I understand the requirement for the Special uploader to require a date field to be completed to progress, however, the recent imposition of the sole requirement for an exact date to the day is an overreaction, and simply wrong. For works that were published years ago, and are now out of copyright, there is generally only the ability to specify a year, and for some photographs published in books or from archives there may only be the capacity to presume a decade. So now we are forcing an exact and no necessarily accurate date.
Possible solutions
* rollback and not force a specific date
* have radio buttons that allow for alternates to exact dates, eg. year only, that takes YYYY; and a circa dropdown that allows one of the existing categories, eg. year, decade, century. Flag those if you really wish to monitor
Either way, forcing people to put in incorrect data is not a solution that should be chased.