GLAM/Newsletter/April 2021/Contents/Wikimedia and Libraries User Group report
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Extended Date Time Format for Wikibase
EDTF stands for Extended Date Time Format. The EDTF standard adds new date formats to ISO 8601-2019 2, including support for intervals, sets, uncertainty, precision and seasons. It was published by the US Library of Congress in 2019, after joint creation of the standard with the wider bibliographic community.
The new Wikibase EDTF extension adds an EDTF datatype to Wikibase, which supports the full EDTF specification. In other words, you can now have a property with type “Extended Date Time Format”, and then have statements with values like “15XX-12-25” or “{2010,2015..2020}”. This allows you to express dates too complex for the native Wikibase date format (ISO 8601-2004).
Wikibase validates the input, ensuring only valid EDTF values are stored. Furthermore, the user interface shows a “humanized” version of the EDTF value, which makes the value easier to understand to those not familiar with EDTF.
Wikibase EDTF is available as free open source software (GPL V2) that can be installed on any Wikibase 1.35 instance. It relies on a new PHP EDTF library we developed for the project, which is also open source. We welcome contributions to both the Wikibase EDTF extension and the EDTF library!
Professional.wiki was commissioned to create this extension by the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture, who financed the work.
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To the right I placed a screenshot of how the EDTF extension looks in Wikibase. Also note that each EDTF string is accompanied with a 'human readable' version of that string.
During the development it was decided to split of the handling of the EDTF strings into their own PHP-library to help the wider non-wiki community to adopt the standard.
The Github repositories of the project can be found here:
Additionally the people behind WBStack have added the extension for you to experiment with.