Unlocking years from before ~1800

Hello! 

For older coins, the inability to add new years on certain coins is an unnecessary roadblock when so many of these lists are incomplete. Many mints didn't record mintage figures or even if coins were produced, so the coins listed have been added from observations of numismatists rather than data published by mints, leading to a bunch of unrecorded dates. This restriction doesn't happen on every coin that needs new entries, but it's still a common occurrence that wastes time. I included a picture below. Thanks!

You have to document a “new” year by an image of the coin with the year, you want to have in numista. So in my opinion, we need the intervention of a referee to add a new year.  

We have several times had the problem to delete a NON-EXISTING year, because how can you prove, that a year doesn't exist?

If a Referee have to approve the request anyway, there is no point to block the years.

Geison

If a Referee have to approve the request anyway, there is no point to block the years.

+1

Compendium

Geison

If a Referee have to approve the request anyway, there is no point to block the years.

+1

That is right, but I prefer to have “new” years officially recognized by a referee  than just added by “somebody”?

We have to be serious about the content of our catalog?

For sure, its why the referee can validate or not.

We now have pictures in change requests, which will really help to prove a yearline is missing; I think we should remove the block yearlines feature overall (which existed before Numista had referees)

The majority of times (where year line locks are implemented correctly, when a catalog list is completely on Numista) additional requests are usually misattributions, errors or fakes.

It's a way to force people on the forum and to leave a paper trail that anyone can see. When a ref get's a request and concludes (be it right or wrong) this is a fake → denied, this instance is lost to the vast majority of people and can also not be referred to for future cases or corrections.

But yes, there are many locks that shouldn't be set like modern currently issued types or known incomplete data sets.

I agree, coin minting was less organised before the Industrial era, many countries minted coins only when a stock of silver had arrived, some noble was melting down plate or some “booty” was plundered on the high seas.

I mean the UK, only started listing mintages in 1817 - a year after modern steam powered coinage was made. You have to guess for earlier coins like the £100 worth of shillings minted in 1763 and the £10,000 of shillings and sixpences in 1787.

People in the middle ages, probably didn't even count, they weighed their coins and made guesses.

Plus many of our modern coin issuing entities outside continental Europe and perhaps China did not really exist or mint coins before 1800 (Okay USA was 1793, but that is close to 1800).

Dating is universal from 1650 onwards (Except like hammered coins from some place like Indonesia, Thailand and Indian states) and only common from the mid 1500s as well. However Islamic coins can be dated back as far as AH20 (AD 641).

I hate to be annoying, but I'm going to bump this topic as I've continued running into this issue. 

Idolenz

It's a way to force people on the forum and to leave a paper trail that anyone can see. When a ref get's a request and concludes (be it right or wrong) this is a fake → denied, this instance is lost to the vast majority of people and can also not be referred to for future cases or corrections.

This I can imagine was a fairly valid reason in the past, but like Compendium said, now that you can post pictures in your sources, the likelihood of a newly added real year marked as fake by the referee is probably much lower. Maybe a trail in the forums makes sense for common counterfeits with nonexisting years, but those adding them to the catalog would almost entirely be inexperienced collectors who wouldn't even think to search through the forum in the first place. Now that I think of it, these added counterfeits would be on mostly recent coins too, and of course, that's if this would occur at all. If it does, it would be very infrequent.  

Sjoelund

We have several times had the problem to delete a NON-EXISTING year, because how can you prove, that a year doesn't exist?

Any new years still have to be clearly proven to exist, so I don't see this being relevant to the removal of these pointless barriers. 

Generally, I just don't see how removing these year locks, especially on most older coins, would create any substantial issues, whether it be for the referees or the catalog or whoever. Many, maybe even the majority of older coins that I have edited actually don't have year locks, and that hasn't caused any problems. It's the ones that do have them arbitrarily that cost us non-referees time when we should be able to change it like any other edit. As several of y'all have mentioned, the fact simply is that there's no point in preventing users from adding dates when they still have to be reviewed. 

Thanks. 

Geison

If a Referee have to approve the request anyway, there is no point to block the years.

+1

Last year it cost me month to integrate lines based on a catalogue just because every single pages were blocked … Some of these pages I had more than 50 new lines… It's not only annoying but at one point it just so annoying thta users prefer to don't correct pages than to fight to de-belock pages.

It's goes against the participative concept of Numista. Have you ever see a page of Wikipedia where you can not do a comment?

Good to know: any referree can ask directly to @Xavier to unlock yearlines of their issuers :-)

A ref doesn't need to ask Xavier to unlock the year lines for the purpose of adding more lines (just hit ‘Check this year list as NON complete’). We just can't modify owned years other then change the calendar or the Gregorian value … maybe make it ND.

Idolenz

A ref doesn't need to ask Xavier to unlock the year lines for the purpose of adding more lines (just hit ‘Check this year list as NON complete’). We just can't modify owned years other then change the calendar or the Gregorian value … maybe make it ND.

I meant: to unlock all yearlines of entire issuers if needed (which would be cumbersome to do manually)

It's especially satisfying when you make a change request and you mention in the source field that you would also like to add year lines, but you're not allowed to. So you add picture proof of the missing years + references that mention them and then … it just gets ignored. Request accepted, job done, year-lines still missing and year-lines still locked, no further comment.

Just happened this week to me.

And if someone comes to me with “oh, the referee probably didn't read it”:

EVEN WORSE. Then please remove that referee IMMEDIATELY. But some referees were accepting everything without reading, violating copyrights and approving nonsense entries for years anyway, so I guess that wouldn't really matter either.

Please finally unlock EVERYTHING.

And if not, then at least give the exact username of the person who allegedly checked all the year lines and approved them as complete. Because almost 100% of locked year-lines were definitely not checked.

I have already commented on other occasions that the year lines should be unlocked. What's the point of having them blocked if in the end a referee (or catalog administrator) has to approve them anyway? 

If a year must be added through the forum, it is possible that the referee in question does not find out about the discussion and it drags on for a long time (it has happened to me and I think it has happened to many others).