The date precision of different kinds of documents may vary. An email has a time as well as a date. A letter by convention has only a date - not a time - because with traditional post a same-day reply is not expected to be possible. Most documents have a date precision no less than a day but there are some document which have a precision of more than a day.
A map typically only has a year because it is the result of surveys carried out over many months so when published the map is simply given a year only.
A plan of a particular site produced by a land surveyor may take several days of measurement on site and then further work on a computer back at the office so typically such surveys are produced labelled with a month and year. Similarly, by convention, architects' drawings are labelled with month and year.
Google StreetView images are also (for privacy reasons) only given a month and year.
A Google Earth satellite image may be, if it covers a large area, a mozaic made up of pictures taken on different days, so that although a year (and perhaps in some cases a year and month) can be given, the image as a whole does not have a day-of-month.
In these cases it is not so much that the date is uncertain - the year or year and month are known - it is simply that the precision is low, being more than a single day.
On the other hand, some documents must actually have precise date but it is simply not known, perhaps, in some cases, not even approximately. A non-digital photo taken decades ago must have been taken on some specific year, month and day-of-month but the only indication of date might be, for example, the presence of, of lack of, a permanent structure whose year of construction and/or year of removal are known.
When assigning a date to a document (e.g. in a document management system) the objective is to assign an exact date down to an exact day-of-month, if that is known, and otherwise to assign an inexact date making clear that it is an inexact date and avoiding giving an inappropriate impression of degree of accuracy or precision.
At the final tribunal hearing of a dispute subject to litigation various pieces of evidence will be considered by the tribunal which may have a bearing on exactly when a particular crucial document was produced, if that is a matter of importance and is disputed, but, at earlier preparatory stages, the objective is to assign either exact dates where they are reasonably certain (e.g. a letter will have the date printed at the top which, in the absence of any indication of mistake or fabrication, is taken to be the exact date), or else inexact dates where those can be ascertained in a fairly straightforward way. For example a photo may show a child whose birth year is known and whose age can be estimated from the photo so the photo can be given an approximate year. As a result of the litigation process other evidence may point by inference to a more exact date, but that other evidence may not yet have been produced, and/or might be disputed, so initially the document is given (e.g. when being loaded to a document management system and when listed on a disclosure list) any approximate date which can be ascertained in a fairly straightforward way without resorting to any complex inferences.
If the document (such as a map) has a year but no month, you should enter the year as part of the document name within tilde (~) symbols, to ensure that, even if the system you are using requires an exact date in its date field, nobody is misled about the precision of the date.
Document date field Document Name field
01-01-1998 ~ 1998 ~ OS Map
Although it is the tildes which indicate low precision, it is good practice to use 01 as the day-of-month (and 01 as the month number) in the date field to make it stand out.
If the year and month are known, but the exact day of the month is not, you should enter the month and year as part of the document name within tilde (~) symbols.
Document date field Document Name field
01-02-2005 ~ Feb 2005 ~ Google Street View image
When providing a list of the documents to someone else (e.g. a disclosure list) you can give an explanatory note like this:
Please note that where a document (such as a map) has only a year, or perhaps only a year and month, a day-of month of 01 will be used but this is just for ordering purposes, and the document name indicates, highlighted with tilde characters, all that is known about the date e.g. ~ 2005 ~
In a case where a document (such as a non-digital photo) must have an exact date (down to day-of-month) but it is simply not known, do not enter a date in the date field but just put whatever is known about the date at the start of the document name with an @ sign either side, like this
Document date filed Document Name field
@ summer 2006 @ Handwritten note
@ circa 2008 @ Handwritten note
@ 1990s @ Photo of garden
Don't use the form about 10 years ago because if you do someone reading that will not know exactly when you entered it and therefore be unclear what year to count back 10 years from.
If you have no knowledge at all of the date of the document, not even the likely decade, use @ date nk @
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