Talk:Mikhail Albov

Latest comment: 2 years ago by Vaughan Pratt in topic When was Albov born?

When was Albov born? edit

The article gives Albov's date of birth as November 20, 1851. The article Margherita of Savoy gives the same date for her birth, suggesting that they were born on the same day.

Is that actually the case?

What I'd really like to know is which date system Wikipedia uses. If it uses the Gregorian calendar for all dates after 1582 (the year Italy and Spain adopted it) then the answer would be yes. But if it uses the dates on their respective birth certificates then one would expect Margherita to have been born 12 days before Albov since in 1851 Italy had been using the Gregorian calendar for 269 years whereas most of Russia remained on the Julian calendar until 1918. (12 = 10 + 2, the 2 because 1700 and 1800 were leap years in the Julian but not Gregorian calendar.)

Since this issue must surely have come up before in a great many similar contexts, I would hope Wikipedia would by now have standardized how it records dates. Vaughan Pratt (talk) 00:06, 28 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

Meanwhile I found the article Old_Style and New Style dates which addresses the latter part of my question. What remains is whether 20 November is Old Style or New Style. I don't see any immediately obvious way of determining this. Vaughan Pratt (talk) 00:34, 28 September 2021 (UTC)Reply