Talk:69 BC

Strange tense

The intro says "Year 69 BC was a year of the pre-Julian calendar." But that calendar did not exist in 69 BC. So it should say "is" instead of "was." Edison (talk) 20:52, 14 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It says "was" because it was more than 2,000 years since that year occurred. All years in the past are (or should be) credited as "was", just like you say that dead people "were" rather than "are" (George Washington is not the president of the US, but he was in the 18th century).
It says the "pre-Julian" calendar, not the Julian one, to show that the year occurred before the Julian calendar came into effect.
What is so special about 69 BC, apart from all other years BC or even all other years in the past?

/Ludde23 ^{Talk Contrib} 22:52, 14 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It is true that 69 BC wasn't called "69 BC" when it occurred (the Romans probably referred to it as "685 Ab Urbe Condita" or something like that), but today, it is known as "69 BC" in those parts of the world that use the western calendar (which includes most of the world). In comparison: We call the war that was fought in 1914-1918 "World War I", even though it wasn't called that when it was fought. A thousand years ago, nobody had any idea they were living during the Middle Ages, but we still call it that today. /Ludde23 ^{Talk Contrib} 22:59, 14 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thus it is an article about the year, but it was not the year 69 at that time. Please take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Years where the suggested template says "This article is about the year 2004. For other uses of 2004, see 2004 (number): :::2004 is a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar." There is no was in the project's template. Maybe you should discuss the edit or change the template rather than simply reverting my edit without an edit summary mentioning that you had commented on this talk page. The odd tense was added this past January by an anonymous editor [1]. As to why I changed this one to comply with the project template, would you rather I had changed all the year articles so you could revert them all to your preferred form?? Far better to make a corrective change to the one article I found on random article patrol. See WP:BOLD. Edison (talk) 04:20, 16 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm very sorry for having been too hasty. I will try to put in edit summaries in the future. Secondly, I find it difficult to comply with you in the is/was issue. Both the year before (70 BC) and the year after (68 BC) have was and I've also looked at a few random years AD (1319, 1345, 1700, 1809, the aforementioned 2004 and 2007) and they all have was. All years that have a statement about what kind of year it was seem to have just that - was. I can't find is anywhere. However, if it should be is, then of course this should be fixed. It's just that there are more than 2,500 articles to fix, which might take some time. /Ludde23 ^{Talk Contrib} 07:05, 16 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]