Template talk:Convert/Archive April 2008

message: This template should include proper HTML formatting for the exponent, not the Unicode precomposed superscripts (¹²³...). For example, km2 (km2) instead of km² (km²). There are two reasons for this: use of precomposed characters is deprecated by the Unicode standard; and the precomposed characters do not match up with proper superscripts (as seen above). This can be distracting, as articles using measurements and units are somewhat likely to include math as well. —Werson (talk) 01:31, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: This is an issue to be taken up at WT:MOSNUM and WT:MOS.  WP:MOSNUM does not proscribe precomposed superscripts.  Whether or not "articles using measurements and units are somewhat likely to include math as well" is something we can't know a priori but in my experience, it doesn't seem to be the case.  What, arguably, may be more distracting is the way that that rather large "proper" superscript pushes the line of text down (as seen above). Jɪmp 06:36, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It's proscribed at WP:MSM. The superscript doesn't push down any lines on my browser; if it does on yours, you can fix that with CSS. On the other hand, having mixed formats in the same article is going to look terrible no matter what your settings are. Can you imagine something like 1 × 109 m² happening? —Werson (talk) 07:17, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Not "uncontroversial" it seems...  Why then are ¹²³ right there in the character menu on the std edit screen? --Gergyl (talk) 07:55, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The same reason ‘“’” are there, even though those marks are not supposed to be used: There is no reason, the characters were chosen rather arbitrarily. —Werson (talk) 18:02, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

text: WP:MSM pertains to mathematical formulae where the rule makes perfect sense.  As for fixing it with CSS, I'd rather see what is seen by the average reader, the bulk of whom wouldn't be bothered fixing their CSS if they even know what it is. Jɪmp 08:11, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The "average reader" sees what I see; I'm not using any special settings, and no lines are getting pushed down. km2 is mathematical. If you square something, that's math. The fact that it's a unit doesn't create unique typographical rules for it; no published document makes a distinction. Using ² goes against Wikipedia policy, the Unicode standard (and by proxy, the HTML standard), hundreds of years of typographical tradition, and common sense, and looks terrible (IMHO); I don't see why it wouldn't be changed, it's a very quick fix. —Werson (talk) 18:02, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I thought I was pretty average ... I'm using Internet Explorer ... that's pretty averge.  If we want to get semantic I might stress the fact that the rule is under the heading Typesetting of mathematical formulas.  Squaring might be maths but this template is not for use in formulae.  But let's not get carried away.  The policy which governs units is to be found at WP:UNITS.  If they didn't have edit boxes with prefabricated exponents a hundred years ago, lucky us.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  I'll grant you that the prefabs look terrible next to s but generally that's not where you find them.  It's the s which look terrible to me in amongst text, which is where you mostly find this template.  One byte verses eight is common sense enough for me.  If MOSNUM policy changes, though, the template will change with it.  But it's not all that quick a fix. JЇѦρ 18:59, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: …and even more correct would be to use the <math> formating for his 1 \times 10^9, but again lets not get carried away.  Until ² is deprecated by wiki-policy, it is a legitimate character to use. Personally I hate the html formatting codes, which were a clear hack -- KelleyCook (talk) 15:50, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That's exactly backwards. ² and ³ were a hack, put into ISO 8859-1 because there was no reliable, versatile way to display superscripts onscreen in 1985. There is now: HTML (and MathML, etc.). Unicode specifically says they shouldn't be used and were only included to process legacy documents. Using a character set flaw to cheat crappy browsers into displaying line-heights correctly is definitely a hack. —Werson (talk) 01:40, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Computers are a hack.  Not the MOS, not logic nor æsthetics give us cause to favour one over the other.  Indeed which is best may depend on context.  The best solution I can think of would be to make it optional whether to have one or the other.  We've currently got two ways of specifying cubes and squares: either with "cu" and "sq" or with "3" and "2".  How about this?  Let cum, sqkm, etc. give "m3", "km2", etc. and let m3, km2, etc. give "m³", "km²", etc. JЇѦρ 04:46, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That's even worse; it's inconsistent, which is the same reason I'm against ² and ³. Logic and aesthetics certainly favor consistency on this side of the pond. The actual best solution is to fix Wikipedia's stylesheet so superscripts don't screw things up in IE. I'm working on that. —Werson (talk) 05:01, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That I can't do.  Logic and æsthetics certainly favour consistency on the other side of the pond too I'm sure ... just the same as on this side of the other pond.  However, consistency within an article comes before consistency across the project.  If ²s and ³s are already there, we're best fitting in.  If you want to get rid of all ²s and ³s, then this is not the place to discuss it.  JЇѦρ 05:48, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Exponent

message: Well it turns out that the volume of a mountain formed by a volcano and the volume of lava produced is talked about in terms of cubic miles and cubic kilometres. Is this supported? --DRoll (talk) 07:10, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah. JЇѦρ 08:18, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Works great. Thanks --DRoll (talk) 00:29, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: No worries, mate. JЇѦρ 00:34, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  cubic miles 

message: I've been doing some tinkering with  and I've run into something odd that I think might be due to a weird interaction with this template. I put the documentation into a subpage (Template:Infobox Ice Hockey Player/doc) as per the common standards, and the included example looks fine. Template:Infobox Ice Hockey Player/doc#Example for Aleš Hemský. But when I go to Template:Infobox Ice Hockey Player#Example for Aleš Hemský, convert appears to display a major freakout over the weight. I'm having the same problem with my attempt to convert the template as a whole over to , when I try previewing a test case using my prototype (User:Bryan Derksen/Template sandbox) the weight conversion throws a fit even though it's the exact same code as is used in the current template. Any ideas? Bryan Derksen (talk) 18:30, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That is odd.  It seems to happen only with the subtemplate Template:Convert/kg stlb and not with Template:Convert/kg st.  —MJCdetroit (yak) 20:38, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Though Template:Convert/kg stlb seems to work fine by itself. JЇѦρ 16:41, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I still haven't been able to figure out what's going on.  It is strange. JЇѦρ 16:37, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: A strange convert template issue, I think

message: Comment moved to ongoing discussion of this issue in Feature request: option for 'trillion', 'billion', 'million' above. Lightmouse (talk) 13:49, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Oil and gas pipelines

message: It is not universally true that SI units are not used in the oil industry. While the American industry uses barrels while the Europeans use tonnes, the Canadian industry uses SI units to measure both petroleum and natural gas. They only convert them to barrels and cubic feet for export purposes (Canada is the largest supplier of oil and natural gas to the U.S.), and for reporting to investors since many Canadian companies are listed on the New York Stock Exchange. At the oil field level, workers talk of "cubes" (cubic metres of oil and cubic metres of gas).
The SI units used are:
* cubic metres (m3) for both petroleum and natural gas
* kilograms (kg) for weights
* kilograms per cubic metre (kg/m3) for densities
Litres (L) and tonnes (t) are depreciated non-SI units and not used for petroleum or natural gas measurement (although they are used for products like gasoline and commodities like coal.) Tonnes would be particularly misleading for measuring oil because a lot of Canadian production is much heavier than normal oil.
 Metric (SI) versus U.S. Measurement Units
Measurement	SI Unit                          	US Unit
Oil volume 	cubic metres (m3)                	barrels (bbl)
Gas volume 	cubic metres (m3)                	standard cubic feet (scf)
Density    	kilograms per cubic metre (kg/m3)	API gravity (°API)
Energy     	gigajoules (GJ)                  	British Thermal Units (BTU)
There is a problem with volume units in that the increments are too large. Litres are too small to be practical for crude oil, and cubic kilometres (km3) are too large. So, exponential notation is used, but with the caveat that "engineering notation" is used, in which only multiples of three are used for the exponent, as below:
 Petroleum and Gas Volumes
Acronym	Full Name            	Abbreviation
m3     	cubic metres         	m3
e3m3   	thousand cubic metres	103m3
e6m3   	million cubic metres 	106m3
e9m3   	billion cubic metres 	109m3
e12m3  	trillion cubic metres	1012m3
Hope this helps to clarify things. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 04:11, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It did help.  I've changed the default conversions to engineering notation instead of scientific notation.  I've also used the above acronyms as codes. JЇѦρ 18:28, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  SI units for petroleum and natural gas 

message: Hello, is there away to convert ranges? I.e. 100-120 meters (xx-yy feet)? Thanks, Renata (talk) 01:58, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Not yet, but this is, hopefully, something the future will hold.  See Template talk:Convert/Archive February 2008#Support for ranges?. — Huntster (t • @ • c) 02:03, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Ranges?

message: For those among us who are offended by "Before Christian Era" and "Christian Era" because it presupposes a faith in the existence of Christians.--Zerothis (talk) 02:06, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: First off, unless I've missed something, this template doesn't convert dates (does it??), so I'm not sure why this is being asked here.  Second, any modern dating system is going to have some references to Christianity, for better or worse.  BC/AD has historically stood for "Before Christ"/"Anno Domini" (In the year of the/our Lord), so I don't see how that would be a better term to use.  Modern usage calls BCE "Before Common Era" and CE just "Common Era". Unless we adopt a completely non-standard, non-offensive system, this situation is unavoidable. — Huntster (t • @ • c) 07:48, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

text: Nobody know for sure whether such a man even existed ... but we do digress.  If this were implimented, you'd have  producing "44 BCE (44 BC)",  producing "1944 AD (1944 CE)", etc.  Would there be any point?  Surely we don't need both.  If, on the other hand, you want to change BC to BCE, AD to CE, etc. just do so in raw text.  Now, if you were after a template to convert between Julian and Gregorian dates, then you'd be talking sense. JЇѦρ 01:25, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

text: What? First, how is this remotely relevant, and second, doesn't it contradict your first statement that BCE/CE shouldn't be used? In terms of this template, this is simply a non-issue. — Huntster (t • @ • c) 19:03, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

text: When you are talking about converting between Julian and Gregorian dates, are you talking about Julian years, Julian days, or the Julian calender? They are three different things. And I'm not really sure it's useful unless you are an astronomer, in the military, or want to celebrate a traditional Ukrainian new year. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 20:36, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

text: RockyMtnGuy, while strict ISO adherence would be fine, I'm afraid we'd still have the U.S. and European (aka everyone else) proclivities for having month-day and day-month, leading to even more confusion given that there are only numbers and no month names to draw inference from. — Huntster (t • @ • c) 11:08, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

text: Now, in a past life working as a consultant to giant international oil companies, I found that when you use a date like "01/02/03", nobody knows what you are talking about. It's either "1 February 03" or "January 2, 03". I took a survey and discovered that about 50% of Americans knew their date format was supposed to be "MM/DD/YY", and the other 50% weren't sure. About 75% of Brits knew that they were supposed to use "DD/MM/YY", but a lot of them weren't sure, either. Of course you could use "1 February 2003" but then the Americans got upset, or "February 1, 2008", but then the British got upset, and on both cases the French insisted it should be "1 Février 2003" and pretended they couldn't speak English. And that was even before we got into an argument about AD versus CE. So the easy way out was to use ISO format, "2003-02-01" which has the additional advantage that it sorts into ascending date format without any reformatting or translation. We made the concession of formatting it as "2003 February 1" on reports for the English-speakers, and translated it into "2003 Février 1" for the French (because we had to translate the headings anyway). RockyMtnGuy (talk) 20:08, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  BCE/CE dates to BC/AD dates 

message: I have often linked unit numbers to an appropriate orders of magnitude page. I haven't encountered this template before now, and editing the Sarnoff Corporation article, I was about to change "300 acres (1.2 km²)" into perhaps "300 acres (1.2 km²)" (or rather "300 acres (1.2 km²)") when I discovered that that wouldn't be possible without throwing out the  code. Perhaps you who have been working on this template all along wouldn't mind incorporating this feature into the template? __meco (talk) 12:42, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Of course, "300 acres (1.2 km²)" may be preferable but "" can be achieved with   However, we come next to the question as to whether links from specific measurements to these orders of maginitude pages is appropriate ... not really a topic to be discussed on this page. JIMp talk·cont 07:08, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

text: If it's not written somewhere, I say it probably should be ... but that discussion for WT:MOSNUM (if you can get a word in edgeways these days). JIMp talk·cont 23:48, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposing new parameter: Orders of magnitude