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 delete. While the Delete views are solidly anchored in P&G, the two Keeps - one plus a PERX - only bring up the "legitimacy" of the term and its popularity in academic literature, neither of which is a guideline-based argument. This leaves us with the same outcome as was reached in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Detailed logarithmic timeline. Owen×☎13:13, 22 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is where not just mechanically looking for the article title and having an idea of what to look for pays off. The concept of a logarithmic timescale was documented by, amongst others, Nigel Calder in 1983: A logarithmic time line
[…] is no more mysterious than the maneuver of an aircraft as it nears touchdown and flares out to avoid hitting the ground too hard. The rate of "descent" through time diminishes as one approaches the present, according to a strict but simple rule that a stipulated proportional change in ancient dates always corresponds to the same distance along the timescale.
Alas, Börje Ekstig' 2011 book ISBN9781456779542 is self-published through AuthorHouse, because on pages 12–13 it not only explains what a logarithmic timescale is, it gives much the same reverse logarithmic calendar as in the reverse timeline section of this article, their both going back to the origin of life at 10^9MaBP, for example.
But Joel Levy's Big Book of Science (ISBN9780785835998, Quarto) is not self-published and explains on page 94 that when it comes to the difficulties of comprehensibly visualizing the history of the Earth, "[o]ne way around this is to use a logarithmic timescale".
Where rôte mechanistic keyword searching fails to pay off is that it doesn't find David Christian's Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, a book that nowhere says the word "logarithm" but that is logarithmic (albeit not base 10) in overall structure, the scale of the book increasing as it works chapter by chapter towards the present, going from Ga at the start through Ma by chapter 5 to decades by chapter 11, and at least useful for being able to source explanatory notes on events in the table, satisfying any "But what do historians include?" questions. For another actually explicit logarithmic timeline of the history of the Earth, albeit a less detailed one (but in colour ☺), see Foley (ORCID0000-0001-7510-0223) et al., chapter 16 of ISBN9783030822026 (also published as doi:10.1016/j.ancene.2013.11.002), page 206. There's a logarithmic timeline of the past 10Ma on page 217 of ISBN9780241280904 by Simon Lewis, for yet another "logarithmic timescale, where each jump is an order of magnitude" going down from 1Ma to 1Da from left to right.
This most definitely is not some novelty that was invented by Wikipedia. And to those, not historians/geologists/whatever, who opine that it is not useful, I give the words of the late geomorphology professor Antony R. Orme about xyr reverse logarithmic timeline of the Earth going from 1Ma up to 4.5Ga in doi:10.1093/oso/9780195313413.003.0008: "The logarithmic timescale condenses the distant past, thereby enhancing Mesozoic and Cenozoic events relevant to the present landscape."
Keep. Expressing time in the logarithmic scale is a legitimate approach for analyzing many different phenomena - see Google Scholar search [1]. The page can be improved of course. My very best wishes (talk) 16:57, 1 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Delete per my comment about this page at the bundled AfD: The concept of a timeline is encyclopedic, but the idea of making the axis logarithmic is just a convenient display convention, not a separate concept that needs a page unto itself. The bulk of the page is unsourced and would be, at best, synthesis. XOR'easter (talk) 02:58, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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.
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Logarithmic timeline
