Why cant I enter a date of birth keeps saying format not recognised

Question

Tried to put in date of birth for my relation Arnold Whitten which is 29 feb 1907 said wrong format, tried everything wont take it only the year , no problem with date of death or entering date of birth for anyone else on my tree just this one.

Answer 1

1907 was not a Leap Year, so there was not a Feb. 29.

Comments

 Does WT have anywhere in its pages a list of Leap Years? If I recall 1900 was not Leap Year -- hmm so I googled that puzzle and it said if the year cannot be divided by 400 evenly (no leftovers) then it is not a leap year ... 1900 / 400 = 4.75, so it is not a leap year.  Likewise 2000 turns out to be a leap year because 2000/400 = 5 (and no leftovers) 

But in any case is there a WT page where the leap year are listed? And would it be helpful to have it on one of the drop down menus ? Or would it be possible to include in the software ref to any entry of Feb 29 to state in the rejection why: "There is no 29 February in this calendar year" ? 

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At the very least, a leap year needs to be an even number!

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The problem is that 29 February isn't the only date that people can get mistaken about. There have been G2G questions about people having 31 days in Months that only have 30 days for example. So Wikitree would have to either create individual messages for every possible false date or just have a Wrong Format message that catches every false date. 

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So, Darren, the problem remains unsolvable.  

Still, not that many folk are born on 29th Feb anyway which makes it a very minor difficulty

And a more generic statement would be -- for other dates such as what you mention --  "This date does not occur in this calendar month"  and that would be for all but the one ref leap year and that message could still be "This year is not a leap year." or "This year does not have 29 Feb."

Not that I expect the messages to be incorporated into the software ... it is also a minor difficulty in the midst of the whole

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yes, if it is an odd year it is not a leap year.

divide the year by 4.  if you get a remainder then it is not a leap year.  if you get no remainder then next divide the year by 100.  if you get a remainder this step then it is a leap year.  step 2 is easily done by checking the last 2 digits.  if they are not 00 then it is a leap year.  if you have no remainder in both steps so far then step 3 is divide by 400.  if you still have no remainder then it is a leap year.  but if you got a remainder in step 3 (or step 1) then it is not a leap year.

2100 not a leap year

2000 a leap year

1900 not a leap year if using the Gregorian calendar

1800 not a leap year if using the Gregorian calendar

1700 not a leap year if using the Gregorian calendar

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likely the WT software is just handing the date to a software library function to convert it.  it fails so that is what is being reported.  going that extra step to report the edge case of dates that are invalid but can be better explained would require conversion of the variety of different formats even for an invalid date to be able to appropriately test the various values to isolate these cases.

perhaps a more useful solution is for any date error to give a link to a date help page that can explain the 3 different date confusions.  the 3rd one is date differences between Gregorian and Julian calendars,  and when the calendars were changed at different places.  it gets real fun when there are longs runs of missing dates in the middle of a month.  it happened.

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Honestly, I don't see the problem as unsolvable.  Except for the less-than-once-in-a-century issue, leap years are years divisible by 4.  As for the other, didn't we all learn in grade school, "Thirty days hath September..."?

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Sometimes the sources people use have the wrong dates on them. I've had a profile where the Gravestone had an incorrect date carved into the Stone and had other profiles where the date was incorrectly recorded on source documents. So when those profiles dates are added into Wikitree they come up with the Wrong Format message. I then had to extrapolate what the date should have been and added a note saying why the date was different in the source and what I put.

In this specific instance the Month was wrong in interpretation and the Wrong Format message and answer giving by Nelda helped get the right date added to the profile. A more specific message wouldn't have helped any more.

Answer 2

His birth certificate, which you posted on his profile, says he was born 29 Jan 1907.

Comments

It may be that seeing the Answer from Nelda Spires caused Stephanie Russel to go back to her sources and realise that she had made a typo when she tried to enter the date as 29 February 1907. The profile currently has the Birth date as 29 January 1907 which was added about the same time as the first answer.

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That is a total bummer, all that effort to obtain a copy and some clerk botched it ... oh, bummer.  You have my sympathy. But the software will not accept the 29th of Feb for any year that is not a leap year