More off-topic than site-related, but it's about e6 so it's in General

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the year naming systems out there, and how they could possibly become more widespread.

If you want to talk about religion or similar topics this is not the place to do it

-

TL;DR - Holocene Calendar on e621: How and Why? Why not? Any better options?

-
For those that don't know, most of the Western world uses the liturgical Gregorian Calendar, whose years are calculated in AD/BC

Out of all the newly-proposed ones, the Holocene calendar [Wikipedia link] by Cesare Emiliani seems to be the least biased/globally-applicable

The Holocene calendar, also known as the Holocene Era (HE) or Human era, is a year numbering system that adds exactly 10,000 years to the currently world-dominant AD or CE era system, placing its first year near the beginning of the Holocene epoch and the Neolithic revolution, making the current year 12016 HE. The Human Era was first proposed by the scientist Cesare Emiliani in 1993.[1][2][3]

-

If we ever use a more international form of year-keeping on e621, how would that work? For things like

• Post upload timestamps
• Forum timestamps
• Comment timestamps
• Report ranges
• Member registration dates
• Other

One of the things I see possibly becoming an issue is the tagging of years:

post #819711
post #839251

Speaking of years, we have tags for each individual year but not a generalized "year" tag? It would make tagging the year of an image a bit easier if it was [Insert applicable tag] -year.

GameManiac said:
Speaking of years, we have tags for each individual year but not a generalized "year" tag? It would make tagging the year of an image a bit easier if it was [Insert applicable tag] -year.

Yess, was wondering the same thing while making this

Seems like the year is tagged on some posts even if it's not visible on the image itself

So a tag like stated_year or similar mightn't work

I don't understand the point of the thread. The time displayed anywhere on the page is an integer number going from 0 with "0" being defined somewhere in 1970.
Since every time shown on e6 is relative that date by counting forward changing the used calendar would be trivial, you just change the definition of that 0 and count from the "new" date.
Tagging would be somewhat harder to fix, but that greatly depends on whether or not the length and the "placement" of the year stay the same or not.

Ignoring all that, why is this in thread form? We're a US based page catering to an English speaking audience. Every person that somehow speaks English either grew up in a place using the gregorian calendar as the main one, or learned about it in school because it was required by open traderoutes with neighbouring communities. Changing the calendar would solve and offer nothing and just be change for change's sake without a good reason. Especially considering that the gregorian calendar is the most widely used calendar worldwide it would make no sense changing it to something that is used by less people over all.

This entire proposal reminds of that guy who insisted that the base-10 system is bad and "must" be replaced by the superior base-12 system.

GameManiac said:
Speaking of years, we have tags for each individual year but not a generalized "year" tag? It would make tagging the year of an image a bit easier if it was [Insert applicable tag] -year.

That would make sense as uploading date sometimes may not represent initial works publish or creation date and combining year with either signature or watermark tags does not give only posts with date stated.

I just read the wiki description to 2015 and it stated about creation of the image, nothing about if the year is visible on the image. And that makes total sense if you are trying to search for images from certain time.

NotMeNotYou said:
This entire proposal reminds of that guy who insisted that the base-10 system is bad and "must" be replaced by the superior base-12 system.

Or that qwerty should be replaced by dvorak. All of the suggestions have idea behind them to correct things and make things better, but in reality it's pretty hard to change something that has been standartized for so long and in use literally everywhere.
But with this situation, what makes it so hard for those using holocene calender to not simply add or reduce "1" from the year number they see? If image has 2016 in it, then it's most likely done in 12016 instead of 2016 according to that calendar. Also some images use two digit formats to begin with, like -16.

NotMeNotYou said:
I don't understand the point of the thread.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the year naming systems out there, and how they could possibly become more widespread.

-

The time displayed anywhere on the page is an integer number going from 0 with "0" being defined somewhere in 1970.

Since every time shown on e6 is relative that date by counting forward changing the used calendar would be trivial, you just change the definition of that 0 and count from the "new" date.

That's pretty interesting, a moveable 0
Why 1970s though? Is that for abbreviated years like '16, '15 etc? (Is that even an option on here? Never noticed one)

-

Tagging would be somewhat harder to fix, but that greatly depends on whether or not the length and the "placement" of the year stay the same or not.

Yeah, that would possibly cause some confusion.
If we treat it as a non-numerical tag (dog, cat), or even a non-year number (5, 100 etc. Not sure how non-year numbers are used on e6 atm), then that should make it much easier to comprehend
-

Ignoring all that, why is this in thread form?

What form should it've been in instead?
-

We're a US based page catering to an English speaking audience.

Why?
-

Every person that somehow speaks English either grew up in a place using the gregorian calendar as the main one, or learned about it in school because it was required by open traderoutes with neighbouring communities.

Even if you ignore how the latter began using said calendar in the first place, are we still learning it because it's required by open traderoutes with neighbouring countries communities?
-

Changing the calendar would solve and offer nothing and just be change for change's sake without a good reason.

Why?
-

Especially considering that the gregorian calendar is the most widely used calendar worldwide it would make no sense changing it to something that is used by less people over all.

Why?
-

This entire proposal reminds of that guy who insisted that the base-10 system is bad and "must" be replaced by the superior base-12 system.

Which guy (there are at least 2 tmk)? That would be interesting to try, but the ones accustomed to base-10 probably wouldn't like it:

Languages using duodecimal number systems are uncommon. Languages in the Nigerian Middle Belt such as Janji, Gbiri-Niragu (Gure-Kahugu), Piti, and the Nimbia dialect of Gwandara;[5] the Chepang language of Nepal[6] and the Mahl language of Minicoy Island in India are known to use duodecimal numerals.

titanmelon said:
Not sure how non-year numbers are used on e6 atm

Number, and (in certain instances) get. So far there's been no need for anything more specific than that. Hardly anyone even bothers to tag 'number'.

titanmelon said:

Why?

How about we turn this around and you explain why such a change would benefit anyone using this site?

titanmelon said:
-
That's pretty interesting, a moveable 0
Why 1970s though?

It's an epoch value. Asking why often isn't that meaningful. In this case the answer is Because Unix came into existence circa 1970

Genjar said:
Number, and (in certain instances) get. So far there's been no need for anything more specific than that. Hardly anyone even bothers to tag 'number'.

Hm, should we do anything about that?
-

Beeseverywhere said:
How about we turn this around and you explain why such a change would benefit anyone using this site?

Because the topic of this forum isn't 'Listen to titanmelon tell you why you should do X instead of Y'

It's already all there in the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar#Motivation

Most prominent reasons being:

[..]

• The Anno Domini era has no year zero, with 1 BC followed immediately by AD 1, complicating the calculation of timespans further.

• The years BC are counted down when moving from past to future, making calculation of timespans difficult.

• Instead, HE places its epoch to 10,000 BC. This is a rough approximation of the start of the current geologic epoch, the Holocene (the name means entirely recent). The motivation for this is that human civilization (e.g. the first settlements, agriculture, etc.) is believed to have arisen within this time.

This isn't a problem at the moment, but if/when more ancient-dated art (10 000 years+) begins to show up- none of which is currently being uploaded/created/dated using contemporary systems, then I suspect that this will begin to become slightly more of a concern

-

savageorange said:
It's an epoch value. Asking why often isn't that meaningful. In this case the answer is Because Unix came into existence circa 1970

Oh

POSIX time still uses a variant of the gregorian calendar though (which the epoch in UTC is based on):

The 2001 edition of POSIX.1 rectified the faulty leap year rule in the definition of Unix time, but retained the essential definition of Unix time as an encoding of UTC rather than a linear time scale.

while we're at it we can adopt metric time

titanmelon said:
POSIX time still uses a variant of the gregorian calendar though (which the epoch in UTC is based on):
"Asking why often isn't that meaningful."
Why?

And? It's an epoch value, it is by definition arbitrarily chosen, on the basis of convenience, recognizability, or both. This is just as true for holocene as for unix or any other epoch.

:V

Assuming e621 uses the right storage of dates in the database (the date or datetime data type), this would be highly incompatible, requiring a custom build of the database software and a long/risky update to the database it's self.
On top of that, ruby/Perl/python do not have native support for this, neither does any known operating system.
Additionally getting users used to the date format change to a system most probably never heard of would cause confusion and possible arguments (we are talking about furries after all).

If we want a completely neutral, non-biased date and time system, we should use the day the earth's first atom came into existence.
Although it can be argued that the Gregorian calendar is more specific to a specific religion, is widely accepted by most, if not all English speaking countries regardless of religion, so much that no one really cares about the origin of it and more about just keeping a known time system.
I believe switching of a widely known date system would cause a mental version of dagen H. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H

Also of all the site and service I have seen, non of which have used the Holocene calendar system, which might make e621 a hipster site, code wise. I'd also confuse new users.

Chaser said:
Assuming e621 uses the right storage of dates in the database (the date or datetime data type), this would be highly incompatible, requiring a custom build of the database software and a long/risky update to the database it's self.
On top of that, ruby/Perl/python do not have native support for this, neither does any known operating system.

• Database might or might not need changes, according to whether the datetime type in use is unsigned, signed, or string based. Rendering dates relative to X or Y epoch doesn't mean that they have to be stored that way. The storage just has to have an isomorphic mapping to the numbering system you want to express things in.
• Python supports years < 1970: eg. import time; time.gmtime(-86400 * 365 * 96000) -> minus 94238 AD.
• Operating system support is basically irrelevant, unless you want downloaded files to be tagged with the date suggested by year tags (they are not currently). Not really in e621's scope.

Don't mistake this for support for OP's proposition; OP's proposition is misguided and particularly fails to address the very large 'user confusion' problem you raise.

I believe switching of a widely known date system would cause a mental version of dagen H. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H

A more directly related example would be the situation with Metric vs Imperial. Even in countries that generally use metric, there's still noticable amounts of imperial measuring in use. Maybe in another 300 years the world will actually be all on metric.

(and holocene seems to be much worse off here.. unlike driving on the right side of the road, or calculating sizes of objects, the average person has no reason to care about the benefits of the holocene calendar.)