Year as mandatory field precludes creating valid publications

[Alberto Gallardo]

The field year is currently a mandatory field for publications. Unfortunately this forces the use of a workaround to populate this field when it is not known (for such an entry see e.g.: http://bowvalleycollege.libguides.com/c.php?g=494959&p=3386873#s-lg-box-wrapper-13322180).

True, a user could entry in this case n.d.(no date) to indicate that the date is not known, but that requires that the user is acquainted with the final style in which the entry should be rendered. This (n.d.) is the case in APA in English, but if we resort to the locale translations, we see that the user should input o.J. for Germany entries…

I don’t know how other styles deal with missing dates, and that is the point: the user shouldn’t care. It should be possible to leave the year field empty.

[Daniel Zoller]

changing the year field to be optional is not so easy, because the interhash and intrahash calculations depend on this value

see #2886

[Mario Holtmüller]

More information about the mentioned hashes can be found here: https://www.bibsonomy.org/help_en/InterIntraHash

[Alberto Gallardo]

To be clear and to not overestimate this one: I don’t have a real need for this (yet). For the use cases I’m interested in, publications make only sense with publication year. I’ll change the priority to trivial.