Date Format for Author Lives

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Date Format for Author Lives

1gabriel
Nov 29, 2020, 3:08 pm

Authors from the first millenium (and those before) have an odd look to their life dates. King Alfred the Great, for example is "-0899".

I've literally never seen this format used for people's lives. Is there a reason why we need to use four digits in the CK for people who lived in the first millennium? It seems to me that we should omit preceding naughts from all years.

2Cynfelyn
Modifié : Nov 29, 2020, 4:38 pm

It's part of the International Standard: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS

That said, an ISO-compliant covering date would use a forward slash: YYYY/YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD/YYYY-MM-DD rather than LT's dash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Time_intervals

The example given in CK Important events, "Battle of the Bulge (1944|1945)", is just wrong, as it causes works to be filed as 1945 but under 1944.

3gabriel
Nov 29, 2020, 9:35 pm

>2 Cynfelyn:

From perusing the wiki page, it seems that LT only sort-of uses ISO. BCE, for example, isn't part of the standard at all.

That said, I'll put this in the Propose Site Improvements thread, since one possible solution would be for the programming to remove zeroes before birth and death years.