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Sure. I'm going off MOS:UNCERTAINTY, specifically this example:
The city's 1920 population was 10,000 (not population was 9,996 – an official figure unlikely to be accurate at full precision)
There's no way that, over the period of a year, the measurement of usership was precise to the person. All it takes is a few people to sneak in without being noticed per day, or for the person counting to leave half an hour early sick, or for people to use it after hours because they were slow in locking up, to throw a little bit of error into all the daily counts. The significant digits means I'd wager that the average daily counts were maybe accurate to within 10 people at best, which over the course of a year means accurate to within ~500 people one way or the other. Rounding expresses more accurately how much we really know - precision to the single digit, while useful in primary sources that just wants the raw data, is misleadingly accurate here. SnowFire (talk) 21:05, 30 December 2023 (UTC)Reply
Interesting. I don't think I've ever read that MOS page before. I'd think that if a precise number is available, we'd cite the precise number for the sake of avoiding WP:NOR. *shrug* - I guess I'll just add "about" since we know the new number is an estimate. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 22:08, 30 December 2023 (UTC)Reply
To be clear, while we have a "precise" number in the sense of "precisely what the NYT wrote", we don't have a precise number in the sense of "how many people actually used this restroom." So I'd argue we don't actually have a precise number, hence the rounding. (And even for something that is truly objective, like the size of the MTA budget, very often the insignificant digits aren't relevant and are just statistical "noise" - once you're talking 19.2 billion a year, the thousands place really does not matter anymore.)
While I'm fine with "about", I believe there's another guideline elsewhere that says that shouldn't be included, and I've definitely seen people remove that from my writing before, even when it is an estimate. SnowFire (talk) 22:31, 30 December 2023 (UTC)Reply
