"Poul-Henning Kamp" wrote on 2012-04-03 21:53 UTC: > In message <[email protected]>, Warner Losh > write > s: > > >Wouldn't that need to be done by the Pope? Has the Vatican ever > >delegated continuing maintenance of the Gregorian Calendar to a > >third party? > > The ISO secretariat claimed at one point that the controlling > document were an ISO standard, but couldn't tell me which one...
Section 3.2.1 of ISO 8601:2004 does formally define the "Gregorian calendar" and the "proleptic Gregorian calendar". It anchors it in history by stating that the "Convention du Metre" was signed in Paris on 20 May 1875. It also gives the usual leap-year rule and clarifies in a note that the calendar year [0000] in the proleptic Gregorian calendar is a leap year. But, like the definition of (universal coordinated) time in ITU-R TF.460, such standards documents are only widely accepted because they are compatible with commonly accepted historic practice. They do not actually confer authority onto their authors to change common practice. I don't think the authority of ISO to define what calendar we use is any higher than (say) the authority of Wikipedia on such matters. They both are merely widely-respected committees reporting on what the current consensus is. Neither ISO standards, ITU recommendations, nor Wikipedia articles are the right place to start a revolution. Your edits will be reverted quickly unless you have managed to build consensus first. > I wouldn't be surprised if UN has some kind of rule about which > calendar to use to schedule and call meetings, and whatever that > document says, would have a very credible claim to being "it". ITU, UN, ... same thing. You don't revolutionize the world by editing obscure documents that are kept from readers behind paywalls and that only very few geeks ever have read in the original. The Vatican hardly has significant authority in these matters today. They had enormous troubles already back in 1582 to get leap-year changes implemented everywhere, in spite of enthusiastic support from the astronomic timekeeping community. Editing a document is trivial. Building consensus for "a new order of things" (see Nicolo Machiavelli: The Prince, Chapter VI) is difficult. It takes a lot of time and excellent arguments, and still fails more often than not. Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
