Consider creating a Publish Year field

[George]

Instead of trying to work with dates like 24 February 1973, perhaps we should consider trying to create a publish year field for editions.

[Edward Betts (edwardbetts)]

I want to better understand your requirements so we can implement this feature. How do you see the year field being used, what problem are we trying to solve?

[George (george-archive)]

* we should move towards structured dates for publish date, and author dates
* not having structured dates makes anywhere we present date-related info "rubbery" (data table, subject pages)
* being able to sort by date is useful

Some use cases:

* show me authors born this year
* show me authors who died this year
* show me authors/publishers who published a lot this year
* show me a subject graph with *every* edition that has a publish date on it

I totally understand that dates and date formatting is still an unsolved problem. But, there are tons of tools out there now, to help us move towards structured dates. It would be useful to run our publish dates through some sort of normalization service, so we could see the extent of the outliers like 19--.

Perhaps we should also consider changing the date data entry points to structured/validated fields asap, to stop the rot.

[George (george-archive)]

Maybe we could throw our dates at Freebase Gridworks for a first pass to see what happens?

[Edward Betts (edwardbetts)]

This bug is about published dates, I think the requirements are:

Sort editions of a work by date, and show first publish date of a work.