Geoffrey Pruitt

Welcome!

Hello Geoffrey Pruitt, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page
• Help pages
• Tutorial
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask me on my talk page or see Wikipedia:Where to ask a question. Again, welcome! --Sean Black ^(talk) 21:56, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

AD & BC or CE & BCE

Hello Geoffrey,

I noticed that you have changed AD & BC to CE & BCE in the Zion National Park article. I can understand your dissatisfaction with AD & BC but keep in mind that others may feel just as strongly about CE & BCE.

Please don't get me wrong. I really don't like either. AD & BC are too Christian biased whilst CE & BCE smell too much of neologism with BCE being such a cumbersome three-letterer.

The problem is that when you go about making unjustified changes like this you are liable to spark off an edit war. These are ugly things: not what you want to start. Though you may be safe with your changes to Zion National Park as the ADs had only recently been added.

When I say "unjustified" what I really mean is that you don't have the consensus of the other users here. This consensus is expressed in the manual of style. To save you time let me direct you to the paragraph in question.

Of course these guidelines are not written in stone and are always open for debate. With respect to the question of AD & BC verses CE & BCE you might like to debate your point here. You might also find this proposal interesting.

P.S. You missed one. Jimp 05:10, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your helpful information. I admit I had not memorized, nor did I check, the manual of style. It really hadn't occured to me that this would be a point of debate 25 years after I first encountered BCE/CE, and was informed that BCE/CE was was now generally accepted. To find this lack of consensus is confusing; to see BCE/CE's rationale picked apart in the proposal page as mere "political correctness" is appalling.

But that's me. I'm hardly so enamored of the concept that I'm willing to submit to an edit war. If someone really really wants to revert my changes, I'll let it happen. I'll still be appalled by what I see as callous Christocentrism (and hence a to-me obvious and blatant violation of NPOV) in a non-religious article. I'm also new enough to this Wikiworld not to be entirely comfortable yet with all the technical or social niceties: I'm still figuring out all the bells and whistles, both technical and social, as I go.

Missed one? I can't seem to find it. Unless you changed it?

Anyway, thanks again for the advice. Geoffrey Pruitt 18:06, 3 March 2006 (UTC)