Jc3s5h added a comment. ISO 8601 says "The interchange parties shall agree the additional number of digits in the time element year." I believe thiemowmde is incorrect in claiming that this can mean the data exchange partners can agree to a variable number of digits.
Other parts of the standard make it clear that the agreement is to the additional digits beyond 4 that are to be specified. Years with 1 to 3 digits are absolutely non-compliant in every case. To understand where the standard is coming from, you should understand that it support both a basic and extended format. An example of an extended format with more than 4 digits for the year is given on page 27 of the standard: +0119850412. An example of an extended format for the same date is +011985-04-12. Page 14 makes it clear why it is absolutely mandatory to specify a fixed number of digits. In the examples on that page, it has been agreed to provide two additional digits, or six digits altogether, for the year. The year 1985 may be represented +001985. The century of the 1900s may be represented +0019; since it is agreed there are six digits in a year, the standard demands the recipient interpret +0019 as a case where the exact year is unknown, or a case where it is sufficient to know the century and the exact year is a don't care. If you don't know how many digits the year must contain, you can't tell the difference between a year and a century. Keep in mind that the whole point of using a standard for information interchange is to allow the use of //any// parser that correctly parses ISO 8601. Requiring the data consumer to write a new parser that parses a quasi-ISO 8601 Wikidata proprietary format defeats the whole idea of following a standard. TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T66084 REPLY HANDLER ACTIONS Reply to comment or attach files, or !close, !claim, !unsubscribe or !assign <username>. EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: Jc3s5h Cc: thiemowmde, Jc3s5h, Wikidata-bugs, Nemo_bis, Addshore, MZMcBride, Lydia_Pintscher, JohnLewis, aude _______________________________________________ Wikidata-bugs mailing list Wikidata-bugs@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-bugs
