Yes, to be accurate, any dates in the first two months of the Great Resynch calendar would necessarily have to be listed as being the last two months of the BBY/ABY year spans. Otherwise, the information would be factually incorrect.

There are not, by the way, as far as I know, month names at this point. The only month names we have ever been given were dates from the Tapani Sector in "Lords of the Expanse," but that was a 10-month calendar and names localized to that sector, whereas we have a 12-month calendar now for the entire galaxy.

Anyway, say there's a listing on Wookieepedia for the report on GWNN about the Gladiator Droid market booming (from the GWNN article in the Adventure Journal, Issue 3). The date on the report is 35:2:17. That would put it about 0.5 months or so prior to ANH/Yavin, so we'd refer to it as being part of the 1 - 0 BBY year span.

Meanwhile, the Lamuir IV Priole Danna Festival article from the same issue's GWNN section is dated 35:5:27, so that'd be about 0.5 months after ANH/Yavin, so it would be within the first month of the 0 - 1 ABY time span.

Those two time spans, 1 - 0 BBY and 0 - 1 ABY, are commonly referred to (sometimes giving an incorrect impression that it's a year number, not a duration) as "0 BBY" and "0 ABY," so I'd bet that those are what would be used as the shorthand on Wookieepedia.

Personally, if I were making the call, I'd probably go with the BBY/ABY as the standard for Wookieepedia, then have side references to the GS dates only when there was something specifically pinned down.

I'd be of the opinion that they use the most common form (BBY/ABY), but along with a side note of the digital calendar when such dates are available.

The question they're trying to deal with is whether or not to fix their dates so that events in Month 1 or Month 2 on the Great Resynch calendar are in the correct "BBY/ABY" year, given how those dates are based on ANH (Month 3, not Month 1).

It's not a question of which dating system to use. It's a question of whether, in using both, Wookieepedia is going to be accurate or not.

Because it came up again here, I just took the issue directly to Leland via email so we could double-check the reasoning in the dates and perhaps figure out a way to make this clear. So, from the conversation between Leland and I, and previous information delineated on the boards here and elsewhere, here's what I hope will be an elaboration that can clear it up.

As Leland clarified, and I think we are all well aware at this point, there are "two different in-universe dating systems in existence." This is referring specifically to the Great Resynchronization dating system (digital) and the BBY/ABY (relative) system. We could add in BTC/ATC or BBG/ABG, but the conversation itself was limited to the digital and BBY/ABY systems because that's what I emailed to specifically discuss.

The Great Resynchronization calendar, we know, was created for the West End Games RPG to add some flavor to the documents in the RPG. That was picked up for the Official Star Wars Adventure Journal, and when Galaxywide News Nets was created, the writer decided to go with 35:3:5 for the dissolution of the Senate because, frankly, it would've just seemed kind of unrealistic for ANH to have been coincidentally happening on New Year's Day. Rather than putting the film around early January, it was put in March, so to speak, just to be a bit more realistic.

The Great Resynchronization calendar, therefore, is one that uses exact, digital dating for years, months, days, etc. It also apparently begins about two full months before the month when ANH took place because ANH was placed in Month 3 (not out of necessity but as a realistic bit of flavor text that has, since then, taken on a life of its own).

Meanwhile, the BBY/ABY system is a "relative" dating system, which, you may have noticed (and as Leland and I discussed), doesn't tend to ever really give us exact month or day names or numbers. You don't see "January 7, 6 ABY" or "December 2, 20 BBY." You don't even see either of those listed as something akin to "01-07-06" or "6:7:1." BBY/ABY dates are, as they were intended to be, just relative time periods, dating away from A New Hope. "There are definitely two different in-universe dating systems in existence but to my knowledge the ABY/BBY system has never given any specific dates . . . There are no pinpointed day or month numbers," as he put it. It's a dating system, which leads us to often call it a "calendar," but it is more like a number line. It's all relative times without trying to pin it down and create a whole new set of months and days to keep track of with the detail of the Great Resynch calendar. (In his words, quite pithy: "ABY and BBY is a dating convention, not a calendar system.")

Leland also reminded me, as I've mentioned here before, that the entirety of ANH that we date approximately backward or forward for could be considered the period of the Battle of Yavin. Technically, "even the Battle of Yavin is a date range starting from the point where the Tantive IV is captured to many days later when the Heroes of Yavin are celebrated."

That is, in part, why the BBY/ABY calendar doesn't tend to move beyond relative timing, as with ANH being a date range referred to as the Battle of Yavin. "Knowing this, it'd be impossible to assign specific dates to this system." We won't be seeing month or day numbers assigned via BBY/ABY. It just doesn't work that way. So, trying to take the Resynch calendar and shoehorn it together with BBY/ABY and pin exact dates is a somewhat fallacious effort. The closest BBY/ABY gets to exact months and days in its notations are to refer to, say, days that are "in terms of the few days after the destruction of the Death Star and the few days before the capture of the Tantive IV." (This, by the way, is why I still prefer BSW4 and ASW4 to BBY and ABY, because saying "before/after the Battle of Yavin" seems to pin it down more closely to an exact day of the month than those dates are really meant to do.)

So, with the BBY/ABY dating system being a set of relative time frames that all refer back to ANH and give us the approximate length of time before or after that film another story takes place, what does that mean practically?

"When we say something like 3.5 ABY, we mean 3 and a half years after the end of of Ep IV . . . if I have something that says .1 BBY, I mean about one-tenth of a year before the start of Ep IV."

So, we're looking at two different calendars, one that runs from X:1:1 through X:12:31, give or take, which uses digital dates that are very specific to pin down events to exact days, based on a flavor text concept that is not as commonly used but is more specific when desirable for in-universe documents.

On the other hand, we have a second dating system that is often referred to as a "calendar," but which is more of a dating and time-keeping system, used to determine relative positions on a timeline, which uses a specific event within that timeline (ANH) as its focal point, rather than "Month 1, Day 1" on the other, completely different style of calendar.

We use the former (Resynch) as we would a regular, real world calendar. We use the latter (BBY/ABY) in the same vein as saying "X months after September 11 attacks" or "X weeks after I graduated from college."

That should make it relatively obvious (and simple) to determine how to use both of these calendars.

1. They're separate calendars. They aren't meant to be merged. You're just asking for trouble in trying to merge them. Don't just swap out year numbers from one calendar for another. It won't make sense, especially given that the BBY/ABY calendar is not really about year numbers but about lengths of time.

2. We know that time frames given relative to ANH are simply determined by looking at ANH and moving back or forward that amount of time, as detailed above.

3. We also know that we're dealing with years that are 12 months long, whichever dating system we are using.

So . . .

In those few instances where we have some need to actually use one dating system to find a date with the other dating system, as was the case with the Essential Atlas, then we keep what was laid out above in mind. If, for example, we want to find the date of something 6.5 years after ANH (like X-wing: Rogue Squadron), then...

A. 6.5 means "six and a half years," not "six years and five months." So, we're looking six years and six months ahead of the date of ANH.

B. ANH is the focal point of the "BBY/ABY" dating system used for Part A, but since we'd be trying to find a date on the Resynch calendar, we'd need to know the date of ANH on that calendar. That date is 35:3.

C. To find "6.5 ABY" then, we take ANH and add 6 years and 6 months. 6 years and 6 months after 35:3 is 41:9.

Thus you have a date like the one for XWRS events in the Atlas, based on the time relative to ANH being based around the start of Month 3, not based on the beginning of the year on the other dating system, which would've made our numbers off by a couple of months.

It is this very conversion, all necessitated by a random choice of a month for ANH in the Adventure Journal, that is what has made this confusing to some, but without using the BBY/ABY calendar to set exact months and days of the month for most events, it generally isn't an issue that has to be dealt with in sourcebooks and such. If you are looking for an "Essential Calendar," I wouldn't hold your breath.

Then again, if you can read this, understand that it comes from both the Atlas process and a conversation (via email, with permission to quote) held within the last hour with Leland Chee on this exact subject, to address this specific concern in the Wookieepedia community, and you still don't think that it would make the most sense to fix the Wookieepedia dates so that they don't accidentally mislead fans, then I'm not sure what to tell you. I would think that accuracy would be valued over ease, but to each his own. If you wanted something other than my word and the Atlas to back up the information I've been providing, you at least now have that extra information.

(My thanks again to Leland for helping sort this out in a way that I hope might make some more straightforward sense than the way I've been trying to explain it before now.)

I was thinking it was time for an update of Characters. We have Ben now and Jag is way more important. PLus tons of others

Is that strictly wrong? Maybe. Is it proven wrong by canon? Arguably, but I (and much of the Wook population, per the aforementioned Concensus Track vote) think that it's but one interpretation of many. Unless someone says that 1 ABY:1:1 equates to 36:3:1, then it's up in the air.

Well put, Nathan.

But you have to admit that the year system is very strange and a bit confusing.

Until an official source (beyond your work on the atlas, I mean an Essential Calendar) comes out, then all of this dating must come with a grain of salt.

EDIT: I had an idea here, that I ultimately completely retract in my next post. So I removed it. I must be more consistent with my own brain .

Speaking as one who has sort of straddled fandom and officialdom (mostly fandom):

Personally, I find that Wookieepedia, which I visit every so often, tends to be a relatively good resource for Star Wars information, with a few caveats.

The site's greatest strength is in its community and its very nature. As an online resource with dozens (hundreds?) of contributors, Wookieepedia has the potential to be one of the best Star Wars resources, official or otherwise, in that it can constantly evolve to accommodate new information and the task of adding that information is a community responsibility, which keeps it from being the kind of one-man or small-team burden that, for example, my Star Wars Timeline Gold has been over the last 12 years.

Its weakness, of course, comes from its nature as well. As a Wiki, it is left open to vandalism (which I would think is likely rare, statistically), incorrect information (or, again, probably much less likely, deliberate misinformation), and the same kind of pitfalls that any Wiki, including the grandfather of them all, Wikipedia, is prone to face.

Its community atmosphere also makes for some tricky situations. For example, there is a discussion/debate right now as to whether or not Wookieepedia will go through a process of fixing their dates because they have events about two months misaligned in many of their date notations. (It goes back to the whole, BBY/ABY years running from Month 3 to Month 2, due to ANH being in Month 3, and that whole issue.) Rather than saying, "Oh, okay, that's what's official, so we need to accommodate for it and fix our error," there's discussion as to whether that error is worth correcting, which seems to be an issue that has developed along the lines of personal opinions about what people wish were true, rather than what simply is true on an official level. In a sense, in that case, community and discussion is not allowing something to easily be dealt with that is incorrect, and could, in theory, actually perpetuate that incorrect information by community consensus. If consensus points to incorrect information, then consensus serves more to break down the reliability of a Wiki, rather than bolster it. (Luckily, this seems to be constrained to rare instances like this one.)

I find that Wookieepedia is of most use for me as a cross-referencing tool. I rarely go there seeking information on a topic, unless I'm doing fast and loose research for something I mention on a podcast, but I do find myself frequently using appearance and source lists, along with footnotes, to cross reference information and more easily find sources when I need to back into the novels, comics, etc. to dig out a reference.

Broadly speaking, it's a useful resource and on a scale that is hard to contend with, even for, say, Bob Vitas' Completely Unofficial Star Wars Encyclopedia or the Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia. On the other hand, we do need to remember that it is a fandom resource, not an official resource. As is the case with my SWT-G, fans can track and provide information, and sometimes we are left to draw some conclusions to make things make sense, but anything fan-generated (assumptions, conjecture, proposed retcons, et al) are only fan material until/unless a licensed source uses that material. (I seem to recall being blasted by intellectually dishonest flamers years ago for "daring" to state the same about Curtis Saxton's fandom materials that never appeared in official materials, oddly enough.)

So, if we can keep it in perspective, keep it honest, and keep a balance between consensus and correctness, I'd think that Wookieepedia will end up being one of the best fandom resources of the current and next generation. I mean, look at the timelining field: In terms of extensive, full-saga timelines in great detail, the SWT-G is about it (though different approaches taken by Once Upon a Galaxy and the SW EU Chronology a great resources as well). Years ago, TimeTales was at least running parallel, but it has fallen by the wayside without updates in years. Eventually, fans will tire of resources they produce, and there will need to be major resources out there that can continue to grow as the saga grows to be there as a constant resource. Wookieepedia has the potential to be that resource, if the kinks can continue to be worked out over the next months and years.

having not read that article recently, what misinformation.

Another problem is that SW fandom being what it is, and this being the official site, factual debates are liable to run at an extremely high level. Both in terms of scientific analysis, logical argumentation, generally well-informed participants, and scepticism.

Under such harsh conditions, the Wook doesn't stand a chance. Even official stuff can get broadsided.

A nice analogy was one of the first thing they told us in university: Wikipedia does not meet the standards of a legitimate source in a thesis paper. And these are not even real thesis papers. They are mock school tests, even if theoretically there is nothing stopping them from being used for real.

And I'm not necessarily talking about vandalism or unsourced info even. I often read fully sourced sentences on the Wook, that aren't wrong per se, but which I nevertheless disagree with, because they paint a picture I find flawed, or extrapolate beyond evidence. It can even be nuances as small as that.

Don't get me wrong. I use the wook to look up stuff regularly. When I can't remember where a reference is from or the name of a character I go there. Or if I want a quick summary of something I haven't read in a while, I read up there.

However, people quote it as an official source to make their argument, and often the articles are based on fan speculation.

And even if vandalism has not occured, it is possible for someone to make an honest mistake.

Usually people have a problem when the conversation goes something like this:

Poster 1: Well character x and Y did this!

Poster 2: I've never heard of that? where's that from.

Poster 1: Wookiepedia says so.

Well, that's nice, but it doesn't make it accurate or official. More often than not it is, but it isn't something to reference for a debate on here. The origiinal source material (book, comic, interview, whatever) is.