Library discussion:A History of the U.S.S.R./Part 1

I took some editor liberties to improve the formatting of this section for the web. In the source text, this is formatted as a "table" using dots to align the historical descriptions to the center. Also, I believe due to space constraints, the author shortened "century" to "cent." - I returned this to expanded form. Lastly, I converted "of our era" to "A.D." for readability. If anyone has a better idea how to format this, I'm interested.

I think elongating century back to its full form is warranted in that the abbreviation is clearly cent. for century -- I say that because in some historical cases editors or translators mistook one word for another and gave entirely new meaning to a manuscript.

In the case of the A.D. change though I feel this can be debatable, because it does introduce our own meaning to the text that wasn't necessarily present in the original. There's an entire debate around A.D., C.E., and I think there's even a third option?

I did a quick ctrl+f for A.D. throughout the text and noticed that it was used quite a few times so I can imagine if they were all originally written as "of our era" it can get overbearing, but it's not really our task either to edit the text for the reader, we normally host it as is from the source. However, there is a case that can be made that since the authors used Current Era, we can easily abbreviate that whole sentence to just C.E. That would make for a stronger case imo than using A.D.

Alternatively, include "of our era" the first time they make the switch from BCE to CE and then don't remind the reader again. I assume the book progresses linearly through time. Generally if I read "in the 4th century" I would be aware that it's current era as BCE is more often pointed out than CE, but I don't know if that's a widespread convention. At the same time this is debatable again because it would be us removing wording from the original text.

Thanks for summarizing the edit here!

You're absolutely right about the A.D./C.E. debate, I didn't even think of C.E. I reverted the change since it doesn't hurt to keep it the same as the original.

I also reverted a change I made yesterday which placed two timeline events under the same year bullet point if they occurred in the same year. I think this could have changed the meaning by positioning two events closer together.

Now if 2 events occurred in the same year, it looks the same as the original, so each event gets its own bullet point, for example:

• 1648
  • Expedition of Semyon Dezhnyov
• 1648
  • Beginning of popular uprising in the Ukraine (under leadership of Bogdan Khmelnitski) against Polish domination