Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Year 10,000 problem (4th 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 yet another keep. Yamamoto Ichiro 会話 05:43, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Year 10,000 problem

Year 10,000 problem (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

year 65,536 problem, year 292,277,026,596 problem and year 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,727 problem

Not significant, as these are occurring in the distant future. Voortle (talk) 20:13, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Keep the first, delete the others. These problems are every bit as notable as the year 2000 problem, with the exception that they're not happening yet. But since some people are taking the year 10,000 problem seriously and some not, it's already a topic of discussion, just like the year 2000 problem, which of course is notable. Keep that. The others are just amusing things posted on some college site, and are not serious topics of discussion.... yet. Delete those for now, perhaps bringing back the others when the problem's imminent, if Wiki (heck, the world!) is still around. Redbull47 (talk) 20:24, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

• Comment. I suggest that year 65,536 problem and the two other later ones be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Year 32,768 problem which I created shortly before this AfD. They are all short stubs whilst the Y10k is an established article. -- RHaworth (Talk | contribs) 20:35, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
• Weak keep for year 10,000 problem. -- RHaworth (Talk | contribs) 20:35, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
• Merge: these are all legitimate computational problems, not just for the future, but for those who have to work with such dates, such as astronomers calculating the dates of events, interest payments on national debt, etc. A suitable article might be titled Year rollover problem. —EncMstr 20:35, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

• Needs to be separated:

  Y10K = keep, already discussed, no reason to believe a change of consensus.

  65536 = delete, no point. Alternatively, redirect to year 10,000 problem.

  292,... = keep as redirect to year 2038 problem.

  170,... = speedy delete, as it was created by the nominator. moved to other nomination

  — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 20:31, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

• Speedy keep as the current nomination is cluttered with extraneous WP:POINT stuff. Renominate if you really think it's necessary, for just this page.--NapoliRoma (talk) 21:17, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
• Delete all (or merge to Y2K maybe) It's survived three previous nominations, but in response to some of the arguments made in favor of it: (a) if it was a satire on Y2K, it's pretty stale by now (b) if it's something you're worried about, you've still got 7,982 years left, and your descendants will laugh about their superstitious ancestors (c) if there's a computer 7,982 years from now that still uses the "old" four digit technology, what a triumph of engineering that will be (d) if it's here because someone is going to look up "year 10,000 problem", merge this to Y2K (e) if you think this is a problem for computer programs that have to calculate astronomical data 10,000 years in the future, rest assured that even now, in the year "02008" or "002008", someone smarter than you will be able to solve that particular problem. Mandsford (talk) 21:56, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
• Merge to computer year storage rollover problem, perhaps also included Y2K. 132.205.44.5 (talk) 22:31, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
• Delete as it's not for another 8,000 years, nonsense really to even think that the same type of system will be in use. -RiverHockey (talk) 22:59, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Comment: thinking like that has caused plenty of trouble to date. Even in 1998, I knew plenty of programmers who were uncertain whether Y2K was something they should anticipate. Choosing the Unix epoch of 1970 was frugal for file timestamps, but the date-related library routines would have been tremendously useful for general purpose date computations (mortgages, birth dates, etc.) had the epoch been set earlier. The Y10K limit is less restrictive than recent problems, but plenty of applications are sensitive to that kind of limit: MTTF, radiocarbon dating, and age of celestial bodies. See the articles referenced by Template:Time measurement and standards for many such examples. —EncMstr 00:28, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

• Comments Year 2000 problem is easily distinguished from all the other "Year problem"s in play in that it's a past event, and the article thus has a wealth of material dealing with the run-up, event, and post mortem. 2038 and other future events thus would be a sensible candidate for their own separate article, although it would need to be edited 30 years+1 month from now to reflect that 2038 is now no longer a future event (that's what {{update after}} is for, right? :-)

Note also that yes, the year Y10K is not for another 8,000 years, but five-digit dates can be and are used today in certain circumstances, as the article says. Since the speedy keep is an apparent lead balloon, my vote would be strong not-delete as there is relevant content. At most, we could give a merge a try, with the obvious corollary that if any given year problem then appears to deserve it, it can be re-spun into its own article.--NapoliRoma (talk) 00:06, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

• Keep, as many programs (e.g. computer simulations of star paths) carry such large dates today - this is not such a long-way-off problem for many people already. LHMike (talk) 00:26, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
• Delete or maybe Merge to Year 2000 problem. From my experience, people only mention this "problem" (if this is still a problem in 8,000 years then I will be shocked at the retarted computer skills of humans) is when joking about Y2K. TJ Spyke 09:20, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Comment Please watch out for the argument from personal incredulity, which is one of many, many arguments to avoid in deletion discussions.--NapoliRoma (talk) 22:37, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

• Keep the Year 10,000 problem but delete the rest (year 655535 etc etc) as those have no clear references. The nomination uses a bizarre reason of "happens in the distant future"; that is irrelevant (the Heat death of the universe happens in the future too so what counts is references. The RFC 2550 (albeit humorous) plus the g77 compiler explicitly references the "Year 10000" when it says...."Programs making use of this intrinsic might not be Year 10000 (Y10K) compliant." You could argue *that* is humorous too unless you were trying to convince the public that the high-grade radioactive waste you want to dump in a Salt Mine is stable for -32,000 years. Actually that would be funny too. Ttiotsw (talk) 18:47, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
• Keep the Year 10,000 problem, people around the internet and elsewhere are referring to it, in jest or not. Thue | talk 20:57, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. Seems to be meet all the Wikipedia criteria for keeping; I don't see the argument for delete.Geoffrey.landis (talk) 21:28, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
• Keep Please keep this article. It's more relevant than many other theories. XChaos (talk) 23:02, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
• Strong Keep Just because you have trouble thinking 8k years ahead doesn't mean the rest of us do. (see also the Long now project for other people thinking seriously about this issue) Osric (talk) 00:14, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
• Oh, it's a handicap, to be sure. Mandsford (talk) 13:00, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
• Keep the Year 10,000 problem. Even if it never become a real problem, it's certainly a real topic of discussion in certain communities (see, e.g., the references in the article). — mlc 05:43, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
• Keep, ^^^ and the deletion-discussion in itself actually show that the article is valid for an encyclopedia... Wille Raab (talk) 13:21, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
• Keep. This page is relevant, as it describes, in detail, this possible bug in computing. User:Humanitix_bro(talk) —Preceding comment was added at 03:43, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

• Keep or merge. I'm fairly sure this problem was mentioned, though not by that name, in Donald Knuth's "The Art of Scientific Computing". I listed a few other books that mention it briefly, from a Google Books search, on the article talk page. 2480 Google web hits can't all be wrong. Whether it's something we need to worry about is beside the point: those of us who tend to think like mathematicians talk/write about these things regardless, making them notable. --Coppertwig (talk) 04:16, 19 January 2008 (UTC) (changing to "keep or merge. --Coppertwig (talk) 18:09, 19 January 2008 (UTC))

• Keep Year 10,000 problem - The Jewish religious calendar is already more than halfway to Y10K. I'd say that's evidence enough that this is a real issue. RossPatterson (talk) 16:21, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

• Comment - How many times does Year 10,000 problem need to survive AfD campaigns before the nominations stop? RossPatterson (talk) 16:26, 19 January 2008 (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.