related searches, "1800s timeline" and "life in the 1800s".  The first 10 of each of those also concern the century. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 18:26, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Pretty much all of the decade articles prior to the 20th century are basically "proleptic", applying today's conception of decades to an earlier time when it's likely people didn't refer to things in quite the same manner we do now. Well, maybe in the late 19th century there were some similarities in terminology (that's when they had the "Gay Nineties", referring to the 1890s and using "gay" in the then-current meaning of "happy, merry" with no connotation of homosexuality), but probably not that much earlier; certainly, people in 1 AD didn't think they were in the decade of the "0s". *Dan T.* (talk) 20:41, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Use of decades as named periods goes back to the Hungry Forties. Not all of them had adjectives, but that's true now. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:17, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

← I've just finished reading this... I must say I don't like the inconsistency that will be created, but, well, we have to bow to the real world. I fully support Dan(k55)'s idea for disambiguation pages; since there is so much confusion concerning naming, we need to employ our best means of resolving naming conflicts. (As a plus, we dispose of a few hatnotes along the way.) Waltham, The Duke of 13:29, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
 * What's the next step here? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 14:01, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, having convinced ourselves we're right about this, I suppose we have to get down to work. As Arthur points out, the first step is to change Decadebox and Decadebox BC (are these the only ones?) to allow the PAGENAME references to be bypassed. At first glance it seems that replacing each with 0s (plus " BC" in the second template) would work perfectly OK, though I might be missing something.--Kotniski (talk) 14:19, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Should bots be used for anything? (I'm asking; I'm not a big fan of bots personally, because they tend to generate a bit of drama; I'm generally content if we can make articles that have been through some kind of review process look right.) For instance, it's unlikely that someone who doesn't know Wikipedia jargon meant 1800–1809 if they chose to link 1800s in their article.  Discussions over the past several months show wide support for discouraging linking of anything to do with dates unless we're trying to put special attention on the date.  Rather than go through every page in Special:WhatLinksHere to 1800s etc, would it make sense to fix the templates, and use a bot to delink most occurrences of 1800s, with a note in the edit summary saying what we're up to and where people can complain if they didn't want us to delink?  If there's not a bot already approved for that purpose, we'd have to get approval at WP:BOT.  My main question is: would bot approval be a necessary step to get broad consensus for doing something, or can we do without?  Bot approval would be more difficult than getting consensus at, say, WP:VPP. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 14:35, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I guess Lightbot might help, since I believe it already delinks things like 19th century. But there's no urgency about the links - once we have 1800s set up as a dab page, then links to it will at least not be completely misleading, whatever the intended meaning was. First we need to sort out the templates and actually carry out the moves.--Kotniski (talk) 15:06, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, but arguing for the Dark Side: if the changes we have in mind don't make a lot of sense unless there's a bot task somewhere in the future, then the first step is to see if we can get approval for that task at WP:BOT, since that's the hard part, even if we're asking for future, conditional approval. What happens if a bot never runs, are we happy with the results? - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 15:44, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Well I will be: the renaming by itself will make a lot of things better without making anything much worse. Possible future bot runs or manual link repair campaigns will represent further improvement on top of that.--Kotniski (talk) 16:40, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
 * The disambiguation page idea makes sense to me. However, "in tables and infoboxes" is still a self-ref, and so should not appear. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;  ‹(-¿-)› 20:28, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks, and good point. Deleted from the suggested DAB page above. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 20:43, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

I believe 1800s is perfectly clear where we use it, between 1790s and 1810s. I still object to changing that usage, and if it is changed, decadebox must include code that masks it. I subjoin as a reminder what a useful thing we are talking about. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:17, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
 * That decadebox seems clear to me; I don't want to change that. Okay, I'll post a link at WP:VPP and WT:MOS to this discussion, and I'll let you guys know if they develop a separate thread.  I've already posted at WT:YEARS, and we got here from WT:MOSNUM; please alert anyone else that you think might want to know. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 02:11, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, the appearance of the decade box (and similar beasts) doesn't need changing. Just the underlying links under the xx00s ought to be changed (but after the moves have taken place).--Kotniski (talk) 14:02, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

←We seem to have consensus; there's been no strong reaction at WP:RM (the discussion page for the proposal I put there is at Talk:1800s; they don't invite discussion directly at WP:RM), or at WP:VPP or WT:MOS. The last issue is to figure out which pages we want to move ... I'm assuming when we make 1800s a disambig page, we want to move the current 1800s page to 1800–1809 to preserve the content and history (with minor adjustments in the text). It would solve 99% of the problem of wrong links to move only 100s through 1900s, but inconsistency would be less than satisfying, and I have no opinion on the best way to handle the fuzzy cases. Should every such page be moved, even including 0s? We should post the multimove template (see WP:RM) on every talk page that will get moved. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 14:20, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I'd say once we move some of them, we move all of them (especially 0s, which looks bizarre). It will make redoing the templates much easier if we are consistent among all the 00s decades (BC as well, for as far back as they currently go).--Kotniski (talk) 15:08, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually, I take that back, it's overkill to post talk page notices given that there's been no opposition on any of the relevant pages. WP:RM requests that discussion be at the first relevant talk page that's moved, which is now Talk:1800–1809. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 23:22, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
 * And there are a couple of items over at Talk:1800–1809 that may need discussion, such as whether to make use of a page named 1800s (disambiguation). - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 01:29, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Footnote
What follows was a footnote to this page.

Without going too technical, for standard use in articles on time periods, a "year" is defined as:
 * according to Gregorian calendar for years from 1582 on;
 * according to Julian calendar, counting back from 1582, for the years 1 to 1581
 * according to the (proleptic) Julian calendar, counting back from 1 (without year zero) for the years 1 BC and older.
 * Note, however, that also after 1581 some countries continued the Julian calendar, see Old Style and New Style dates. Occasionally for years from 1582 to well in the 20th century (when the last countries converted to Gregorian calendar), dates in the "year"/"day" articles are mentioned not according to Gregorian calendar: in these cases add a notification according to which calendar!!!
 * This might seem complicated: see the October Revolution example above, and the entry of the start of that revolution both in the October 25 and the November 7 articles.

I am not convinced that this helped anybody; it is also questionable in detail. I have therefore brought it here.Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:00, 19 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm pretty sure I agree. This doesn't seem like the page for it, and if it is, then it should be much shorter.  We've talked about this before; there's a tendency for guidelines and naming conventions to accumulate a huge pile of stuff that won't be of interest to 99.9% of the people who actually read the page. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 20:14, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yep, this is definitely the kind of incomprehensible non-guidance we should be getting rid of.--Kotniski (talk) 10:32, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Technically speaking, 1582 is in the Julian calendar through October 4, and the Gregorian calendar from the following day, October 15, after 10 days were skipped. Thus, the year has 355 days. *Dan T.* (talk) 15:31, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

First decade of each century revival
I know this matter has already been discussed above, but I have revived it over at talk:2000–2009, where a variety of editors have agreed that we should change the title from 2000–2009 to 2000s (decade), and likewise with all other relevant decades. This would remove ambiguity all the while keeping with convention (the only notable name for the current decade as of present is "2000s") and consistency (all 9 other decades of the centuries are titled "XXXXs"). I would appreciate input on this request&mdash; `C RAZY `( lN )`S ANE ` 23:02, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Seems reasonable to me, at least for 2000s (and I believe we found 1900s to be quite often used for the decade as well). How about the older ones - is there really enough usage for 1800s, 1700s etc. as decades to justify their being considered "correct" in that meaning?--Kotniski (talk) 08:15, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I tend to agree with your reasoning, I see no reason to tamper with 1800s, 1700s and so on — there isn't enough documented usage for those decades and what they were named colloquially and so on. I think moving simply 1900–1909 and 2000–2009 would be sufficient.&mdash; `C RAZY `( lN )`S ANE ` 20:07, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I think it reasonable to generalize; many of these articles are retrospective anyway, beginning with 100-109. My principal concern is having the template decadebox work predictably and intelligibly. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:20, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

On a related issue another user has tried to correct the use of the term "the 2000s decade" in the lede to 2009. For discussion of the confusion arising from this usage see Talk:2009/Archive 3. Cheers, 22:11, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I've always preferred "2000s" for consistency with other decades; I never liked the awkward switch to "2000-2009". *Dan T.* (talk) 15:32, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Grumble. OK, I tend to like this change, but you have to remember that (one of the) (protected) templates transcluded by Yearbox, Decadebox, etc., needs to be modfied before or nearly simultaneously with the renames.  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 10:12, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I suspect this won't actually be necessary (at least, not urgently), as long as the current names are left in place as redirects.--Kotniski (talk) 10:53, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually, you may be right. The appropriate WikiProject (probably Years, although Timeline may be appropriate) should be informed of this discussion, so that it can be corrected appropriately when changes are made.  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 15:59, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

RFC – WP title decision practice
Over the past several months there has been contentious debate over aspects of WP:Article Titles policy. That contentiousness has led to efforts to improve the overall effectiveness of the policy and associated processes. An RFC entitled: Wikipedia talk:Article titles/RFC-Article title decision practice has been initiated to assess the communities’ understanding of our title decision making policy. As a project that has created or influenced subject specific naming conventions, participants in this project are encouraged to review and participate in the RFC.--Mike Cline (talk) 16:40, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Articles on events
I propose that the "Articles on events" section be brought in line with Naming conventions (events). At present, these two guidelines are in conflict; the main guideline for naming articles about events states that the year should precede the rest of the title and should not be in parentheses, but the "Articles on events" section of the numbers and dates guideline provides the option of using "bracketed disambiguator style". My impression is that this guideline has simply not been updated to match the main guideline for naming conventions for events; the second example of "bracketed disambiguator style", Azadegan League (1999–2000), has been redirecting to 1999–2000 Azadegan League for almost four years now. Considering that bracketed disambiguators serve a separate purpose in Wikipedia titles, I suggest that the "bracketed disambiguator style" section simply be removed from this guideline. Neelix (talk) 13:16, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Year ranges as page titles
A new addition to this guideline is proposed at Wikipedia talk:Article titles‎ --Francis Schonken (talk) 11:43, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Proposal on numbers 1 to 100
It has been proposed that numbers should be considered the primary topic for articles titled "1" to "100" instead of years. This would require numerous page moves and an amendment to the guidelines. Please discuss at Talk:1. — JFG talk 02:54, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I followed up at that RM on template changes that I believe should be done first before the moves. — Andy W.  ( talk  · ctb) 18:19, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Wider RfC now open at Talk:1. — JFG talk 08:30, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Please comment at the follow-up RfC on how the topic of years 1-100 should be titled here. Thank you, — Andy W.  ( talk  · ctb) 00:21, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Requested move for five-digit numbers
Editors may be interested in Talk:10000 (number), which proposes to move nine articles of the form n00000 (number) to n0,000 or n0000, and which may lead to also moving the remaining seven five-digit articles. Certes (talk) 13:28, 2 July 2017 (UTC)

"May 1, 2015 Jalisco attacks" or "1 May 2015 Jalisco attacks"
Hi, I'm working on an article with a very specific date (day/month/year). Are both acceptable? I prefer the first option because I'm using the "Month, Day" format in my draft. MX ( ✉  •  ✎  ) 00:23, 18 October 2017 (UTC)


 * I believe it depends on the style used in the country in which the event took place. For example, the day-month-year" format would be more appropriate for articles related to the UK while the month-day-format would be better for subjects related to the U.S. --Ixfd64 (talk) 18:51, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

RM on 911
not me but somebody else. © Tb hotch ™ (en-2.5). 19:46, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

Titles with a number first, words second
How should we entitle articles consisting of a number first, and words second? In a case similar to the examples Form 1040 or Intel 80386, but the other way round, the article 5 Whys has long been at that title, but was recently moved without discussion by to Five Whys. User:FULBERT followed up by starting a discussion after the fact, at Talk:Five Whys.

I have two comments about this: I attempted to find guidance on this at WP:AT and MOS:, without success. This article seems to be the one that comes the closest to it. So, I'm requesting that we come up with some verbiage to add to the guideline, probably in section Articles on years, articles on numbers, article names containing non-date numbers, to cover the case where the common name starts with a number usually expressed in numerals, followed by a word or words. The case where this is the title of a work, is already covered; we don't need to duplicate that. This is for common topics that are not titles of a work. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 00:06, 11 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I'd like to request feedback by users familiar with number usage in article titles, to respond at that discussion about the individual case.
 * Secondly, and perhaps more important: what about adding some verbiage to this page, to cover the general case?
 * I think there are two items involves here -- the first would be how this can work with new articles, and the second with how this works with items that are already in the literature. I agree there should be a discussion and policy on this, though one aspect of this should also be how people in the literature are already using the term. In the case of 5 Whys, a quick search in both public as well as academic searches seem to show that the first term is used as a number, namely 5. Thanks for raising this discussion Mathglot.--- FULBERT (talk) 01:54, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

3 digit number move discussions
See User talk:Crouch, Swale/Year DAB for a move discussion involving numbers 101 to 125, note that after those have been processed numbers 126 to 150, then 151 to 175, then 176 to 200, then finally any other. Any that are objected at that discussion page or at RMT will be subject to a normal RM.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 20:25, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

RfC notice: Titles which are part of an ambiguous series
There is an ongoing RfC to clarify our stance on titles which form part of a numbered series whose meaning is not inherently apparent, and whether we should disambiguate for the purpose of clarity even when not strictly necessary. An example would be Symphony No. 104 (Haydn) (as there is no other notable "Symphony No. 104"), which is already covered by WP:MUSICSERIES, but this RfC would explore the application of this principle to other domains, such as sequentially numbered legislation. -- King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;  &spades; 03:25, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Daterange in titles
Check out the variation in these titles. I don't think WP:NCDURATION covers them. Pinging from above sections:  and.

In my opinion some standardisation could help; here are my thoughts (suggested additions in bold):
 * real-world titles and other WP:COMMONNAME should stand, e.g. Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945
 * dateranges in titles should per MOS:DATERANGE be 1234–1256, not 1234–56 or 1234 to 1256 or between 1234 and 1256 or 1234 – 56
 * period slices within a longer history should be Foo, 1234–1256 not Foo (1234–1256) because parentheses might be misinterpreted as disambiguation. An example that hit me was Kingdom of Hungary (1000–1301); was that a temporary state, like Kingdom of Italy (Napoleonic)?
 * if the start or end is not a specified date:
 * Foo to 1256
 * Foo since 1234 [if Foo still exists] or Foo after 1234 [if Foo is defunct]
 * single multi-year event: currently there are these patterns...
 * Foo (1234–1256)
 * Foo of 1234–1256
 * 1234–56 Foo -- should be 1234–1256 Foo per MOS:DATERANGE although I really prefer the shorter in this case.
 * ...I would not propose to favour one as each seems to pattern with single-year titles of similar articles

Any comments? jnestorius(talk) 23:38, 21 September 2020 (UTC)


 * IMHO,
 * partial standardization on full years (for ranges) might be a good idea: partial, that is except for (many) common name exceptions (e.g. 2020–21 NHL season might be such a common name exception)
 * (mostly) avoid dates in parentheses at the end of an article title might be a good idea too, but with many exceptions too, e.g. when the date (or date range) is, for instance, a real disambiguator, e.g. George Heriot (died 1610) is an actual example from the WP:NCP guideline
 * completely disagree with Foo since 1234 [if Foo still exists] or Foo after 1234 [if Foo is defunct] – that is not the distinction of since and after, e.g. "Olympic Games since Pierre de Coubertin" is not a synonym of "Olympic Games after Pierre de Coubertin", and that is unrelated to whether these Games still exist or not (e.g. also "Olympic Games since the 8th century BC" would mostly be understood as "Olympic Games starting from and including the 8th century BC", which is not a synonym of "Olympic Games after the 8th century BC")
 * I'd avoid to give too much detailed bandwidth to this in the actual guideline per WP:RULECRUFT: a few general principles, and an indication of many exceptions, but without too much nitty-gritty. --Francis Schonken (talk) 02:13, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Anyhow, I'd recommend to proceed with a few page moves and/or WP:RMs according to your proposals above: if these stick to the improved name proposals, then we can start talking about updating the naming convention accordingly. If, on the other hand, consensus established through a lack of sticking page moves indicates otherwise, then maybe, eventually, even the MOS page on dates and numbers might need to be readjusted. Note that the big & fundamental difference between MOS pages and naming conventions is that the former mostly follows external style guides, while the latter follows whatever Wikipedia editors decide in accordance with WP:CRITERIA, meaning that one would always need consistent WP:RM outcomes before a change to the naming conventions guidelines (in other words, if the actual page naming isn't going to some sort of consistency, then don't bother to write a new naming conventions rule). --Francis Schonken (talk) 02:36, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Another thought: please see also Naming conventions (events), which has some related guidance. E.g. the five events listed at 2019–2020 outbreak (disambiguation) apart from COVID-19 pandemic (which, BTW, abbreviates "2019" to "19" per the conventional name of the disease), that is three starting with "2019–2020" and two starting with "2019–20", would likely rather look at the more specific "events" naming convention for their article title than at the general "numbers and dates" naming convention, so, if, for instance we'd like to standardize as much as possible on full years for ranges that should probably be reflected in the "events" guidance (too). --Francis Schonken (talk) 02:58, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

RFC notice: BC or BCE, AD or CE in article titles
Please see the RFC taking place at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers. Jc3s5h (talk) 18:44, 29 October 2022 (UTC)