Talk:21st century

Starting year

Currently the article lists the starting year of the century as 2000, right next to a comment stating that the starting year is 2001. Either the comment should be removed or the article should be changed to reflect the comment. Thoughts on which one? Thattransgirl (talk) 12:57, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Hi Thattransgirl, I have found some lengthy discussions about this on talk pages in the past, e.g. at Talk:20th_century/Archive_3#Dates. However the manual of style gives a simple answer:

Treat the 1st century AD as years 1–100, the 17th century as 1601–1700, and the second millennium as 1001–2000; similarly, the 1st century BC/BCE was 100–1 BC/BCE, the 17th century BC/BCE was 1700–1601 BC/BCE, and the second millennium 2000–1001 BC/BCE.

Thanks to Gap9551 - who reverted the IP-edit - the article follows the MOS again. If thinking about changing from 2001 to 2000, then I'd think would be best to start a discussion on the MOS talk page because dozens if not hundreds of articles would be affected. – NJD-DE (talk) 15:05, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

A related issue which I have noticed in some century articles and century timeline articles is that the lists of events by year are grouped into 0-to-9 decades which, of course, do not fit neatly into 01-to-00 centuries, and consequently in some cases the wrong -00 year is included and the correct one is not included. Has this been discussed previously? --Blurryman (talk) 22:54, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

I would just change the headers from (for example) "20th century" to "1900s". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 16:48, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I could agree with you too. ArtForDecades610 (talk) 22:26, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Mass Surveillance

I think one of the defining developments in the 21st century is the rise of mass surveillance. There were the global surveillance revelations by Edward Snowden, and now there is the NSO Group's Pegasus scandal. Someone's ought to add this information to the article. (And if you do, thank you!) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.64.76.29 (talk) 03:03, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Governmental surveillance has a long history, but the ease of modern surveillance is a significant byproduct of the information age. I'm not sure Snowden deserves a mention here, but a section on the expansion of surveillance should mention the Five Eyes to give appropriate context. Biasedeyes (talk) 07:10, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

Why are there no colons?

Just wondering why there are no colons for each year, listing the events? 134.204.224.36 (talk) 14:04, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

we need to change the structural format of this entry's section for history

why are events delineated by date in this article? I would like to change the history section for this entry into a narrative-based format. after all, this enry does cover the entire 21st century. Sm8900 (talk) 18:34, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

An old request but I whole-heartedly agree. The events section as it stands should not be a timeline (already covered in Timeline of the 21st century and respective years article such as 2022) but rather a general overview of trends and major events. The same could be said about many of the other sections as well but this is the most egregious in both substance and length. Editors should take inspiration on deciding what is notable enough for inclusion from the 20th century article. Yeoutie (talk) 09:34, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Maybe when we get into 2040 or 2050, we would have too many events here and people from the future would look back onto the general trends and the events of our early 21st century, maybe... Just a random Wikipedian^(talk) 15:49, 12 August 2023 (UTC)

Yep, I agree. The current format is too lengthy to have a full read, and also, it is very inconsistent with the information given. A narrative based format would be a lot better EarthDude (talk) 15:57, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Inclusion of events

There has been a lot of additions of somewhat internationally obscure events in this page by IPs, so there should be some inclusion criteria here. TagaSanPedroAko (talk) 21:54, 7 April 2023 (UTC)