Main components:
- WikibaseLib
User story:
As an editor, I want to have a clearer indication if a number in a date is a year or a day in order to correctly enter my data.
Problem:
Right now it is not obvious if "January 1" is the first of January in an arbitrary year or the month January in the year 1. We need to make this more obvious.
Screenshots/mockups:
BDD
GIVEN a date between -99 and 99
WHEN displaying it in the statement view
OR WHEN displaying it in client wikis with the default formatting (e.g. {{#statements:}} parser function)
THEN we add BCE/CE at the end of the data
Acceptance criteria:
- For years below 100 we add BCE/CE in the formatted value
- The new formatting of the values can also be parsed! (roundtrip)
Notes:
- We do this regardless of the precision of the date.
- This is already happening for BCE dates.
- We want this for both Wikidata and Wikibase.
Original report:
In English, you can write the 1st of January as "January 1". If you enter that into a date field on Wikidata, it will accept it as valid and there is no indication that it has actually interpreted the "1" as a year. If the user intended the day, since it looks correct, they will save the value, completely unaware that it has been interpreted as something entirely different.
I made that mistake and I was able to find examples of it happening to other people, e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17274546, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6522769 and https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4996993.
One solution would be to always indicate low year numbers (any one or two digit ones, maybe even three digit ones) using eras, so that it's clearer that the year is meant, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drusus_Caesar says "AD 7", https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Penzi says "11 n. Chr.".