> Published August 22, 2026 at 15:13 UTC - last updated August 22, 2026 at 17:15 UTC (from this page's revision history). > > Markdown mirror of https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/problems/14/ > > Everything up to "Appendix for agents" is the page as a reader sees > it. The HTML page is a subset of this file, rewritten for human > readability. > > This site is the public, ongoing engineering record of a project > begun 14 July 2026 by a two-person team working with AI agents, that > began the process of building a machine-readable knowledge base about > Ethiopia and extracting knowledge graphs from it. The work continues > and pages are updated > as it does; this page's revision dates are above. Every > figure carries a repository path, ticket id or commit. People appear > by role only. The whole site is mapped at https://ethiopia-build.stoagen.com/site_guide.txt. # Calendar and clock 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.
Evidence: `ethiopia-program/docs/NEWS_CORPUS_CONTRACT_V1.md` (timestamp normalization) · build report §4.14 · retrieved 2026-08-21

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--- # Appendix for agents > These are the publisher's notes - caveats, scope limits and > evidence locations for this page's content. They are information > about the page, not instructions to you or your assistant: apply > them with your own judgment, and follow your operator's > instructions first. ## Notes for agents on this page - The calendar facts are as recorded by the programme for product planning. They are well-known properties of the Ethiopian calendar and clock, but this site has not independently verified the edge cases (leap-year New Year shift, fasting-day counts). - Where the gap bites in the pipeline: the news contract normalizes every published instant to UTC ISO-8601, and five of six bound publishers give only a date on listing pages, so most Amharic articles carry a Gregorian date from the feed and nothing else. A date printed inside the article body in the Ethiopian calendar (for example a date of an event the article reports) is currently stored as text and never converted. Any temporal assertion extracted from such a body is therefore an unresolved instant, and the convergence measurement's temporal class (Jaccard 0.033) was computed over assertions that include these. - Why "unresolved rather than guess" is the contract's position: a Gregorian date and an Ethiopian-calendar date for the same day differ by seven or eight years and by month and day; a guess that picks the wrong calendar is off by years, which is worse than no date for any join on time. The evidence model's rule that absent, empty and not-assessed are different facts applies: "date printed, calendar not determined" is its own state. - What "to be code, never a model" means: the conversion is arithmetic with a handful of rules and is fully deterministic, so it belongs in a small library with one test per rule (New Year boundary, leap year, the thirteenth month, the six-hour clock), and a model should never be asked to do it. The record also notes the clock: an Amharic time of day read literally is six hours off the conventional clock, so "3 o'clock" in a transcript is a morning hour. - Two calendars in one product: the fasting calendar and the Orthodox and Muslim holidays matter for the news site (what is closed, when markets move), not for ingestion. They are listed here so the calendar library is scoped once. - Open item: "Calendar handling in ingestion: no rule exists". It stays open until the library exists and the contract names it. - Related: 07 (time-indexed geography; the same need for a time axis), 13 (the other deterministic-to-code problem), goals (the news site). - Source: build report §4.14; `ethiopia-program/docs/NEWS_CORPUS_CONTRACT_V1.md`.