Talk:Dublin Port

Dublin Port Company

regardng sailings to dublin mostymn no longer used and ulysess is not the largest -pride of roterdam is Regarding the edits by User:Gene Nygaard, whilst he may be technically correct in his use of teragrams as opposed to million tonnes, stevedores generally do not understand what a teragram is. They tend to understand what a tonne is. And a million tonnes.

Using 23,540,000 tonnes is incorrect as the quantity in question is an approximate total. It is a figure sourced from the DPC and if they say 23.54 million tonnes then that should be the figure used.

Frelke 06:35, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

Teragrams, of course, were not the units I first used here.

Note that "tonnes" are more totally ununderstandable in the United States than teragrams are.

This article isn't written just for stevedores.

Furthermore, any tons are ambiguous; even if "tonne" were never used in English or French for any other ton, and never for units of force but always for units of mass, there is still the problem that they are pronounced the same by many people. Using "metric ton" or "metric tonne" instead isn't much of an improvement, because the identifier often gets dropped in further transmission of the information. That's the biggest advantage of teragrams.

The metric system has prefixes. They should be used instead of things like "million" and "billion". If tonnes are used, it should either be in digits as 23,540,000 tonnes, or it should be 23.54 megatonnes. There is no reason whatsoever for a spelled out "million", which is unnecessarily confusing and actually takes up more space in the article:

• 23,540,000 tonnes
• 23.54 million tonnes
• 23.54 megatonnes

As far as the precision goes, if it is approximate the extraneous digits should be dropped. For that, it doesn't matter how the number and the units are formatted, and it doesn't matter if some source carries them to an impossible precision. Gene Nygaard 16:08, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

WRT taking up more space, 4 characters per instance is not too much overhead to convey usefulness. And such references are only useful when comparing to another port. The ports will never quote megatonnnes or teragrams. If you can find a single mention of either on any port website, I'll eat my hat.

Why would anyone be interested in the amount of cargo handled by Dublin port in 2003? Well they might want to see if it is a busy port. And to do so it needs a baseline to compare to. And all those baselines will be figures published by ports, which will inevitably quote thousands, millions or billions of tonnes. None will use teragrams. None will quote megatonnes. Believe me. I have worked in this industry for nearly 30 years now and whilst I personally understand where you are coming from, I have to say that the use of megatonnes or teragrams will only confuse matters.

Why not send DPC an email and ask them why they don't use proper metric terminology?

The main reason that they don't is that their users will not understand it and it will not be useful. If we were to compare Dublin, Ireland, with Duluth, MN, we would be comparing 23.54 million tonnes with 38.3 million tons. I can say immediately without any conversion that Duluth is bigger in terms of cargo throughput. If the Duluth figure was 28.3, I would say the two ports are about the same size.

These figures are marketing prose, trade puffery, not scientific fact and they should be treated as such. If they were totals measured on a weighbridge or flowmeter then I might concede your points but they are not.

I doubt your point about tonnes being 'ununderstandable' in the US, especiallly if wikified. They are more likely to understand 'million tonnes' than either teragram or megatonne. Frelke 20:05, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

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