Talk:Q4693114
Autodescription — Agnes Sampsoune (Q4693114)
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Deprecation of date of death edit
I have deprecated the date of death 28 January 1591, Gregorian calendar, because sources seldom use Gregorian calendar dates for events in Scotland during the period that the Julian calendar was in effect. The Gregorian calendar did not go into effect in Scotland until 1752. I believe whichever editor introduced this value probably blindly copied the characters "28 January 1591" without giving any consideration to the calendar change. Jc3s5h (talk) 11:13, 2 August 2019 (UTC)
Upon further research, I looked up the source, "Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database", cited to support the Gregorian calendar date. It in turn cites Calendar of State Papers, Scotland. I found an online version of the relevant pages of the primary source, and cited it in support of the Julian calendar. The relevant quotation from the source is:
[Confession of Agnes Samsone.]
"Certane notes of Agnes Samsone her confession, 27 Januarii 1590; quhairupon sche was convict be ane assise and brint in Edinburgh 28 day for ane witch."
The double quotation marks and square brackets are present in the source.
The source gives the date of confession as 27 January 1590 and the date of execution (by burning) as "28 day", that is, 28 January 1590. But in Scotland the year began on 25 March rather than 1 January; this custom was followed until 1600 in Scotland. Since Wikidata uses the proleptic Julian calendar (Q1985786) which always treats 1 January as the beginning of the year, it is mandatory to convert this date to 28 January 1591.
This demonstrates that the source used to support the Gregorian calendar date has been misunderstood. Therefore I have moved the reference to the Julian calendar date and removed the Gregorian calendar date claim. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:09, 2 August 2019 (UTC)