I do lots of edits related to artworks. Many artworks (and, I assume, many other things) are dated in the following ways:

1. 'between 1850 and 1899’ - on Wikidata that could be ’18. century’ (yep, needs to be written like that) with qualifiers start date and end date ?

2. ‘between 1784 and 1787’ - on Wikidata ‘1780s’ with qualifiers?

3. ‘between 1878 and 1904 - on Wikidata... eeeehm?

I was wondering: can’t we express this without needing any qualifiers at all?

We can enter units as ‘320 cm plus/minus 7 cm’, right?

Might we also be able to say ‘1898 plus/minus six years’?

I can imagine we’d then also have an interface that helps you enter a ‘between date x and date y’ elegantly without needing to do any math.

Or would that not be possible?

I think it would be great to have, as it would make our dating conceptually much more accurate IMO.

Curious what others think.

Best, Sandra (User:Spinster)

p.s. On Commons we have an {{Other date}} template that’s used very frequently, that allows rich time/date expressions, and that I really love. Here’s the documentation: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Other_date

Besides this ‘between’ concept, it also has, among other things

* before (date) or after (date) - also very common!

* seasons - you can say ‘Spring 1986’

* first/last half/quarter (year, decade, century) etc

Some might not be translatable to a period as I suggested above, but some may.