Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Detectable BC/BCE dates

Project created
The plan for starting this project is as follows. Because it is hard to explain the project without having a working example, I plan to first create the project page (with at least partial information at first), all the necessary templates, and use those templates in a very small number of articles (probably 5-10 articles). Then I’ll make a formal proposal.

I intend to demonstrate that this project aligns nicely with the mission of Wikipedia and that, although it is going to serve only a small number of people, the effects of the project will be invisible and completely harmless for all the readers and editors of Wikipedia who are not interested in using any alternative year-numbering systems.

Another question I intend to discuss with the community is the specific technical solutions that I have come up with. Although I believe my solution is OK, I think technical details need to be discussed before this solution is implemented on thousands of pages.

Some time will be needed for reaching consensus both on conceptual and on technical levels (maybe a couple of months). During that time I plan to finish developing software tools for quick processing of articles (adding missing “BC”s and/or marking up dates that can’t have “BC” labels). Those tools most likely will be used only by a very small number of editors (one editor can easily process thousands of articles in reasonable time).

Once the tools are published and we have more than one editor, that’s when we will finally start using this WikiProject for collaboration and coordination of efforts. I know that I do things kind of backwards compared to other WikiProjects (by not starting with a proposal), but given the nature of this project, such approach makes the most sense.

The project will be in its active phase for months, possibly even for a few years until all relevant articles are processed and all BC/BCE dates on Wikipedia are finally detectable programmatically. After that the project will go into maintenance phase. No coordination of effort will be needed then. Most work will consist of fixing rare issues, mostly when someone adds a date BC that lacks both “BC” label and the markup. Such random issues can be fixed by anybody, not just by highly motivated editors like myself who are ready to process thousands of articles on their own.

The project page at the last phase will serve only as a reference, a standard for detecting BC/BCE dates. KarenGrigMan (talk) 21:43, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Templates should be merged
I haven't looked into the details of this proposed project, but before going too far, all of these bc-* templates should be merged into a single template with a name that is not an abbreviation. It is acceptable to have redirects to that template, but the main template should have a real, readable name. The merged template also needs a sandbox and a testcases page to verify that it works as intended.

Also, if you are proposing mass tagging of tens of thousands of articles, you need to get consensus support for that work. Before tagging any articles, set up some example pages in this WikiProject space. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:24, 15 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your suggestions. I was too excited and completely forgot I could use sandboxes for demoing stuff. I was going to add the markup to only a few articles anyway. Now I’m going to do it in this WikiProject space as you suggested.
 * As for getting consensus support before tagging thousands of pages, here I completely agree with you. That’s what I intended to do.
 * One thing I kind of disagree with you on is merging all the templates into one template. I’m more concerned with readability of wiki text around the templates than with readability of template names. And so I tried to make the template names as short as possible because of that. Using separate templates doesn't require an extra argument and makes template calls even shorter. There are articles that would require lots of instances of templates in one paragraph. Take for example this one: User:KarenGrigMan/Roman Republic. You can search for "{{bc" instances in the source code.
 * I will raise the question of template naming and organising (whether they should be merged or not) and lay out my arguments for my way of organising them in my proposal. Ultimately this question is not terribly important to me. If I have to change the templates I'll change them. KarenGrigMan (talk) 07:17, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the response.  is the same length and readability as  . Merging will be asked of you by the community, so it's probably easier for you to do it now. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:10, 16 October 2022 (UTC)