Talk:Metrication opposition/Archive 3

message: If the references directly support the information, let's get some footnotes so the readers can easily trace these things. NickelShoe (Talk) 14:44, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: References

message: Okay, I've edited the article in an attempt to improve it to something more neutral, factual and grammatical.  I've tried to keep as much as possible as I could, lest anyone accuse me of WP:POINTing my way towards "if you delete the POV there's nothing left", but some stuff just had to go.
I removed the "pricing" section altogether, because its two paragraphs were a) some vendors may, or may not, take the opportunity to reduce the size of their containers but still charge the same price, and b) the utterly stupid paragraph about French wine.  My attempts to re-write paragraph 'a' failed, because I couldn't write it in a way that made it clear it wasn't utter crap (yes, I saw the source there; I'll wager the writer there doesn't know any more about what it's like to live in a metric country than you do), and paragraph 'b' wasn't just speculation, but blatantly false speculation.  So, the whole thing had to go.
I left in "Social problems", although I personally disagree with it and know from firsthand experience that it's crap (the previous generation in Australia was taught how to convert to metric, and my generation was taught how to convert to imperial; we're all equally well-versed in the important units), my disagreement is no less OR than the original writer's.  I removed the stuff about common vs civil law countries, because that can never be properly sourced (much like the French wine bit).
I rewrote "unit confusion", because while it may be true that this is a real, life, honest-to-goodness argument used by the anti-metric people, it's neither NPOV nor correct to say that we metric-users "commonly" get confused between millilitres and litres, for example.  I added  to the "Avoirdupois" bit, because it contradicts our article — does avoirdupois predate English units or not?  I removed "even in those days ..." because, frankly, it's meaningless: one would expect more resistance to metrication two hundred years ago than today, when it is perfectly natural and the way of nearly the entire world. fuddlemark (fuddle me!) 16:15, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  major edits 

message: The article contains a paragraph alleging that resurveying to restate property dimensions in SI is impractical. I will divide the paragraph into individual sentences for discussion:
"One major obstacle to metrication in the United States is its established system of Torrens title registration for real property."
According to Brown (1995:36-37) the Torrens system is only used in Minnesota, Massachusetts, and the city of Chicago; in the rest of the United States the evidence of title is recorded.
"The metes and bounds descriptions of land in deeds and other title documents are tied to the well established Public Land Survey System and the Lot and Block Survey System, all of which use English measures such as feet, rods, and furlongs."
Referring to the "Glossary of Deed Terms" of Brown (pages 374-400), the terms in this paragraph are throughly confused. The message that deeds are more often in feet and rods than in SI is true, but it neglects vara which is used in the Southwest and Florida (Brown 1995:44). 
"All of these systems of land measurement were in place well before there was ever any thought of converting any measurements in the United States to metric measurements." 
The first large survey ordered by the U.S. Congress was the Survey of the Coast. The very first baseline measured for this survey, near New York City, was measured in 1817, and was measured in meters. The Survey of the Coast and successor agencies (now the National Geodetic Survey) continued to use meters ever since (National Geodetic Survey 2001). This is not to say there isn't an enormous amount of data measured in feet, just that this sentence exaggerates the dominance of traditional units for surveys.
"The process of re-surveying each tract of land in the United States to produce a revised metes and bounds description of the various lots or sections in metric units would be quite costly."
It is difficult to find a citation to prove a negative, but I don't believe it is customary in most areas to resurvey unless a property is divided or questions arise about the location of the boundaries. Since land surveyors are skilled with computers and mathematics (NCEES 2005), conversion would place little additional burden on the surveyors, compared to the effort of remeasuring distances in the field.
Gerry Ashton 20:28, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Delete or modify surveying section

message: The first paragraph has been edited several times this month. For a while there was an incomplete sentence, and now the sentence reads
Today, only the United States of America, Liberia, and Myanmar (Burma) have gone under the process of metrication. 
This sentence is obviously false; every country that currently uses the metric system has undergone the process of metrication. Gerry Ashton 20:48, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: First paragraph mangled