Old Era on Wikipedia

Description

This extension converts BC/BCE dates into Old Era dates. Old Era is 10,000 years before Christ (from 10,000 BC to 1 BC) that are numbered in chronological order.

This idea is not new. You may have heard about Holocene Calendar - a calendar reform proposal made in 1993 by Cesare Emiliani. Old Era can be viewed as the first 10,000 years of that calendar.

There was another calendar reform proposal in 1963 by E. R. Hope. He basically proposed an era identical to the Old Era differing from it only by name. He called his one the Anterior Epoch.

I came up with the idea of the Old Era before I learned about the 1963 proposal, and I decided to keep the name Old Era, because it sounds simpler.

It’s important to note that this project is not a calendar reform proposal. I don’t propose an official change of the calendar. I just use the Old Era. And I’ve been using it for years. Why? Because I like learning history and I like the way history feels when it’s presented with a timeline that doesn’t number years backwards.

I recommend you to try it too. When using this extension set a goal of becoming comfortable with Old Era dates in a day or two. Being comfortable means you should be able to understand year numbers without translating them back to Christian dates. To achieve this you need to learn by heart a few OE dates of main historical events.

This is how this extension works.
I create instructions for each Wikipedia page, and save them on the server. Instructions look like a list of BC dates and their positions on the page. When you visit a page on Wikipedia, the extension requests those instructions from the server and uses them to translate the dates on the page.

This means that not all pages can be translated by this extension, but only the ones for which instructions have been created. Currently there are instructions for only a few hundred Wikipedia articles. But soon there will be thousands as I continue to upload new instructions to the server regularly. Later I plan to let other users create instructions too. So hopefully translating all articles on Wikipedia won’t take too long.

The number or articles on Wikipedia that contain dates BC is a tiny fraction of the total number of articles. I have currently identified about 56,000 of them. However this number also includes irrelevant articles in which "BC" may stand for British Columbia, baseball club, bowl championship, etc.

Also, there are a lot of articles that are not really about history, but just happen to mention a BC date. Take for example an article about hippopotamus. Of course, such articles should also be translated eventually, but they can wait.

Based on the number of ancient civilisations, numbers of ancient rulers, wars, etc., I'd say there are about 10,000 to 20,000 articles with BC dates that are truly about history and should be translated as soon as possible.

Also note that the vast majority of articles contain only a few BC dates and shouldn't take too long to translate.