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Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the original Anno Domini (AD) and Before Christ (BC) notations used for the same calendar era.
The Common Era is, of course, the time at which Jews and Christians began to have a shared history. See for: BCE, “Before the Common Era,” is a theologically neutral equivalent to BC, “Before Christ;” just as CE, “Common Era,” is a neutral equivalent to A.D. (anno domini), “the year of our Lord.” See for WHY BCE AND CE?
Argument 3: If the Gregorian Calendar is the common one, the common era is clearly when that calendar started to be used by cultures outside Western Europe - around AD 1900 / 1900 CE. That is truly the common era. Argument 4: BCE/CE is an anti-Christian POV way of writing BC/AD. Find an independent year 0, and then I'll use CE.
For dates before the year 1, unlike the proleptic Gregorian calendar used in the international standard ISO 8601, the traditional proleptic Gregorian calendar (like the older Julian calendar) does not have a year 0 and instead uses the ordinal numbers 1, 2, ... both for years AD and BC. Thus the traditional time line is 2 BC, 1 BC, AD 1, and AD 2.
A year zero does not exist in the Anno Domini (AD) calendar year system commonly used to number years in the Gregorian calendar (nor in its predecessor, the Julian calendar); in this system, the year 1 BC is followed directly by year AD 1 (which is the year of the epoch of the era).
BCE and CE or BC and AD are written in upper case, unspaced, without a full stop (period), and separated from the numeric year by a space (5 BC, not 5BC). It is advisable to use a non-breaking space. AD appears before or after a year (AD 106, 106 AD); BCE, CE, and BC always appear after (106 CE, 3700 BCE, 3700 BC).
Maybe in 30 years’ time, if Wikipedia is still going, almost everyone will agree with you and use BCE/CE instead of BC/AD - in which case Wikipedia’s approach should change. But for now, we use what most people use now - not what a select few Wikipedians would like us all to use.
Arthur C. Clarke proposed the use of a single time zone in 1976. [2] Attempts to abolish time zones date back half a century [1] and include the Swatch Internet Time. Economics professor Steve Hanke and astrophysics professor Dick Henry at Johns Hopkins University have been proponents of the concept and have integrated it in their Hanke–Henry Permanent Calendar.