User talk:Daelin/Measurements Standard Proposal

Comments by Gene Nygaard

This whole thing may be instruction creep. I'll address a few points.

• Note that "mi" is a common and acceptable symbol for miles.[1] It is preferable to using "mile" as a symbol, which is unusual and bizarre—I've never seen it done outside Wikipedia. The sentence "Note that the symbol for mile is mile not mi which closely resembles the symbol for meter" (side note: you also violated your rule stated elsewhere on the page about not italicizing or bolding these symbols) is likely copied from something discussing the formerly common practice of using "m." as a symbol for miles. This was used, for example, in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. But by 1971 at least, Britannica had switched to "mi." and by 1979 to "mi" without the period (full stop). That "m" for miles may also still appear on some road signs in some locations.

• BTW, User:Markus Kuhn says on one of the talk pages here, I think, and perhaps in his metric FAQ, that ISO-31 does not specify a symbol for miles. But as you can see in the link above, NIST does: "mi", with no mention of this being any deviation from the ISO 31 standards which are one of the primary references for NIST Special Publication 811.
• Related—I thought Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) used to specify that "mph" is an acceptable symbol for miles per hour (maybe it is somewhere else in the MoS?), and the article miles per hour does that. But "mi/h" is also a legitimate and used symbol. I don't think we need to specify that as unacceptable within Wikipedia, though we could choose to do so.

• Source units first should be the rule whether the conversion is to SI units, from SI units, or between non-SI units, or between units in SI or acceptable for use with it.

• There is no consensus favoring a change to spaces as thousands separators.

• BIPM does not "provide an official standard in English". The standards are set by the CGPM, one of the other organizations established under the Meter Convention of 1875; in Wikipedia terminology, those CGPM rules are the "policy" and BIPM's collection of them in a style guide is a "guideline". BIPM leaves details not actually covered in CGPM resolutions to other standards organizations such as ISO and NIST and IEEE and NPL and the like. The English version, like other publications of these organizations, is only semiofficial; the French version controls.

• In the statement "Unit and value are separated by a full space. Use   to prevent a line-break in the middle of a quantity" there is no reason to specify a nonbreaking space. Sometimes it is desirable, but there is no general rule requiring it. OTOH, you did not even mention these other cases (I'm not sure I can provide specific rules requiring it even in these cases, let alone between the number and value, but to me these are clearly important and the other not necessarily desirable):

1. if the space is used as a thousands separator within a number as you propose and as is sometimes done in Wikipedia, those spaces should be nonbreaking.
2. if a space is used rather than a middot to separate components of a compound unit, those spaces should be nonbreaking.

• You don't need to find an obscure textbook to find misuse of unit symbols incuding division. You can still find several pages on Wikipedia using "J/mol·K" for example, though I've changed a great many of them to the correct "J/(mol·K)". There have been several other examples on Wikipedia as well.

• I don't like the box.

• Series of measurements: in most cases, all should be converted. They can sometimes be grouped together. But the people who ignore one set of units should get basically the same information as those who ignore the other. The cases where some of them should be omitted are few and far between.

• You say "Having said something is 10 cm (~4 in),". In most cases, that tilde is unnecessary and undesirable. Don't encourage its use in your rule by example.

• It is usually appropriate to include the original units in which a measurement was made, no matter where it was made. The notion of politeness to Americans is overdone; it isn't just Americans who are more comfortable with English units, at least for some purposes.

• Saying the "UK has banned Imperial units in commerce" isn't completely correct. In addition to the "drinking" you alluded to but didn't specify the details of), there is also the troy ounce which even in the 21st century has a specific exemption from UK metrication laws, even though the British outlawed the pound on which it was based 127 years ago. But there are also other exceptions: "descriptions" is one big problem, and even in the sale of bananas the use of pounds is still legal—people have been prosecuted for refusing to use metric units also or for adverising the price in English units more prominently.

• Isaac Newton liked to measure length in Parisian toises, pieds, and lignes; when it came to weight, he generally preferred the troy units of mass, probably in part because of his day job as Master of the Mint.

• Other non-SI issues don't involve English units at all. You give short shrift to the use of calories for food energy, of millimeters of mercury for blood pressure, of kilograms-force for rocket thrust by the Soviets as their primary units until around 1990 and by the European Space Agency and the Chinese even today, and by the Russians for jet thrust even today.

That's enough for now. Gene Nygaard 16:29, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I've responded on Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers).—Daelin @ 2006–01–11 10:36Z

Degree Celsius

U+2103 is a compatibility character for East Asian encodings, AFAIK. It shouldn’t be used, let alone recommended. The IE bug is also more acceptable than some replacement character (question mark or the like), in the common situation when no suitable font is installed or found. Christoph Päper 01:50, 14 January 2006 (UTC)