Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers/Archive 87

message: Why does the manual of style say not to use "the"? - Articles written in British english read funny without the "the"... --Fredrick day 23:34, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Articles written in American English would read funny with the "the" (unless "of" is also used).  Using the "th" (and similar) is discouraged by MOSNUM in favor of using auto-formated dates. — Aluvus t/c 05:30, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: "The" looks very funny in any variety of English. Tony (talk) 06:15, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. And I would add that this is just one of those things where the formatting and how one says it aloud do not necessarily have a 1:1 relationship. Read aloud "He died 29 September 2007", will be said differently by different people (unless they are making a conscious effort to read precisely what is written before them). Some will say it as written, others will say "29th September", others will say "the 29th of September", etc.  Similarly "US$57" is usually read aloud as "fifty-seven U S dollars", despite the way it is formatted, and most (though not all) speakers would audibly render "22 cm" as "twenty-two centimeters", not "twenty-two C M", though the latter version would be permissible and understandable to most. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont]  ‹(-¿-)› 22:56, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The 29th September 

message: I suspect that we need to add a bullet point to the Calendar section to cover time in astronomy. For example the articles Julian year (astronomy) and Astronomical year numbering suggest that such articles my need to have exceptions to the general rules in the calendar section. --Philip Baird Shearer 10:32, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Time in astronomy 

message: To assist the Wikpedia online audience with readability, ease of visual cueing, maximizing textual 'texture' for perceptual interest, mnemonic enhancement, deletion of redundant and inefficient separation of space-marker betwixt date proper and unit of measurement (to minimize unnecessary utilization of digital storage resources), and for pure aestheticism:  how may I open a voting and/or dialogic process to invite and initate a change in Manual of Style (MOS) guidelines?
*e.g. convention in current MOS: 1008 BCE
*e.g. propositional amendment to MOS:  1008BCE
*this proposition is tendered only in respect of the CE/BCE dating convention and unit of measurement.  
In my humble and informed opinion, the proposed convention is beautiful when perceived in the context of the uploaded/retrieved page.
Thanking you in anticipation
B9 hummingbird hovering (talk • contribs) 00:42, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, but I disagree.  I think the current style is fine.  —MJCdetroit 02:04, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree with MJC. Tony (talk) 02:48, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Note that the proposed amendment requires twelve bytes more than the current convention; the claim that this minimizes storage is patently false. TomTheHand 03:25, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

text: Double-disagree. Not only are small-caps a typographic convention that is rather archaic and serving no logical purpose (the "aesthetics" argument is entirely subjective), along with numerals like "9" having tails below the baseline like a "g", the usage you propose is simply wrong, from a semantic markup point of view. This would have to be done in CSS with a font-variant:smallcaps, if I remember my more obscure and disused CSS correctly, not with  which is not only a misrepresentation of the typographic smallcaps that some publishers use for century and era abbreviations, but is also deprecated in XHTML to begin with. We shouldn't encourage bad coding habits, especially for only subjective reasons of appearance. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont]  ‹(-¿-)› 00:15, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

text: PS: Please do not wikilink everyday words; it is distracting and makes parsing your text more difficult. FYI: Doing so is also likely to be perceived as an intelligence insult by other editors.; everyone knows what "beauty" and "humble" mean. :-) — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont]  ‹(-¿-)› 00:18, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  One would use 1080 <acronym>BC</acronym> or 1080 BC (and perhaps a class attribute) in HTML with styling provided by CSS, but we cannot expect authors to supply that much markup and the software does not automatically generate it (but perhaps may some day). Small caps is an alternative style of lowercase letters (minuscules), not of uppercase ones (majuscules), so one would indeed simply decrease the fontsize. Small caps are seldomly done right (especially in browsers), because, unlike fontsize alterations, they require extra work by the font designer. Neither small capitals nor text figures are really archaic, though, they are just not as well supported by electronic fonts and DTP software and therefore were hardly used. – Christoph Päper 14:51, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposition for the aesthetic format iteration of the date unit of measurement 

message: I have made the following changes.
;old
Converted values should use a level of precision similar to that of the source value; ... The exception is small numbers, which may need to be converted to a greater level of precision where rounding would be a significant distortion; ...
;new
... The exceptions are values with only one significant figure, which, to avoid the introduction of inaccuracy, may need to be converted to a greater level of precision; ...
*Technically speaking they are values rather than numbers.
*It doesn't matter about the size of the "number" (What does this even mean?  Which is smaller 0.01 millilitres or 10 nanoseconds?); what's important is the significance of that value.
*It's perhaps a little rough and arbitary but one significant figure seems a fair place to draw a line for general purposes.  If you've got at least two significant figures, you've got at most ±5% inaccuracy.
*Rounding to a greater level of precision is still rounding.
*The rounding is not the distortion but that which introduces the distortion—an admittedly somewhat picky grammar point.
*I feel that inaccuracy is a better description of what we're dealing with here than distortion.
Jɪmp 07:28, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It is probably important to understand that the precision of a number isn't necessarily determined by looking at any one single measurement, when similar related measurements are included in the same article—or when we are otherwise aware of the precision normally used in the context. The trailing zeros before the decimal point are sometimes significant digits (and normally are when they come after the decimal point, except sometimes in dollars and cents figures and the like). Gene Nygaard 14:55, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This is true.  Should we work it into the text or can we assume editors should be aware of such considerations? Of course, this was as much a problem with the old text as with the new since it's a detail that neither really address. Jɪmp 23:40, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd leave it and avoid instruction creep.  Some will know it.  The proliferation of conversion templates, which most editors probably won't understand when it comes to the nuances of setting precision (and which employ a number of different methods of doing so, so even those who know it is possible might get it wrong by trying the wrong method) can be a problem in this regard, even if they do provide more formatting consistency and more accuracy (if the right template is being used in the case of ambiguous units).  Gene Nygaard 06:45, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Level of precision