Issue 952: Wrong date of death

Object: Anthony Bulteel (Person)
Submitter: Heiko Schmidt (castle_ghost)
Assigned to: Eric Ferguson
Priority: Normal
Disposition: Fixed
Description: Dear Eric,

please only add dates if you are fairly certain whether they are true.

You entered 2015 as year of death, which indeed was wrong. I was in (off-list) contact with Angela Bulteel since yesterday about Pulling Bracken and also inquired about (a) his true year of death and about his (b) unpublished dances in SCDDB.

FYI, (a) he died February 25th 2013 - I have corrected that in the meantime, and (b) Angela does not have them but will contact their local teachers who might have gotten them from her husband. Whenever I hear something about (b) I will let you know ;)

About (a) I prefer to have no date in SCDDB (even if we now that a person is not alive anymore) rather than a wrong date.

(Could you please close this issue after you read it. Thanks.)

Cheers, Heiko

Previous Actions

Date May 31, 2016, 12:49 p.m.
User Heiko Schmidt (castle_ghost)

New issue submitted

Date May 31, 2016, 12:49 p.m.
User Heiko Schmidt (castle_ghost)

Assigned changed to »EricFerguson« (previously »None«)

Date May 31, 2016, 2:06 p.m.
User Eric Ferguson (EricFerguson)

Disposition changed to »Fixed« (previously »New«)

Thanks for the correction. I wanted users to know that he had died, so I tried to enter “2015?”, but the field is hard coded to take only a number. I was intending to ask Angela for the exact year. Thanks for beating me to it.

I would propose that both “year” fields in “person” be changed to “text” format, so that we can enter approximate information too. I agree that the database should not have factual errors, but sometimes the exact year is not known, or it might be painful to ask. As we make no calculations with these dates, having them as “text” won’t upset anything else.

Issue closed. Eric

Date May 31, 2016, 8:18 p.m.
User Heiko Schmidt (castle_ghost)

Angela has written my another email that she did a mistake when writing me the date. The correct year is 2014.

Now corrected, Heiko

Date June 1, 2016, 12:12 a.m.
User Anselm Lingnau (anselm)

I’m not wild about making the year field a string, because we might want to base calculations, or at least comparisons, on it at some point, and allowing arbitrary text will encourage people to put in, ahem, arbitrary text which will be messy to handle.

I could see myself allowing a sequence of digits followed by an optional “?”, which could still work as a number in a context where a number is required.

Date June 1, 2016, 12:42 a.m.
User Heiko Schmidt (castle_ghost)

Hi Anselm,

I agree not to make it a text, but what is the exact data type it accepts? Year or number?

If the latter (although there is a check if the number is >= 0) could we allow a number “-1” (or “1”) to denote “died” but we do not know the year? Whether to choose “-1” or “1” would not matter as there should have been any SCD people in 1 A.D. ;)

For this solution the output interface needs to interpret -1 (or 1) as “died” and output something like “Lived 1927 – deceased”.

Would that be practical and not too much work to fix the interface?

Cheers, Heiko