The fifteen problems · 14 of 15 · calendar

Calendar and clock

No calendar conversion exists in any ingestion tool. The news contract normalizes everything to UTC, five of six publishers expose date-only timestamps, and there is no rule for an Ethiopian-calendar date printed in an article body. The contract leaves such instants unresolved rather than guess.

For your AI

Look at this file and describe the site: https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/site_guide.txt

Not a problem in the pipeline yet, because no calendar conversion exists in any ingestion tool, but a known gap: the news contract normalizes everything to UTC ISO-8601, five of six publishers expose date-only timestamps, and there is no rule for interpreting an Ethiopian-calendar date printed in an Amharic article body. The contract's position is to leave such instants unresolved rather than guess.

The facts, recorded for the product side:

thirteen months, the last of five or six days;
New Year on 11 September (12 September before a Gregorian leap year);
a seven-to-eight-year offset from the Gregorian year, depending on the point in the year;
a clock that starts at dawn, with a six-hour offset from the conventional clock;
a fasting calendar of roughly 180 days a year running on its own rhythm;
a calendar that must carry both Orthodox and Muslim holidays.

All deterministic, to be code, never a model.

× What it broke

Nothing yet; the contract refuses to guess. Every Ethiopian-calendar date in a captured Amharic body is an unresolved instant in the record.

✓ What it established

That the conversion is a small deterministic library and belongs in code with a test per rule, and that "unresolved" is the correct state until that library exists.

ethiopia-program/docs/NEWS_CORPUS_CONTRACT_V1.md (timestamp normalization) · build report §4.14 · retrieved 2026-08-21

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Published August 22, 2026 at 15:13 UTC. Last updated August 22, 2026 at 17:15 UTC. Times come from this page's revision history and can be checked against it.