Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Year 10,000 problem (2nd nomination)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus, defaulting to keep. Can't sleep, clown will eat me 21:07, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Year 10,000 problem

Year 10,000 problem was nominated for deletion on 2004-11-09. The result of the discussion was "keep". For the prior discussion, see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Year 10,000 problem.

This article is all original research. The only sources on this are a few joke articles which were not written by reliable sources anyway. Fails Wikipedia:Verifiability, and probably Wikipedia is not a crystal ball as well. Xyzzyplugh 05:06, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

• Delete It's Original Research and bad original research at that. Most of the article's just wrong. Fan-1967 05:44, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. The article itself says: This may not be a problem in the year 10,000, as it is unlikely that any of the technology or software in use today will still be active at that time. I'd go even further. I doubt any computers in operation today will even exist then. It may deserve a merge to the Y2K problem where it was originally mentioned, but it certainly doesn't deserve its own article. - Mgm|^(talk) 09:10, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per Mgm (except for the part where s/he proposes the IMHO unnecessary merge). -- NORTH ^talk 10:13, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
• Keep - this is a legitimate topic that has had some media exposure. Someone's going to type in "Year 10,000 problem" and expect to see something. My only concern is the use of a comma; there's no need for a separator. --AlexWCovington (talk) 10:19, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Keep per User:Uncle G's recent addition of existing code which now is failing. (Would have been keep, otherwise, as people would expect to see an article on the Y10K problem.) And the comma has been discussed. I agree it shouldn't be there, and there was agreement the first time, but not the second time after I improperly reverted a move. You may bring it up again at WP:RM, if you wish. — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 13:11, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
• Keep sourced, encyclopaedic - article is in obvious need of cleanup, but that's not an AfD issue. WilyD 13:23, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
• Comment As the nominator of this, I think that, given the sources Uncle G has found, merging this with Year 2000 problem would be reasonable. The majority of this article is still about the Y2k problem, with basically one paragraph which is actually about the "year 10,000" problem. As Uncle G's source on this also mentions the possibility of a year 100,000 problem, and as the creation of Year 100,000 problem is therefore possible but undesirable, merging seems the best course to me. --Xyzzyplugh 13:41, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Comments Unless I missed something, the sources are: (1) a 1998 public opinion poll about Y2K, with a footnote at the very end about the alleged Year 10,000 problem, but no references or sources to support its existence; (2) An April Fool's day post about the problem (3) An essay that there might be such a thing (with no technical description of an actual issue), so we better look at it; (4) A fanciful blog posting from the year 9998 (still with no technical description of an actual issue); (5) A posting that actually invites responses to a humor page; (6) Another fanciful blog entry, this one purportedly from 9996 (still no technical description of the problem).

    All modern computer systems store dates as a number of days since January 1, 1900. There may conceivably be an issue in 2079, when that number passes 65,536, the number which can be stored in one 16-bit word of computer memory. The only verified issue about year 10,000 is that Excel formatting routines can't handle displaying the value. That's it. Fan-1967 14:29, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

    • All modern computer systems store dates as a number of days since January 1, 1900. — If that's the premise that you based your earlier "Most of the article's just wrong." comment upon, then we have articles on time_t, Unix time, and Time (computing) that you should read. ☺ Uncle G 14:52, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
      • True, there are other time storage formats. None of them have an issue with the year 10,000, because none are storing the year as decimal text. Fan-1967 14:57, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
    • There are now systems that use ISO date format (the one used at the top of this discussion) internally, and you can bet that some of them assume a 4-digit year. Gazpacho 01:10, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
• Keep has sources and examples, discusses a notable computing phenomenon. - CNichols 15:07, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
• Delete and do not recreate this crystal ball until the year 9990. --DrTorstenHenning 16:50, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
• Delete This is clear crystal balling folks. First off, does anyone actually believe that current software/hardware is going to be used in the year 10,000? Common sense says, No, no one will be using them in 7990 years. That said with how fast computer technology is evolving, this is fairly a null pointed article. As someone who derives a paycheck from the industry, this is complete and utter non-sense --Brian ^{(How am I doing?)} 18:25, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
• Merge. There's no reason to believe that the epoch will still be in use, much less the systems. Gazpacho 19:19, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
• Keep per above. -AMK152 03:12, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per tha above: OR, crystal balling, lack of respectable sources. Sandstein 05:39, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
• Keep There is another aspect of the phrase 'Year 10,000 Problem' that is not in this article, but could be. We use this phrase in our software development group and I have heard others use it in others groups with an ironic twist. It describes a problem that would require a systematic examination and overhaul of all the code to address a theortical problem whose real significance approaches zero. "That's a Year 10,000 kind of problem--let's leave it for my successor." We also have occasionally used this rather non-ironically to describe in a generic sense any kind of problem that would require large scale code examination for a payoff, that while perhaps important, does not produce new features and is not very sexy. Obviously this by itself would not be the basis for inclusion in the article. But if my description of the phrase had wider currancy and was verifiable, it would provide a non-crystal ball componant for the article that would be useful. Jdclevenger 13:25, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

• Comment There's the problem: "if my description of the phrase had wider currancy and was verifiable..." Doesn't seem that it is. Fan-1967 13:30, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

• Delete complete and utter nonsense. Plus the problem would actually occur in the year 65536, as years are now most often stored in 16bit's. --Darkfred ^{Talk to me} 16:44, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
• Delete - Absolute rubbish. We might as well have an article on the Year 100,000 problem as well. - Hahnchen 15:27, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
• Keep - The Y2K problem turned out to be science-fiction as well, so even if this "problem" turns out to be nonsense, there should still be some evidence on the sort of nonsense it was. Furthermore, please note that i ended up reading about this issue after some research on "The Long Now" project which should be deleted as well if we do decide that such long-term thoughts are none of our business. -— Eyeprotocol (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
• Delete per nomination. This is a non-problematic. The only problematic part is very addequately dealt with in the Y2K problem, which is already past and well documented. The remaining hypotheses and theorisations are so crystal ball (ie it won't happen for another 8,000 years) that it falls off the scale of WP:NOT; 2079 is still 73 years away. Ohconfucius 09:14, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
• Keep per above. Seems worth having per the discussion. --badlydrawnjeff talk 16:09, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
• Keep and iron out any original research issues (the article does contain some referential notation). Yamaguchi先生 22:52, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
• Keep - it's well written, it mentions the inherent humor value, and balances it with the real issues, which may not be catastrophic, but do exist. AnonEMouse ^(squeak) 20:30, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.